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In actual fact, however, in the years before the Civil War, there was no capitalism without slavery. The two were, in many ways, one and the same. At the end of the 18th century, slavery in the United States was a declining institution.... Wage labor was increasingly replacing slave labor in both the urban and the rural areas of the upper South. And then came cotton.... By the end of the 1830s, the Seminole, the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw and the Cherokee had all been "removed" to lands west of the Mississippi. Their expropriated land provided the foundation of the leading sector of the global economy in the first half of the 19th century.... Between 1820 and 1860 more than a million enslaved people were transported from the upper to the lower South, the vast majority by the venture-capitalist slave traders the slaves called "soul drivers." ...It is not simply that the labor of enslaved people underwrote 19th-century capitalism. Enslaved people were the capital: four million people worth at least $3 billion in 1860, which was more than all the capital invested in railroads and factories in the United States combined. Seen in this light, the conventional distinction between slavery and capitalism fades into meaninglessness.

Until very recently, technology had a clear, if boring, purpose: by taking care of the Little Things, it enabled us, its human masters, to focus on the Big Things. "Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible," proclaimed that noted connoisseur of contemplation Oscar Wilde. Fortunately, he added a charming clarification: "Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends." ...Alas, most designers, following Wilde, think of technologies as nothing more than mechanical slaves that must maximize efficiency. But some are realizing that technologies don't have to be just trivial problem-solvers: they can also be subversive troublemakers, making us question our habits and received ideas. Recently, designers in Germany built devices - "transformational products," they call them - that engage users in "conversations without words." My favorite is a caterpillar-shaped extension cord. If any of the devices plugged into it are left in standby mode, the "caterpillar" starts twisting as if it were in pain. Does it do what normal extension cords do? Yes. But it also awakens users to the fact that the cord is simply the endpoint of a complex socio-technical system with its own politics and ethics. Before, designers have tried to conceal that system. In the future, designers will be obliged to make it visible. While devices-as-problem-solvers seek to avoid friction, devices-as-troublemakers seek to create an "aesthetic of friction" that engages users in new ways. Will such extra seconds of thought - nay, contemplation - slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy?

Ensuring the continuation of slavery was, overwhelmingly, the chief cause of Southern states' secession and the Civil War.

Catholic theologian Tim Muldoon: when "social contract" theory fails as a source of social ethics, then - said Martin Luther King Jr. (in "Letter from a Birmingham prison") - the appeal must be to some kind of transcendant "natural law." (I would only add that new views of "natural law" evolve with history and social circumstances - the incompatibility of slavery wasn't clearly seen till the 19thC, of segregation till the 20th, of discrimination against homosexuals in all the rights & privileges of civil society until the 21st.)