Modernity didn’t end slavery, it just innovated.

Instead of taking orders from the same master who houses you, modernity spit things in two: wage-slavery and debt-slavery. One master for whom you must perform labor and one who owns the fruits of your labor.

The inherent instability of the system is obvious - whereas the legacy slavery system saw a matching of durations, the system today frequently sees a mismatch of durations, I.e. your employment is terminated but you still have a mortgage.

As long as you have debts to pay, you’re not free, and as long as someone else has the power to order you to be somewhere on Monday at 9am, you’re not free. Both at the same time? That’s a slave.

There are some meaningful differences - although your debt master can sell your debt to someone else, your wage master can’t quite do the same (though, he can just fire you without finding someone else to take you on… is that really better?)

In professional sports, where the team actually does house you and feed you and has you on a contract they can reassign, you really fit a more classical definition of “slave”.

When you consider the Roman gladiators were “slaves”… you have to wonder if they were that different from professional athletes or WWE wrestlers.

But professional athletes are well-compensated and get to keep their earnings beyond their debts. Sure, but until very recently college athletes were prohibited from licensing their own likeness. Again, the parallels to “slavery” as we traditionally understand it are incredible.

When we look back at chattel slavery in the American South, we wonder how anyone could resign themselves to bondage and not fight tooth and nail.

Maybe in the future they’ll look back at TSA grabbing our junk and wonder the same about us.