Labor wasn't free in the prewar South. There are costs associated with maintaining slaves. To be effective laborers they required feeding, housing, and clothing

Labor wasn't free in the prewar South. There are costs associated with maintaining slaves. To be effective laborers they required feeding, housing, and clothing, and their acquisition wasn't cheap either! This isn't fatal to whatever your point is, because computers also require the equivalents of these things. Yet... >However, I can see a future where our data is used in ways we had no intention of allowing and the people in charge of the "big computers" will exploit that data. So you are claiming that the future will be much like the present?