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
