Deleting Democracy:
Australia and the surveillance juggernaut
The digital age means we increasingly carry out the minutia of our daily lives in a type of hyper-bent hi an attentionharvesting behavioural-modification Panopticon. Google Inc, whose search engine has its origins in military funding, invented the business model 1 and was quickly followed by a litany of emulators – Facebook and the social media brigade, Amazon which dominates cloud-computing – and an endless procession of start-ups for whom data-capture, in all facets of humanbehaviour, is the core around which entire businesses are built.
The ‘datafication' of the economy as we near the third decade of the 21st century is all-pervasive. The model, in the space of a decade and a half, has become so utterly hegemonic that it has earned its status as a special type of capitalism – Surveillance Capitalism – a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff in 2015 and the subject of her watershed 2019 book.
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Surveillance capitalism is a new data-driven socio-political-economic modality that aims to predict and modify human behaviour for profit and market control. Behavioural prediction markets are dominated in the US by Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix,
…markets that are about us but not for us. Shoshana Zuboff
Apple and a few others. In China it is Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu.
These markets now consume all forms of economic activity, and these monopolies are shifting from predicting behaviour to creating behaviour through cognitive engineering. Other consumer-facing entities, such as retailers, sit below them acting as cogs in the surveillance architecture.
There's a couple of things about surveillance capitalism every Australian needs to understand because, just as the general public is catching up, the model is about to leap into its next phase.
1. Democracy threatens surveillance revenue
Autocracy is the much-preferred governance form of surveillance capitalism. This is a quasi-accidental product of what Zuboff describes as the “unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behaviour.”
3 As Yuval Harari has noted, “The same technologies that might make billions of people economically irrelevant might also make them easier to monitor and control.”
4 There is an unfortunate and decidedly sinister tendency toward the erosion of liberal and democratic forms here,
5 a tendency that is at the same time extremely difficult to define, specify, and assign as an object of political and legal resistance.
Agency resides in new networks of human-computer mediation, occurring across the layers of a complicated digital stack – an observable material space like any other, populated by data-brokers and other entities – yet nonetheless operating largely outside the purview of regulatory bodies and under the radar of consumer awareness.
Few government representatives know what surveillance capitalism is, while most members of the public assume the government is in control. It is not.
The layperson is largely unaccustomed to these processes and existing legislative, regulatory, and judicial institutions of socio-political mediation also remain alienated. Cyberspace has long been veiled in a mystique it does not warrant – individuals and institutions are now paying the price for their self-exoneration from this zone – while those benefitting from its obscurity have been ruthless in exploiting the gap.
Douglas Rushkoff warned us in 2010 to Program or Be Programmed.
6 Many took this to mean we should all become coders. Rushkoff meant differently. The social fabric was being dangerously exposed to the rapacious and inhumane forces of technological determinism. No one was protecting us.
Where democratic and liberal institutions are hanging on, a strategy of stealth, deception, speed, paying out lawsuits, and incessant lobbying has been employed to side-step existing governance mechanisms. Deception
7 induced ignorance is the public relations modus operandi and it has worked remarkably well, enabling a process described by Siva Vaidhyanathan as “infrastructure imperialism.”
8 As congressional hearings in the US attested9 – and as is evident in most polities where it operates – few government representatives know what surveillance capitalism is, while most members of the public assume the government is in control. It is not.
Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Apple…these monopolies are shifting from predicting to creating behaviour through cognitive engineering.
This system is not a ‘new type of contract’ – it is in fact the abolishment of reciprocal contracts, which are the fundamental foundation of citizenship and of society.
If the stampede of neoliberalism in the 1990s meant democracy was effectively vetoed by international capital markets, now, democracy is captured by the threats, promises, and obscurity of surveillance capital.
2. The user is a recyclable resource.
The ‘user' has ceased to be a real human being. It is instead a digital ectype of a human being – a copy of something with a special relationship to the original. The ectype has no rights.
10 No zone of privacy, no inherent value or dignity, no meaning. It is a data set in a cybernetic system whose goal is optimal efficiency. Its user's data emissions are gathered, collated, sold on, manipulated, and gathered again in an endless loop.
This view of humans as mere data-sets in cybernetic information systems may appall the layperson, but it has a long and well-documented history in Silicon Valley ideology.
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3.The quid pro quo – that you ‘get something' for free – is an evasion. You only give.
According to the prevailing justification, you agreed to all this and will continue to. You legally acceded when you ticked a box online. You find convenience and novelty in using a platform or a service, and for that you forfeit your rights. You will continue to do so because those services will improve to the point where you will not see it as an encroachment and, eventually, you will be unable to live an effective life without them. You are simply required to trust that someone is writing the algorithms with your best interests at heart. This system is not a ‘new type of contract' – it is in fact the abolishment of reciprocal contracts, which are the fundamental foundation of citizenship and of society.
4. The customer is anyone who will pay for analytics derived from the extraction process.
Many continue to labour under the assumption that the customer of this model is either an advertiser or the government. Advertising has become a ubiquitous feature of consumerism and, if irritating, seems largely benign – governments are bound by checks and balances and you are not committing any crimes, so why worry?
This view is extraordinarily naïve. Firstly, the concept of advertising as a passive stimulus has been revolutionised. Cognitive engineering at the human-computer interface has been a growth industry since the late 90s, deploying the vanguard of
12 insights from neuroscience which carry paradigm-smashing implications for the concept of ‘choice'.
Secondly, while governments are both consumers of this knowledge as well as burgeoning participants, the
13 state is merely one among peers in what is a free-for-all of profiteering in the exploitation of human cognition.
5. The model is as profitable as it is destructive to the social fabric.
Notwithstanding the recent bearish sentiment regarding ‘Big Tech', the top five US data primes had a market
cap approaching US$4 Trillion in June 2018.14 Yet compared to the biggest corporations of industry past, they employ a miniscule number of people.
The relational dependency between the worker and the firm established under Fordism, even at its most lopsided, is an historical relic. The surveillance capital industry is radically decoupled from the fate and well-being of the population.
In fact, the relationship may well be inverse. Humans emit more ‘honest signals' when they are disorientated and humiliated. Why do you think Facebook leaves disturbing content up? Ask any torture expert about how to extract truth from a subject without them knowing.
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6. 5G will enable the next phase.
As Constantiou and Kallinikos note,
16 the real value of big data analytics lies in updatability. This means that while after-the-fact big data analytics derive significant behavioural insights, we haven't seen anything yet.
It is real-time data streams flowing from sensors embedded in wearable tech, clothing, machines, bodies, everything, that will unleash the next phase. The higher throughput and lower latency of 5G is the crucial step here.
17 Behavioural modification conducted by faceless social engineers is set to go real-time.
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Real-time flowing embedded from data in sensors wearable streams tech, clothing, machines, bodies, everything, that will unleash the next phase…
Behavioural modification
conducted by faceless
social engineers is set to
go real-time.