Consent

She took the drink because a man offered it to her and that is what people do in nightclubs. He seemed fine. The drink seemed fine.

What she did not know — what CCTV would later show a courtroom — was that he had come looking for women he could incapacitate. He knew what was in the drink. She did not. That was the entire plan.

Within minutes, the women he targeted struggled to move and stay awake. He was right there when it happened. Of course he was.

The footage followed one woman into his nearby barbershop. It showed him blowing a hairdryer on her face as she lost consciousness, then carrying her into another room.

Kenan Baki was convicted of sexual assault and rape. He received an eleven-year extended sentence with nine years in custody.

If somebody deliberately removes another person's capacity to choose and then exploits that state, a willing first sip is not consent to what follows. The impairment came first.

In 2017, Sean Parker — Facebook's founding president — described how social platforms had been built to consume as much of our conscious attention as possible. He described dopamine hits and a social-validation feedback loop designed around a vulnerability in human psychology.

He said the creators understood it consciously.

And did it anyway.

Behavioural cocaine.

Baki checked how deeply she was under.

The companies ran studies to measure how deeply we were under.

We clicked agree. Somewhere in pages of legal language written so almost nobody would read them, consent was obtained. The effects were not understood. The glass looked fine. Everyone was drinking.

There was no reason not to trust it.

The law has a word for what happened in that barbershop.

It does not have one for this yet.

Sources for the reported events: STV's court report on Kenan Baki · Sean Parker's 2017 remarks.