The Infrastructure of Control

Technology isn’t a tool anymore — it’s infrastructure. It’s how we live, work, move, pay, speak, and exist. You need it to function in modern society. And the more we depend on it, the more dangerous it becomes when that access is conditional.

Can you get a job without internet? Buy groceries without a debit card? Apply for housing without an email address? In some cities, you can’t even get the cheapest bus fare without a smartphone. Across the world, governments and businesses are moving away from cash. In Sweden, cash is used in less than 9% of daily transactions. In India, mobile payment apps dominate everyday commerce. In cities like New York and San Francisco, card-only establishments are becoming the norm. The message is clear: if you’re not digitally connected, you’re increasingly invisible.

And yet, the systems that mediate that access are privately owned, and they answer mostly to the people who own them.

Let’s talk about EULAs — End-User License Agreements. They’re the fine print you blindly accept to use your phone, your bank app, your cloud storage — basically, your life. Most people don’t read them. That’s not an accident. These documents are written to shield corporations from responsibility, not to protect users. The terms can change at any time, and if you disagree, you lose access.

Apple’s recent capitulation to the UK government proves the stakes. Under pressure from the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act, Apple disabled its Advanced Data Protection feature — a setting that gave users end-to-end encryption of their iCloud backups. It only applied to UK users, but the precedent is chilling: when power knocks, privacy folds. And you’re never consulted.

What happens when the thing you rely on to store your memories, access your accounts, and communicate with the world can be turned off, just like that?

This isn’t limited to cloud storage or photos. It’s happening in finance, too.

Globally, 1.4 billion people still live without a bank account. In the U.S., nearly 6 million households are unbanked, and millions more are “underbanked,” relying on expensive workarounds like payday loans or check-cashing services. And it’s not because they’re irresponsible. It’s because they’ve been priced out, filtered out, or ignored.

Regulations like KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) are supposed to prevent fraud and criminal activity. But in reality, they often block people without stable documentation, like unhoused individuals, immigrants, or the poor, from opening accounts. Onboarding a customer has real compliance costs, and a low-balance account rarely covers them, so banks have every incentive to exclude.

Fintech was supposed to change that. Instead, it put the same barriers behind prettier screens.

Now your access to money depends on whether your app is compatible, your phone is charged, your selfie matches your ID, and your behavior doesn’t trigger a security flag. You’re not onboarded — you’re screened. And once you’re in, you’re monitored.

Every transaction, every search, every location ping becomes a data point. Platforms say it’s to “improve your experience,” but in practice, it’s to predict you, sell you, and shape you. The moment you enter these systems, you become the product. Your habits, your preferences, your trustworthiness — all calculated and packaged for monetization.

And if your behavior becomes inconvenient to the platform — politically, financially, or socially — your access can be throttled, suspended, or erased. You don’t have to break the law. You just have to become unprofitable.

This is how people get digitally exiled — not for crimes, but for misalignment. This is how control works in the age of infrastructure.

There's an old answer to this problem, and it's worth remembering. When railroads, telephone lines, and electric grids became things you couldn't live without, we didn't leave access up to whether you were profitable to serve. We treated them as common carriers and utilities and attached obligations to them. Serve everyone at posted rates. Don't discriminate. Don't cut people off without some kind of process. Universal service funds paid to wire rural areas that no company would have wired on its own.

Digital payments and identity haven't gotten that treatment, mostly because they didn't look like infrastructure when the rules were written. They do now.

Milton Friedman, who was no fan of regulation, argued that when you're dealing with monopoly you're choosing between private monopoly, public monopoly, and public regulation, and that all three are bad. You pick the least bad one. That's the honest version of this problem. Leave it alone and exclusion gets priced in. Regulate it and you get new costs and new ways for the rules to be captured.

There are real options on the table: a basic account that doesn't require perfect paperwork, KYC requirements that scale with the risk of the account instead of applying the same checks to everyone, interoperability rules so switching providers isn't a trap, and terms of service short enough to actually read. Each one trades something away. But they're all answers to the same question we already answered for water and electricity: once something becomes a condition of participating in society, who's responsible for making sure people can get it?