Introduction
In nearly half of the world's 184 slaveholding countries, the law requires those of servile status to wear a collar of some sort - and even in those which do not, the rate of voluntary collaring by slave-owners is over 90% in all but a few. These numbers have risen sharply in the past few decades, along with a particular rise in "smart collars" which incorporate electronics and computer chips that allow for advanced functions not possible in the past. Said collars now make up the majority by far in First World countries (with more than 20 specifically requiring at least an ID/tracker) and are even fairly common elsewhere, while more old-fashioned "plain" collars have been relegated to retro or legacy uses outside of poorer countries.
In this report I will explain the various ways in which collars (especially smart collars) are useful to an owner and to society, thus explaining why they are so commonly used.
Uses of any collar
Status showing
The most basic purpose of a collar is, somewhat circularly, an effect of it's popularity - since the wearing of one has become associated very closely with slavery (and this even enforced by law in some countries) any observer can tell just by glancing at the wearer's neck that they are a slave. (Because of this, free people almost never wear anything which could be mistaken for a collar, and even when leaving a slave's neck bare is legal, it can arouse suspicion and distrust.) More subtle signs of status can sometimes be observed from the collar's make, with ornamented or padded ones showing a favourite while a crude or basic one suggests a lowly slave - or an uncaring or miserly owner.
ID
Of course, the messages a collar can send go far beyond "this is a slave". Important information like the slave's name, International Slave Registry number, owner and domicile can be printed or engraved on the collar itself or an attached tag, allowing easy checking without any need for a device or Internet connection. Many modern collars (even ones not otherwise "smart") also hold this information on a readable chip, with smart ones generally updating whenever linked up to the Internet.
Leashing
Many collars come with a leash (either chain or cable) attached, or at least a ring for attaching one - some have as many as four. Of course, plenty of leashes can be clipped or even tied around even a collar without specific points for them - they're just often less secure and less comfortable. These can be used to lead a slave, to secure them somewhere, and even sometimes to choke them as a form of punishment. Several collars can also be connected together to form a coffle (for transport) or chain gang (for work).
Uses of smart collars in particular
Punishment
One of the most everyday uses of collars nowadays is to administer punishment to disobedient, lazy or incompetent slaves. While the use of shock technology in them overall dates back as far as the mid-20th century in some workplaces (where the collars were connected to the mains by cables), it was only with the development of first a portable battery-powered method, and then a remote which meant the owner no longer needed to come close enough to press a button on the collar, that this method of punishment began to be used for more and more slaves. Nowadays almost every slave knows the pain of electricity discharging sharply into their body just as well as earlier ones knew the slap of their owner's hand or overseer's whip - not that such things are not also still quite familiar to many slaves, but the convinience of a quick zap makes it the most common casual punishment by far.
This is especially the case because, unlike early models from the 70s which only offered a single shock strength (which could vary significantly from collar to collar) and whose closest thing to a duration control was holding down the remote button longer, modern collars not only offer extreme adjustability on both fronts, but can also preprogrammed with shocks based on location and/or time or activated remotely from anywhere in the world (as long as both the collar and the phone it's linked to both have Internet connection). This gives the modern owner once unbelievable flexibility in disciplining (or tormenting) their slaves.
Tracking
Rivalling punishment as the most handy function of a modern collar to owners - and as mentioned above, so useful to states that several countries legally require it - is the ability to track a slave's location. This is accomplished via a variety of methods, with GPS being supplemented by other tools such as Wi-Fi positioning for wide-scale tracking while local Bluetooth is used for more precision work (like determining where a slave is within a building). Owners can keep track of their slaves in real time via their phones, as well as implementing alarms or shocks if a slave enters or leaves specified areas. And the availability of this tracking data to authorities is likely a major contributor to the sharp decline in successful slave escapes in recent decades.
It should be noted, though, that despite it's great utility, there are also some doubts about this feature. Some owners express concern about being tracked by the authorities via monitoring of their slaves' movements. Others point to cases where the information has been hacked or even falsified by slave thieves. And of course, even with digital connections covering more and more of the world, there are still blind spots a slave can fall into - which can have unintendedly bad results if the collar interprets it as them being out of bounds.
Communication/Surveillance
The newest feature to become so widespread in collars that to not have it is to be old-fashioned, communication (and surveillance, the two being in some ways two sides of the same coin) was introduced in bits and pieces over the course of the 90s and 2000s. One of the first forms was simply a light and alarm which could be set off by phone remotely - sometimes. Then came the ability for a master to give commands and listen in to the slave from a distance. Then video streaming. By the turn of the 2010s, this had often become a full-on phone which could only be called, not call - at least, until some added "master call" and "callback" buttons, plug-in and Bluetooth keypads and "slave phones" were developed, and the newest models can even take vocal instructions. (Of course, all activity can be tracked and functions enabled/disabled via the owner's phone.) Even beyond the actual ways the communication features can be used, simply knowing that their owners could be listening in on or observing them at any time has a positive effect on slave discipline. (As with tracking, though, this has raised some privacy concerns, and many collars can be locked down to neither send or receive.)
Conclusion
All in all, a modern slave collar is a wonder of technology which allows modern owners to monitor and control their slaves' lives to a massive degree (even while still leaving them some semblance of breathing room) - bearing their capabilities in mind, the surprise is not that they are so widespread but that there are thousands of owners who still do without. Even more basic collars, though, while considerable less useful, serve a powerful symbolic role in setting slaves and free apart, to the point that the closing of a collar around a new slave's neck is often seen much more as the moment of enslavement than the point of legal registration. It is therefore no wonder that the collar is almost as defining a symbol of slavery as the Registry mark, and I expect both their usage and their features to only grow in the future.
In nearly half of the world's 184 slaveholding countries, the law requires those of servile status to wear a collar of some sort - and even in those which do not, the rate of voluntary collaring by slave-owners is over 90% in all but a few. These numbers have risen sharply in the past few decades, along with a particular rise in "smart collars" which incorporate electronics and computer chips that allow for advanced functions not possible in the past. Said collars now make up the majority by far in First World countries (with more than 20 specifically requiring at least an ID/tracker) and are even fairly common elsewhere, while more old-fashioned "plain" collars have been relegated to retro or legacy uses outside of poorer countries.
In this report I will explain the various ways in which collars (especially smart collars) are useful to an owner and to society, thus explaining why they are so commonly used.
Uses of any collar
Status showing
The most basic purpose of a collar is, somewhat circularly, an effect of it's popularity - since the wearing of one has become associated very closely with slavery (and this even enforced by law in some countries) any observer can tell just by glancing at the wearer's neck that they are a slave. (Because of this, free people almost never wear anything which could be mistaken for a collar, and even when leaving a slave's neck bare is legal, it can arouse suspicion and distrust.) More subtle signs of status can sometimes be observed from the collar's make, with ornamented or padded ones showing a favourite while a crude or basic one suggests a lowly slave - or an uncaring or miserly owner.
ID
Of course, the messages a collar can send go far beyond "this is a slave". Important information like the slave's name, International Slave Registry number, owner and domicile can be printed or engraved on the collar itself or an attached tag, allowing easy checking without any need for a device or Internet connection. Many modern collars (even ones not otherwise "smart") also hold this information on a readable chip, with smart ones generally updating whenever linked up to the Internet.
Leashing
Many collars come with a leash (either chain or cable) attached, or at least a ring for attaching one - some have as many as four. Of course, plenty of leashes can be clipped or even tied around even a collar without specific points for them - they're just often less secure and less comfortable. These can be used to lead a slave, to secure them somewhere, and even sometimes to choke them as a form of punishment. Several collars can also be connected together to form a coffle (for transport) or chain gang (for work).
Uses of smart collars in particular
Punishment
One of the most everyday uses of collars nowadays is to administer punishment to disobedient, lazy or incompetent slaves. While the use of shock technology in them overall dates back as far as the mid-20th century in some workplaces (where the collars were connected to the mains by cables), it was only with the development of first a portable battery-powered method, and then a remote which meant the owner no longer needed to come close enough to press a button on the collar, that this method of punishment began to be used for more and more slaves. Nowadays almost every slave knows the pain of electricity discharging sharply into their body just as well as earlier ones knew the slap of their owner's hand or overseer's whip - not that such things are not also still quite familiar to many slaves, but the convinience of a quick zap makes it the most common casual punishment by far.
This is especially the case because, unlike early models from the 70s which only offered a single shock strength (which could vary significantly from collar to collar) and whose closest thing to a duration control was holding down the remote button longer, modern collars not only offer extreme adjustability on both fronts, but can also preprogrammed with shocks based on location and/or time or activated remotely from anywhere in the world (as long as both the collar and the phone it's linked to both have Internet connection). This gives the modern owner once unbelievable flexibility in disciplining (or tormenting) their slaves.
Tracking
Rivalling punishment as the most handy function of a modern collar to owners - and as mentioned above, so useful to states that several countries legally require it - is the ability to track a slave's location. This is accomplished via a variety of methods, with GPS being supplemented by other tools such as Wi-Fi positioning for wide-scale tracking while local Bluetooth is used for more precision work (like determining where a slave is within a building). Owners can keep track of their slaves in real time via their phones, as well as implementing alarms or shocks if a slave enters or leaves specified areas. And the availability of this tracking data to authorities is likely a major contributor to the sharp decline in successful slave escapes in recent decades.
It should be noted, though, that despite it's great utility, there are also some doubts about this feature. Some owners express concern about being tracked by the authorities via monitoring of their slaves' movements. Others point to cases where the information has been hacked or even falsified by slave thieves. And of course, even with digital connections covering more and more of the world, there are still blind spots a slave can fall into - which can have unintendedly bad results if the collar interprets it as them being out of bounds.
Communication/Surveillance
The newest feature to become so widespread in collars that to not have it is to be old-fashioned, communication (and surveillance, the two being in some ways two sides of the same coin) was introduced in bits and pieces over the course of the 90s and 2000s. One of the first forms was simply a light and alarm which could be set off by phone remotely - sometimes. Then came the ability for a master to give commands and listen in to the slave from a distance. Then video streaming. By the turn of the 2010s, this had often become a full-on phone which could only be called, not call - at least, until some added "master call" and "callback" buttons, plug-in and Bluetooth keypads and "slave phones" were developed, and the newest models can even take vocal instructions. (Of course, all activity can be tracked and functions enabled/disabled via the owner's phone.) Even beyond the actual ways the communication features can be used, simply knowing that their owners could be listening in on or observing them at any time has a positive effect on slave discipline. (As with tracking, though, this has raised some privacy concerns, and many collars can be locked down to neither send or receive.)
Conclusion
All in all, a modern slave collar is a wonder of technology which allows modern owners to monitor and control their slaves' lives to a massive degree (even while still leaving them some semblance of breathing room) - bearing their capabilities in mind, the surprise is not that they are so widespread but that there are thousands of owners who still do without. Even more basic collars, though, while considerable less useful, serve a powerful symbolic role in setting slaves and free apart, to the point that the closing of a collar around a new slave's neck is often seen much more as the moment of enslavement than the point of legal registration. It is therefore no wonder that the collar is almost as defining a symbol of slavery as the Registry mark, and I expect both their usage and their features to only grow in the future.
