Servitude is not something we really discuss, at least here in the West. The idea of being a servant is confined largely at this point to those British period dramas portraying the 19th and early 20th Century. We are a free, independent, civilized world: service is something that we have relegated to volunteerism (public service).
The reality is that we have become, in effect, servants to civilization and its technologies.
We pretend it is not so, of course. We have the ability to shop as we wish, work as we wish, enjoy as we wish (or at least, we used to). We can (literally) enjoy the world from our homes whether by videos or foods or handmade items.
But all of this comes at a cost, of course.
The most visible part of this is taxes, of course: taxes on income, taxes on fuel, taxes on purchases, taxes on property, taxes on death, taxes on utilities, taxes on travel. While in practice we are less taxed than the peasant of the Western Middle Ages or the farmer of Tokugawa Japan, in principle this is not so. What has changed is what we pay on.
The taxes, of course, are paid in support of our civilization, but I think it is a fair statement to make that no entity we pay our taxes to actually advances civilization. That has been left to the private sector in terms of innovations in technology, in health care, in industry, in entertainment, in agriculture. even to some extent in social relations. The tax money itself disappears into a large hole, never to be seen directly or even indirectly by most of the people paying into the system.
Which raises the rather ridiculous image, of course, of one working merely to pay one's rent, food, utilities, and taxes. It becomes a vicious cycle: we live to work to live.
But the private sector has, step by step, also been contributing to our servitude via the introduction of more and more technology.
Technology, as it advances, encourages dependence. A man can, with skill and training, learn to make a flint arrowhead or how to tame a horse. It takes a trained expert to build a firearm or design/construct/repair an automobile. As we continue to bring more and more technology into our lives, we become more and more dependent on others to maintain that technology and we end up working not only to pay for rent, food, utilities, and taxes, but for the technology that we have come to depend on to make our lives go easier or better or faster or even just survivable.
More insidious yet - and becoming more and more inescapable - is the use of 2FA, or two factor authentication, which requires that one receive a second password or pin - typically on the smartphone - in order to access more and more websites (even as we are discouraged more and more from doing actual business with actual people) that are effectively a necessity. It is rapidly becoming the case that as we shift more and more to online, we must almost constantly bear with us a small tracking device in order to access our own information. Which, by the way, we have the privilege of paying for.
The argument is that the benefits of civilization and its technology outweigh the tradeoffs we are required to make - and one can, I suppose, make a certain argument for such a thing. I enjoy having water which is not likely to kill me, air that does not choke me when I breathe it, some level of safety from marauders and criminals, or just the ability to order items for Iaijutsu directly from Japan instead of having some sort of imitation items from somewhere else. And all of these together are not to be despised.
But it is equally foolish and disingenuous to somehow pretend that all of this is without a cost to our lives and minds beyond just the money we pay to maintain such things. We - all of us to a greater or lesser extent - are servants of a system which offers us degrees of pleasure and convenience but at a cost of managing our own lives and our privacy. To pretend that this chains do not exist, even if they lay very lightly on our conscious mind, is to somehow willingly blind ourselves to the reality of our servitude.
At some point we are all told to stop believing in fairy tales - except, of course, the largest one of all that we live in every day.