The New Surveillance Capitalism
The business model that gives you stuff (apps, browsers, social media, educational software) in exchange for your data, which they aggregate, sell, analyze and ultimately use to manipulate you with.
Every time I talk about the Great Reset or the Fourth Industrial Revolution or the Internet of Things or Bodies to friends that are unfamiliar with these terms, I get blank stares or disbelief. My view that we are rapidly heading into a new era of a globalized biodigital security state, in which daily life for most occurs in a panopticon of surveillance and control, seems like a paranoid stretch to many. One reason for this dismissal is that a lot of background goes into seeing and understanding the shift, the “Great Reset” that is underway and people don’t have the background. To many, it seems like the business models and technologies involved in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), the tools for the Great Reset, have come out of thin air, and they have no context to comprehend what is happening.
The Great Reset and its tools are extensions of changes in business, technology and governance that have been underway for some time. Specifically, in this essay I hope to show that the levels of surveillance and control that we are moving into are entirely predictable from the current dominant business model, surveillance capitalism, and the ongoing explosion of internet connected devices in our daily lives. It has taken me two years to understand these connections better, and I hope to make it easier for others.
Surveillance capitalism is the business model that gives you stuff (apps, browsers, social media, educational software) in exchange for your data, which they aggregate, sell, analyze and ultimately use to manipulate you with. Facebook is the best known example due to prominent news stories, including the recent “whistle blower” story, Cambridge Analytica, and “The Social Dilemma” documentary. These high profile stories document how Facebook tracks your likes and clicks, your photos, everywhere you go and what you do on the internet and many places in the real world, and sells the data to third parties for advertising and socio-political manipulation. They also use your data for machine learning, or artificial intelligence (AI), to improve the algorithms they use to decide what content will best control your attention. For example, Facebook increases divisive (defined through AI) content on your feed, so they can provide better “engagement” for their advertisers.
It is an aside, but perhaps worth remarking at this point that given how Facebook and other social media platforms work, calls for them to censor “mis” and “dis” information are absurd. Their algorithms, which promote and amplify extremist content by nature of its ability to garner attention and engagement, are central to their business model. Their algorithms also promote news and other posts on your newsfeed that AI predicts you are more likely to share or like, meaning that you get exposed more to “friends”’ posts that are like-minded rather than diverse views. These algorithms re-enforce the echo-chambers that harden opinions and beliefs isolated from evidence, to make it easier to target advertisements or other stories to well-defined user groups. Polarization, which makes it far harder to discern truth in a cluttered information landscape, is thus the bread and butter of social media giants, not an aberration of malignant or ignorant users.
It is crucial to realize that surveillance capitalism is the dominant model not only in Big Tech internet companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. but throughout the economy. As Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term and wrote a ground breaking book on the subject says:
“[Surveillance Capitalism] has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a surveillance economy.”
Surveillance capitalists sell three levels of product – the first is the service that entraps the user, like the Google search engine or a GPS service on a phone. The second level is the data or information that they are able to capture when you use the service, which includes both data you provide and meta-data, like where and when you used the service. Location is highly prized real world data from your phone because so much information can be inferred from it with AI. The captured data is analyzed in increasingly sophisticated AI in order to better predict your behavior, called predictive analytics, either by the party that collected it or by a second party that buys it.
The World Economic Forum, (WEF) a global organization dedicated to the Great Reset, shares this handy table to help you grasp the breadth of the data of interest.
As they say, “Think of personal data as the digital record of everything a person makes and does online and in the world.” That’s all.
You, as the sum totality of everything you do within the underlying materialistic context, are the product at the second level, in other words.