Étienne de La Boétie (French political theorist famously known for his essay Discourse on Voluntary Servitude) asked a simple question: why do people obey tyrants they could overthrow? His answer: servitude is voluntary. The subject chooses to serve. Therefore, they can awaken.

This analysis assumes a visible tyrant, an embodied domination, an active consent.

What AI makes possible is different

Imagine servitude without ideology. No myth to believe. No leader to fear. Just a system that works, most of the time, better than what you’d do yourself.

Power no longer requires you to say yes. It’s enough that you don’t say no.

Why spend an hour understanding what the agent did in three seconds? Why verify what works? Why learn what you’ll never need to do yourself?

Not understanding becomes rational. Ignorance is no longer a fault—it’s an optimization.

You don’t give up. You vibe

Claude Code’s “YOLO” mode is the sketch of this. You let the machine do it, you approve without reading, you trust by default. Not out of submission, but comfort. It’s faster. And it works, until it doesn’t. And that day, you no longer have the grip to diagnose.

The formative error disappears. If the machine gets it right the first time, you don’t learn why. Error is what reveals reality, what resists, what jams. Without ever having broken a pipeline, you don’t know why it holds.

Anesthesia replaces suffering

Yet suffering at work is a political signal. It generates conflict, therefore speech, therefore negotiation. A collective that no longer suffers but no longer understands either is incapable of defending itself. It has no reason to complain and no longer the words to do so.

Unlearning is invisible. It’s not “we no longer know how to do X”. It’s “we no longer know how to learn X when context changes.”

The loss is in meta-skills: diagnosing, tinkering, sensing that something’s off. It goes unseen—until the day you need it.

Modern servitude no longer needs constraint. It works through comfort. You don’t choose to submit. You choose not to resist—which eventually stops being a choice.