The word andrapoda means, literally, “man-footed.” It was used to refer to a class of slaves in ancient Greece who were made to perform the kind of mindless hard labor that might otherwise be done by animals. They were usually war captives, and typically bound to each other with ropes or chains. As a description of our present circumstances, the term is something more than symbolic. We are, in point of fact, slaves to a system that has conquered—and is continually, moment by moment conquering—our humanity, binding us to each other in the service of purposes that are not our own, demanding our unquestioned compliance, and condemning us to a meaningless mechanical existence where we are little more than biological servomechanisms yoked to a mindless global machine. Modern chains are forged of a different substance, but the weight of ceaseless servitude is the same; we are modern-day andrapoda.
There is a difference, of course. The 21st century captives of global empire are unlike the shackled and tortured human beasts of burden of millennia past in at least one critical feature: the latter understood their circumstances and were aware of the proximal source of their suffering.
To be sure, there are still many among us who know the sting of the whip and the weight of a perpetually empty belly. All civilization rests on the backs of forced labor and could not exist without it. The modern technology-infused variant is no different from its ancient precursors in that regard. The suffering of diamond miners in Africa or garment workers in Bangladesh or computer factory workers in China is not different in its form from that of antebellum plantation slaves in Mississippi or their ancient Hellenistic counterparts. But there is something different about the coercive power of modern global empire, something disquieting, something insidious and pervasive, something exceedingly disturbing in its subtlety.
