On property, patterns, and the system that replaced trust with tracking.
I. Your Face Is Not Yours
In 2024, Scarlett Johansson discovered that OpenAI had released a synthetic voice that sounded unmistakably like her, despite her having explicitly declined to license it. The same year, background actors on Hollywood sets reported that their full-body scans — taken during production — were being stored for AI reuse, as one put it, "for the rest of eternity." In 2025, SAG-AFTRA filed charges against a production company for using an AI-generated version of James Earl Jones's voice after his death. California and New York rushed through legislation. Tennessee passed the ELVIS Act. The bipartisan NO FAKES Act sits in Congress.
The legal response is instructive — not for what it solves, but for what it reveals. Every one of these laws attempts to do the same thing: establish that a person's likeness, voice, and mannerisms are property, and that using them without permission is theft. Right of publicity. Likeness rights. Digital replica consent clauses. The entire legal architecture assumes that the solution to the problem of unauthorized copying is better ownership: clearer contracts, stronger rights, more enforceable boundaries around what belongs to whom.
This assumption is wrong. Not morally wrong — the actors deserve protection, and the laws are better than nothing. Structurally wrong. The laws are trying to make patterns behave like objects. And patterns do not behave like objects. Objects are scarce. Patterns are copyable. Objects degrade. Patterns replicate. The entire concept of property — developed over centuries to regulate access to scarce physical things: land, grain, tools, labor — is being applied to a domain where scarcity does not exist and cannot be artificially maintained for long.
Every DRM system has been broken. Every paywall has been circumvented. Every attempt to make digital goods behave like physical goods has eventually failed, because the enforcement cost scales with the number of copies, and the number of copies trends toward infinity. The law can slow this down. It cannot reverse it. And as long as the legal framework treats patterns as property, it will be fighting a structural war it cannot win.
II. The Replacement of Trust
Byung-Chul Han observed, with characteristic precision, that the society of transparency is not a society of trust but a society of control. Where information is freely available, the social system switches from trust to monitoring. Transparency does not build confidence. It eliminates the conditions under which confidence is necessary — and in doing so, it eliminates trust itself.
This is the deep structure underneath the digital twin debate, the copyright debate, the AI ownership debate, and every other contemporary argument about who owns what in a world where everything is copyable. The arguments are about property. The problem is about trust. And the problem is old — much older than AI, older than the internet, older than digital technology altogether.
Property itself is a trust-replacement technology. You do not need to trust your neighbor if you have a fence. You do not need to trust the buyer if you have a contract. You do not need to trust the state if you have rights. Each of these instruments — fence, contract, right — is a mechanism for making a specific form of trust unnecessary by substituting a specific form of enforcement. The history of property law is the history of systematically replacing trust with structure, relationship with mechanism, the handshake with the signature.
This replacement has been extraordinarily productive. Modern economies, modern governance, modern individual rights — all rest on the capacity to substitute enforceable structure for interpersonal trust. No one wants to go back to a world where your land is yours only as long as you can physically defend it. The structure works. It has been working for centuries.
But it has a cost, and the cost is cumulative. Each replacement of trust with enforcement makes the next replacement easier and the remaining trust less necessary — and therefore less practiced, less valued, less available. A society that has outsourced its trust to contracts, tracking systems, token economies, border controls, credit scores, verification protocols, and blockchain ledgers is a society that has, over time, lost the capacity to trust at all. Not because the people in it are less trustworthy. Because the infrastructure no longer requires trustworthiness, and capacities that are not required atrophy.
Han calls this the digital panopticon — a system in which surveillance is not imposed from above but performed voluntarily from below. People expose themselves not because they are forced to but because the system rewards exposure and penalizes opacity. The transparent citizen is the compliant citizen. The trackable transaction is the valid transaction. The documented identity is the real identity. Anything that cannot be tracked, verified, scored, or tokenized becomes, in the logic of the system, suspicious.
This is the Kali Yuga reading of modernity — not as apocalypse but as structural description. An age in which the mechanisms designed to protect against betrayal have become the dominant form of relation, in which the instruments of safety have consumed the thing they were meant to protect. The lock has eaten the house.
III. The Learning Model That Does Not Learn
Consider how we teach.
A child does something. The teacher responds with reward or punishment. The child adjusts behavior. This is operant conditioning — Skinner's model, scaled from the laboratory to the classroom, from the classroom to the economy, from the economy to the entire social architecture of incentives, penalties, scores, and feedback loops that constitutes contemporary life.
The problem is not that it works. The problem is what it optimizes for. Operant conditioning produces compliance. It produces behavior that matches the reinforcement schedule. It does not produce understanding, autonomy, or the capacity to act well in the absence of the reinforcement. Remove the reward and the behavior collapses — not because the learner has forgotten, but because the behavior was never theirs. It was the system's behavior, performed through the learner's body.
This is the structure of every token economy, every gamification system, every credit score, every performance review, every social media engagement metric, every funding application. The system says: do this and you will be rewarded. The person does it. The system calls this learning. But what has been learned is not the thing itself — it is the reward schedule. The person has not become more capable. They have become more compliant. And compliance, mistaken for competence, is the operating system of the control society.
The alternative is not the absence of structure. Anarchy without formation is chaos, and chaos benefits the strongest, not the most just. The alternative is a different kind of learning — one that produces autonomy rather than compliance, that builds the capacity to act well without external reinforcement, that aims not at obedience but at what Jung called individuation: the development of a self that is genuinely one's own.
But Jung's individuation, taken alone, is insufficient. It is a process of becoming — but becoming what? Becoming oneself is meaningless if the self is conceived as an isolated unit. The hermit on the mountain is individuated. He is also useless. Individuation without relation is narcissism with a spiritual alibi.
IV. Bezogene Individuation
The term is German and does not translate cleanly, which is part of its value. Bezogen means related, connected, referred-to — but with a directional quality that "related" in English lacks. It implies a relationship that is constitutive, not incidental. Not: I am myself, and I also happen to be in relationships. But: I am myself through and in relationship, and the relationships are not external to the self but part of its architecture.
Bezogene Individuation — individuation-in-relation — is the structural alternative to both the isolated self of libertarian fantasy and the dissolved self of collectivist fantasy. It says: the unit of development is not the individual. It is the individual-in-context. And the context is not a constraint on freedom. It is the condition of freedom.
Boszormenyi-Nagy, the Hungarian-American family therapist whose concept of invisible loyalties structures much of how transgenerational psychology thinks, built his entire clinical framework on a principle he called the relational ethics of the ledger: every relationship carries an account of what has been given and what is owed, and psychological health depends on the balance of this account. Not in a transactional sense — not I gave you this, you owe me that — but in a structural sense: the system must be in balance, and when it is not, symptoms appear. In the individual. In the family. In the society.
What Nagy understood, and what the control society systematically destroys, is that the ledger is not a tracking system. It is a trust system. It works precisely because it is not fully explicit, not fully enforceable, not fully transparent. The relational ledger operates on a felt sense of balance — of debt and gift, of loyalty and freedom, of what has been received and what must be passed on. It requires the capacity to hold an account without auditing it. It requires trust.
The digital replacement of this — credit scores, reputation systems, blockchain ledgers, token economies — makes the account explicit, auditable, enforceable. And in doing so, it destroys the very thing the account was meant to regulate. Because an explicitly enforced account is not a relationship. It is a contract. And a contract does not produce the felt sense of obligation, gratitude, and reciprocity that holds a society together. It produces compliance. And compliance, as we have established, is not the same as trust.
V. What Would Be Required
I am going to state this plainly, knowing that it sounds utopian, knowing that the historical record offers little support, knowing that the structural forces arrayed against it are immense.
What would be required is not better property law, not better tracking, not better tokens, not better enforcement. What would be required is the reconstruction of the conditions under which trust is possible — which means: the reconstruction of the conditions under which trust is necessary.
This means education that produces autonomy rather than compliance — education that treats the student as a developing subject, not a behavior to be shaped. Not: learn this and you will be rewarded. But: learn this and you will understand something you did not understand before, and the understanding is its own reward, and if you do not believe that yet, the failure is ours, not yours.
This means economic structures that do not require every transaction to be tracked, scored, and enforced — structures that tolerate the ambiguity, the slack, the unmeasured give-and-take that characterizes every functioning human relationship. Not because efficiency does not matter. Because a society optimized for efficiency at the expense of trust is a society that has traded its foundation for its metrics.
This means a concept of justice that is not reducible to enforcement — justice as balance, as relational adequacy, as the felt sense that what is given and what is received are in proportion. Nagy's ledger, not the blockchain's. A ledger that is held in the body, in the family, in the culture — not in a database.
And it means — here is the part that sounds most utopian and is most necessary — a willingness to be vulnerable to betrayal. Because trust, by definition, is the acceptance of risk. A system that eliminates the possibility of betrayal has also eliminated the possibility of trust. And a society without trust is not a safe society. It is a controlled society. And a controlled society is, in the precise sense Byung-Chul Han describes, a society of tiredness: a society that has exhausted itself in the effort to make vulnerability unnecessary, and has discovered that the effort itself is the exhaustion.
VI. The Dream Before the Currency
There is a thought that is too early for its moment but worth stating anyway, as a marker.
Every currency is a trust technology. The coin, the banknote, the bank transfer, the cryptocurrency — each is a mechanism for making a specific promise enforceable without requiring the parties to trust each other personally. I will give you this thing of value, and in return I will receive this token, and the token's value is guaranteed not by our relationship but by a system — a state, a bank, a protocol, a consensus mechanism.
What if the system is the problem?
Not the specific system — not fiat versus crypto, not centralized versus decentralized, not this currency versus that one. The system as such: the substitution of mechanism for trust, of token for relationship, of enforced promise for felt obligation.
The anarchist tradition has always known this, which is why it distrusts not just the state but every institutional replacement for direct human relation. But anarchism without formation — without education, without the developed capacity for autonomous ethical judgment — is not freedom. It is the strong doing what they want and the weak enduring what they must. Thucydides described this twenty-four centuries ago. Nothing has changed.
What would change it is not the abolition of structure but the transformation of its basis. From enforcement to capacity. From tracking to formation. From controlling behavior to developing judgment. From a society that does not need to trust because it has outsourced trust to systems, to a society that can afford to trust because it has invested in the formation of people who are trustworthy — not because they are surveilled but because they have been educated, in the deepest sense, to hold the relational ledger themselves.
This is bezogene Individuation at the social scale. Not the self-made individual of capitalist mythology. Not the selfless member of the collective. But the formed person in constitutive relation — a person whose autonomy is not freedom from others but freedom with and through others, and whose trustworthiness is not compliance with external rules but the expression of an internal structure that has been built, over time, through education, through relation, through the slow and patient work of becoming someone who can hold an account without needing it audited.
We are nowhere near this. The trajectory is in the opposite direction — toward more tracking, more tokens, more enforcement, more transparency, less trust. The digital twin debate, with which this essay began, is one small symptom of a structural condition that encompasses the entire architecture of contemporary social life.
But the direction of a trajectory is not a law of nature. It is a description of accumulated choices. And choices, as long as there are people capable of making them — people who have been formed rather than merely trained, individuated in relation rather than optimized for compliance — can be made differently.
That is not a prediction. It is a wager. And a wager, unlike a token, requires trust.
References: Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society (2012) and Psychopolitics (2017). Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, Invisible Loyalties (1973). C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self (1957). B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) — read against itself. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, V.89 (the Melian Dialogue).