CONCEPT
Terms-of-Service Sovereignty
Mbembe's framing of the platform user agreement as the digital era's successor to the colonial commandement — the unilateral contract through which the platform exercises sovereign power over the user it purports to serve.
In the colonial era, sovereignty was exercised through what Mbembe calls the commandement — the colonial state's power to impose order through decree, enforced by administrative and military apparatus, unaccountable to those it governed. In the digital era, an analogous form of sovereignty is exercised through terms of service: the unilateral contract that governs the user's relationship to the platform, drafted without the user's input, enforced through technical and legal means, and modifiable at the platform's discretion. The terms determine who owns outputs, who controls data, who arbitrates disputes, and who decides whether access continues or is revoked. They are, in Mbembe's reading, the constitutional documents of platform sovereignty.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The analogy with the colonial commandement is precise enough to be useful. Both forms of sovereignty share several features: they are imposed rather than negotiated; they govern populations that have no meaningful voice in their drafting; they are enforced by institutions that the governed cannot