Surveillance Capitalism.
Whoa. Just a minute. Capitalism’s a trigger word for the left, and because it’s a trigger word for the left, its use is seen with suspicion by the right.
But, right wingers, this isn’t what the bogeyman Marx was condemning. Left wingers, this is not going to be fixed by the revolt of the proletariat. We’re all proletariat as far as this reinvention of exploitation is concerned.
This should be the legitimate concern of traditional right and traditional left alike. It embodies and perpetuates much of the crap that we on ISAC spend our time deploring.
You’ve spotted that our freedoms are being eroded, including our freedom of thought, never mind speech?
That everything about you is being written down in a digital inventory, and that your life is no longer private?
That you’re being sold shit you don’t need by the behavioural psychologists now employed in Marketing, and only realise you’ve been conned when – or if -you check your bank statement on the mobile phone you are paying through the nose for?
And that every facet of every human interaction has become monetised by the trade in information? Information used to nudge your preferences, suppress your opinions and keep the regular payments leaking out of your account?
That’s surveillance capitalism.
A more informed perception of surveillance capitalism is emerging. Right wingers, I’m sorry this quote comes from a rather good review in the Guardian. However, the Spectator did one of its competitions on the topic.
“While the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context.
She points out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users.
In that sense, her vast (660-page) book is a continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and – dare I say it – Karl Marx.
Viewed from this perspective, the behaviour of the digital giants looks rather different from the roseate hallucinations of Wired magazine.
What one sees instead is a colonising ruthlessness of which John D Rockefeller would have been proud. First of all there was the arrogant appropriation of users’ behavioural data – viewed as a free resource, there for the taking.
Then the use of patented methods to extract or infer data even when users had explicitly denied permission, followed by the use of technologies that were opaque by design and fostered user ignorance.”
Sorry about the length. But it’s a gigantic cunt.
Nominated by: Komodo
Wonder if Karl ever mended his relationship with Harpo, Groucho & Chico?
Terrible when family falls out.
16
I must be the exception. I neither buy shit I do not want or need, have not been conned out of anything, nothing comes out of my bank account(s) that I’ve not expressly authorised.
Not sure what “every facet of every human interaction has become monetised by the trade in information” means. Is it my neighbour asking “how are you?” or the dentist enquiring as to “which tooth?” But that’s always been the case, hasn’t it?
Am not on social media (apart from ISAC) or use a mobile phone, so possibly not applicable. I long ago X’d myself out of society anyway.
16
Over the years I’ve been installing larger and larger data capacity hard drives for domestic and corporate customers.
Only a couple of weeks ago I installed a SAN consisting of around 12 x 18TB HDDs for a business sub-contracted out by the Department of Health!
To think a few years ago a 1TB HDD was considered sufficient for SMB use, but these days businesses are crying out for more storage, although they never fully explain the reasons why (which I suppose is fair enough).
I have also visited a Microsoft Datacentre in London a few years back. It was fully loaded with racks and racks of enterprise servers and SANs running into the Exabytes (1 Exabyte = One Billion GBs). Most of which were used as a platform for their Cloud services.
No doubt a lot of this data storage is needed for ordinary business and personal use (social media, photos, music, film streaming etc.) But you can bet your bottom dollar, a considerable chunk is used for data mining personal and commercial information.
With the advent of the Internet of Things, along with intrusive tablet and smartphone apps and PC operating systems, data mining is big business both on a commercial basis and of course in the shady world of government department and security agencies.
Don’t be surprised if one day new born babies are covertly injected with the same kind of microchip used to keep track of domestic pets. The parents won’t be told about this of course, but once injected and tagged, government agencies will know all about you for the rest of your life!
18
I think you are right about “chipping at birth” it will come – it’ll end up just like the Futurama episode where Fry is in big trouble for being the only person not having an embedded chip.
10
‘You gotta do what ya gotta do’
Oh it’s coming. Neo-peasant class and ruling class with no inbetween. Fucking shite.
9
Information overload is a massive problem as Aldous Huxley predicted, you literally have access to any history, facts, education, music and media within seconds. It’s almost maddening and I’m so glad I grew up without the internet.
10
The interesting thing about what you pointed out is that despite all this instant info, knowledge, nostalgia etc, it’s actually making people even dumber.
13
I read recently – it was actually in a science fiction novel by the late, great Bob Shaw – in which he anticipated a future version of the internet (whilst writing in 1975) – that instant access to knowledge edge would not necessarily make people smarter but would have the opposite effect.
How right he was.
17
People are getting dumber Herman because they can pick and choose what to believe and surround themselves with likeminded people. The state of society has plunged down drastically in the last decade and it’s just going to get worse as people silo themselves into their own mental bunkers.
13
MMCM
You might be interested in E M Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’ a short story published in 1909
In it he predicts the internet, Facebook with people having thousands of friends, instant messaging a youtube/ zoom type livestream and video conferencing, Ipad like devices for communication and where people are almost permanently connected to the internet living in isolation and get very irritated when disturbed by the real world.
No original thought just recycled ideas which passes for knowledge which is mostly wrong or complete garbage while the Machine provides all their needs (to me like a totalitarian state keeping them childlike) generation after generation not realising they have become completely subservient to the machine although humans built it
11
Indeed Dick, I have read The Machine Stops. It’s a sci-fi classic, frequently anthologised, and very prescient. How right Forster was.
8
I’m no Marxist but it’s evident that in a capitalist system everything is monetised and people are “cash cows”, no more, no less. Information is now one of the easiest things for tech-savvy corporations to acquire and exploit. Why else are Facebook and Twitter free ?
It’s the covert nature of it that offends. Most people, as they surf the web and interact on-line, are blissfully unaware that they are being harvested, packaged, re-sold and targeted. When you consider it it’s quite frightening.
Good cunting from Komodo.
13
Come to think of it, why is ISAC free?
Only joking, Admin 😉
Please subscribe to the IsAC onlyfans page for premium pictures of your favourite admins. – DA
13
“When the service is free, YOU are the product…”
according to some cunt who’s name escapes me…
10
Are thet saucy pics? Just asking.
5
Good nom Komodo.
I was a child/teenager/young adult of the 80s and 90s.
Thank fuck for that.
Pre internet, mobile phone etc and looking back, I’m definitely grateful for it.
I’m not quite a Luddite but will admit to being very slow or reluctant to embrace newer and seemingly more intrusive technologies.
Would you mind uploading that personal information to the ‘cloud’?
Yes I would now fuck off.
17
With traditional advertising methods such as TV and radio waning considerably, Ad wankers have to find new ways to sell you their clients tat, as streaming is mostly ad free so viewing and listening has become irritating cunt free.
As for all the data collection, it doesn’t seem to work for me. Most of the embedded ads that are the type ‘inspired’ by your search history or website usage are usually so far from my sphere of interest it’s laughable. Sometimes I get stuff which is ballpark, musical gear and recording tools, but most of it seems more age related than interest, so being mid fifties I get funeral plans, life insurance and erectile disfunction crap. Never looked at any of this crap, and it’s almost insulting, like every bloke my age is a flabby unfit alcoholic smoker with a floppy cock.
YouTube is the same. Because I’ve clicked on the odd link tinfoilers have posted, my suggested content is poisoned with the shite, even though I never make it to the end of these vids, as they usually set their stall out early and spare me the wasted time. And their ads can suck a fat choad while they’re at it too.
12
Facebook keeps trying to sell me ladies underwear by showing pictures of sexy women in said underwear. I can’t think why.
4
Accepting cookies for instance streamlines one for adds because you looked up a drill that you were thinking about buying
These adds are in all the forums now and it’s extra money for the forum
I’m not on social media but I do like occasionally forums that interest me
Location services if you turn it off is it off?
These things are not a concern unless of course you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time
The internet is the revolution for the foreseeable future, but maybe the balance is shifting for more sinister applications
5
A stanza/line in one of those immensely embarrassing and cringe-worthy prize-winning poems from The Spectator link caught my attention:
You can of course chop, mince, purée, bruise or indeed leave it whole but you cannot chiffonade chervil; the leaves are too small to roll up and cut into strips.
I know Kimono is a stickler for commenters remaining “on-topic”, although for a largely humorous website like isac this seems to me perhaps not of primary concern. In deference to the nominator, therefore, I make a couple of observations.
There has already been extremely significant “push back” against so-called surveillance capitalism and the sinister exploitation of Big Data more generally. The recent (2018) Cambridge Analytica scandal has resulted in such a backlash, especially in some EU states, that such activities have already been much curtailed. Mark Zuckerberg satisfyingly apologised saying it was a “mistake”. While it would be hard to deny the likelihood of increasingly invasive abuses in the future, there will also be loud howls and repudiations with legal consequences of ever-larger and more punitive sanctions.
Nor is data gathering all bad. A friend from school is deeply passionate about the “Internet of Things” (he is a Chief Technology Officer at IBM, which is pretty close to the top of the tree). It is hard to deny that more good than evil will emerge from a wider application of the concepts and technology he has pioneered since the early 1990s. However even he admits a “brave new world” is unlikely to materialise soon; progress will be incremental and slow.
In my opinion, the main threat to surveillance capitalism’s success will not so much be from sweeping legal actions by large governments or huge fines for breaches of data security, but individual apathy and burnout of interest. Facebook has been “old hat” for years and future platforms will most likely wax and wane even more rapidly. Most of the interest and uptake was predicated on little more than novelty value, which has long since well-and-truly worn off. Longer term survival will simply depend on whether usefulness outweighs the cost (even if many users are unaware of the latter).
Like the chiffonading of chervil, I think much of the noise and furore made about all this is basically bollocks.
7
Timely nom. My phone was eavesdropping on my conversation with my friend over the weekend, and I get two targeted ads on FaceFuck for random shite we discussed.
Ironically we were discussing the internet early days, what with buffys swearing keyboard and spoooooonguaaaaard. Next morning, fucking advert for ‘spoon carving’. I’ve had ads from phone conversation topics too.
Just wait until we get targeted ads with faces made out of a composite of your loved ones, harvested from your data profile. You won’t even know it, but subconsciously you will.
Our society is so shite that they need to resort to spying on us to sell us the crap we don’t need. It’s pathetic.
10
In 1970, Tomorrow’s World demonstrated the mobile phone in UK and explained that it worked by knowing your location.
That’s when I saw the potential dangers of the infernal device.
Never owned one – never plan t.
1
Thanks to all for their interesting and relevant responses. Threat? Bollocks? Bollocks? Threat? Hurry, hurry, place bets now.
Though Caught Spamming’s complaint re. chervil would perhaps be better addressed to the Spectator. Not being an elitist condescending fantasy toff with Important Friends I have , obviously, no idea what chiffonade means, and if chervil is edible you are welcome to it.
5
Incidentally, your old school chum is hardly unbiased. He’s a passionate advocate of the Internet of Things, some might say obsessive, and he fits rather neatly into the discourse as a self-confessed propagandist for commercial surveillance of the individual. Stockport Grammar and UEA, eh? Well, well. Probably doesn’t know what chiffonade means, either. Strange that you should.
Or maybe you meant IBM’s China CTO?
Espresso, please.
4
You are welcome, Flora. I thought the nom was mayhap flagging a little, so I’m pleased you so warmly appreciate my own bolstering of it.
It wasn’t a complaint about chervil but rather a kind of leitmotiv for that peculiar strain of bollocks evidently prevalent among Spectator readers. I intensely dislike the publication, but I do rather like the delicate flavour of chervil in an otherwise plain omelette.
I don’t think my friend (we aren’t especially close) sees himself as Particularly Important, but he is extremely knowledgeable. He is certainly not a propagandist of any kind, but is very passionate about the potential benefits of IoT. I was talking to him not long ago about the failure of the IoW Track and Trace pilot last year, with which he was involved, and very interesting it was too.
Next time we speak I’ll ask him about his knife skills and where he went to university. You seem to know more about him than I do. Would you like any sugar with your coffee?
0
I have no wish to identify your friend more closely than you have already, for, ahem. legal reasons. But he leaves quite a wide internet trail, and this itself supports my nom’s validity. Biter bit.
He was, apparently, one of the fathers of “pervasive messaging”. His current position is based on this. Here’s a company that does it-
http://www.pervasivecom.com/products%20and%20services/products%20and%20services.htm
So undisturbed is that company by any privacy issues that it can boast:
Pervasive Messaging Technology™ is our full service email messaging solution. It combines patented software (Pervasive Messaging™), the Pervasive Messaging Data Base™, processing know-how and in-house ingenuity that makes bulk legitimate email that appears as regular person-to-person email in the recipient’s Inbox. We take extreme care that this process is not used for sending SPAM. Pervasive Communications, LLC will only subscribe our solution for legitimate B2B or consumer-oriented bulk email of good, earnest values and moral integrity.
The Pervasive Messaging Data Base™ contains millions of superior quality, 100 percent opt-in full data records that may be highly targeted through numerous filtering options. The following are just some of the fields that may be used for filtering the data base: City, State, Zip, SIC code, NAISC code. There are over thirty possible fields. It is also possible to append each record with data from other source(s), providing additional value to the evolving data base. This data base grows by some fifteen million records per month and the entire data base is continually maintained for accuracy, making it the most accurate and freshest 100 percent opt-in list available—anywhere.
No mate, that’s not your job. I’ll get a sachet off the counter like everyone else…
2
You make my friend sound like Dr Miles Dyson from Terminator 2. Disappointingly perhaps, the reality is rather more prosaic. He certainly shares a passion with “Dyson” for the transformational power of technology, but in a positive way.
I’ll ask him about Pervasive Messaging next time we speak. I’ve not heard of it before, but it sounds quite interesting. I’ll also tell him he’s now famous on isac. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s already a fan!
2
No, I’m just reporting what I find. He’s proud of his work on pervasive messaging, and his internet persona is of a stereotypical technology nerd who simply isn’t concerned with the long term effects of his very intrusive innovations. Not the best exemplar for your assertion that surveillance capitalism is not a problem.
Maths and computer science* at UEA….I would actually take his opinion more seriously if it had been sociology.
*Not disparaging the department. It’s excellent, but its students have difficulty getting around due to their heads being up their arses.
1
You seem to know much more about him (more accurately his “Internet persona”) than I do. I know him as a person and I can certainly vouch for his enthusiasm, optimism and passion that technology should be a force for good.
You say he was a poor choice to cite in support of an argument that surveillance capitalism is “not a problem”. I didn’t say it was not a problem, and mentioned in this regard the 2018 CA scandal. On the contrary, if you did know him personally you would have a different view. I’ll pass on your assessment that he is a “stereotypical technology nerd”; I think he would be happy with that, minus the stereotypical bit!
He and others like him are, I am sure, more acutely aware of “long term effects of his very intrusive innovations” than you or I. There must necessarily be a balance struck between “unacceptably invasive” and “useful” for any durable implementation. If not, the technology will be rejected by individuals as well as governments sooner or later, as I also mentioned in my comment at 12:27. Lack of durability entails failure. There is too much money, control and power at stake for such failure, as you are clearly aware.
You say you “would actually take his opinion more seriously if it had been sociology”. In view of your extensive and passionate invective directed against PPE students (with which I largely agree) this seems a little odd. Can’t win with you!
I didn’t know where he went after school or what he studied, but I (correctly) take his opinion on these matters extremely seriously indeed. His head is quite definitely not up his arse, however, I can assure you of that!
1
I will content myself with observing that, on further research, if his head were not firmly up his arse, your friend would even now be designing a digital head to attach, via CANBUS, to his rectum. The guy is absolutely blind to the implications of automating everything, not least depriving us messy non-nerds of our occupations, and has collaborated enthusiastically in the monetisation of personal data for commercial advantage.
Invasive tech nerd says invasive tech is just great, shock, horror!
If he were not a friend of yours, I would probably be permitted to call him a cunt, but the trouble is I understand him only too well, and know that he cannot help it.
0
Probably best leave it there Komodo. This is getting a bit too silly, even for me.
0
I get myself cheap phones on pay as you go. Joke’s on them.
3
Lisa Reilley is still trying to sell me fucking diet-pills…she’s a redoubtable old Porker,I’ll give her that…fuck only knows the lengths she’d go to if she thought I had a cream-cake hidden in the fridge.
4
Afternoon, Dick.
Why not buy some of her tabs and flog them as ecstasy at the next Village Hall dance night? Profit for you and a worthy stand against the tide of fatties.
3
A good cunting, Komodo.
Here’s a piece by John Lanchester that got me rethinking my involvement with Social Media a few years ago.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n16/john-lanchester/you-are-the-product
3
Wow. Long and thoughtful piece, I need time to do more than skim it. Thanks.
(The full meme referenced in the link is, I believe, “if the product costs nothing, you are the product.”)
1
Here’s something that might be useful.
https://adnauseam.io/
I used to click on all kinds of random shit to avoid being profiled.
This makes it easy.
0