Life is a Factory
Let’s be honest – Karl Marx was a bit long-winded in his efforts to explain to every-day people how capitalism organized life around the factory system. Marx was also writing in the middle of the 1800s, he had boils on his face, and he looked like Santa Clause. What could he have possibly known then that would apply to our present day? As it turns out – quite a lot!
Fast forward to the future. Firms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter have pushed the boundaries of capitalism into new territory. The factory is everywhere, resulting in what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” (see her article attached below). Everything we do can be reduced to a data point that can, in turn, be sold and repurposed for profit. The tools of the trade – cell phones, laptops, and cameras, are in the process of changing our relationship to each other as well as our relationship to everything around us. We are the human resources of these new industries; extraction by distraction, the manipulation of affect, and the dispossession of our data are what makes us so valuable. Collectively, our thoughts, feelings, “likes,” and dreams are being monetized for profit. This behavioral data represents a boundless form of wealth accumulation, the limits of which are unthinkable. Every domain of social life is a potential target.
What we have here, in other words, is a new economic model. One whose goal, according to Zuboff, is “the harvest of behavioral surplus from people, bodies, things, processes, and places in both the virtual and the real world,’ so that this can be transformed into profits and power. Crucial to these efforts are ubiquitous surveillance systems built on computer systems infrastructures – digital platforms – which provide for the mass siphoning of public information.
Capitalism, as Marx was fond of arguing, is constantly changing. There are always new Modes of Production. Consequently, as Zuboff argues, we see that were once profits flowed from goods and services, this was eventually replaced by financial speculation. Today, surveillance and the monetization of mass behavioral data are fueling the economy. As a result, the predictive sciences – even prediction itself – has become the product, as companies compete for and sell our attention with the hope that they might alter our behavior.
Facebook Is Not Your Friend
Surveillance capitalism is not a conspiracy theory. To make sense of it, we might recall the eighteenth-century philosopher and social reformer, Jeremy Bentham, who designed the model panopticon as a prison to serve as an effective means of “obtaining the power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”
The Panopticon was envisioned as a type of institutional building. Bentham’s design concept idealized a single watchtower, whose watchman might observe (opticon) all (pan) occupants of the facility without them ever being able to discern whether or not they were being watched. This was, ideally, a circular structure with an “inspection house” where the management of the institution, stationed on a viewing platform, could watch people (prisoners, workers, children…students). Bentham conceived his basic plan as one that was equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, daycares, and asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is this prison that we most identify with the use of the term. In Bentham’s panopticon, prisoners are a form of menial labor. Not much has changed more than 150 years later.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault would later in his work, Discipline & Punish, point to the Panopticon as a metaphor to describe how disciplinary power functions in society. The key here, which Foucault distinguishes, is that people at some point learn to internalize the watchful gaze of the watchers. “Compulsive visibility” is a price we pay to live in modern society. This is what keeps everyone in line and maintains individuals as disciplined bodies and subjects. Think about this next time someone tells you “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to hide,” as this is but one example of how people have come to internalize the panopticon to such an extent they can no longer see they have been overcome by the logic of the system.
Now that you can distinguish this, if you look hard enough, you will find the panopticon is everywhere. But the panopticon has evolved. Domination is no longer physical and doesn’t have to be achieved through confinement-based observation; it operates in ways that are more diffuse, where the target of the watchers gaze actually participates in the terms of their own domination.
For example, think about Facebook and the ascendance of the “like” clicks as a way to control human behavior. Your compulsion to click on a digital object here derives not from a physical and external power exerted on your body, but rather through your manufactured consent. Your participation in socially medicated digital surveillance produces data so that you might, in turn, be controlled by a system that manipulates your emotions and desires to “share” with others.
Alternatively, we might apply the concept to an understanding of how our contemporary government might function as a police state, where round-the-clock surveillance, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and militarization work together to functionally weaponize technology. The end result is relentless mass marketing and groupthink, all of which have become pervasive in society to such an extent that people have come to passively accept their lot in life as a inmates/prisoners of the system – a system of their own making.
Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. The recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica revelations offer proof of this. People are collecting your data, storing it, and selling it every day in unforeseen ways. But people are also being recruited to inform on each other. Think about it: teachers are being turned into prison guards; students are monitoring and reporting on teachers with smartphones. People are being publically evaluated all the time (Yelp, Uber, Airbnb). Fill out this survey and let me know how I did! Our devices are reporting our vital personal information even when we think they are not, as often this occurs with/without our knowledge and understanding. And no one seems to care, so long as they can watch cat, puppy, and goat videos on their phone.
A smartphone user shows the Facebook application on his phone in this photo illustration. Facebook Inc’s mobile advertising revenue growth has continued to explode over the years, though it recently posted enormous losses in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica disclosures (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic).
Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels both justified and empowered to spy on its people, using technology to monitor and control them, we may be approaching a time where we will be forced to choose between obeying the demands of government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity, and independence.
These developments, furthermore, have enormous implications for social inequality to the extent that the new economic model/surveillance state is not being run for the benefit of all its citizens to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Rather, it is aimed at serving the profit motives of people who control the technology to benefit of those with wealth and power.
We Are All Prisoners. Everything is Jail
As was stated above, Foucault theorized the Panopticon as a “mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” According to Foucault, the panopticon automatizes & disindividualizes power. Consequently, it doesn’t matter who exercises the power. Power produces homogeneous effects in populations to the extent that it creates a cruel but ingenious cage. At the same time, it creates populations of people who develop an affinity for their imposed as well as self-made prisons and the information ties that bind them.
Americans, in particular, are prone to boast and claim emphatically that they are “free.” They like to point to their guns and the second amendment as the ultimate guarantors of their freedom. But to what extent are you really free if your every movement can be monitored, uploaded, stored, and recalled for any reason?
Here are some additional questions to ponder:
How have you become accustomed to you social “chains” (in whatever form that takes)?
How have you allowed your comfort and your acquired false sense of security to render you powerless to resist?
How does technology, absent the physical coercion of interrogation tactics, torture, and hallucinogenic drugs, perhaps engage in softer forms of mind control, identity theft, dream manipulation, and other forms of social conditioning and indoctrination, “persuade” us all to comply and subjugate ourselves to the will of the powers-that-be?
How does one maintain their freedom in a society where prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy?
Does standing for the national anthem at a sporting event, “thanking” soldiers for their service, suggest that a citizenry and a people are free? Or do these things merely offer the comforting illusion of freedom, all while functioning like a prison, where people have essentially become inmates of a system that controls, monitors, and disciplines them?
Police Panopticon
The American police state in many ways functions like a metaphorical panopticon. That is, American society is a circular prison, where “inmates” are monitored by virtual watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.
As a case in point, the New York City Police Department has the largest police budget in the United States. In light of this, they have one of the largest budgets to conduct surveillance operations on citizens. After the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD purchased and deployed a fleet of mobile surveillance towers to monitor what were deemed to be “hot spots” – in high crime areas – throughout the city. The Mobile Utility Surveillance Towers (M.U.S.T) are self-contained, mobile units, that have a surveillance platform that extends from a conversion van. These vans have been used to monitor NATO summit protests in places like Seattle and Chicago and they are sometimes found on the Texas-Mexico border, but their deployment in New York marks the first time they’ve been employed by the NYPD.
NYC residents are less than enthusiastic about the towers and beefed-up security presence. East Village residents criticized the deployment of the M.U.S.T. units and demanded that the NYPD get rid of the ones they erected in Tompkins Square Park. Instead of round-the-clock surveillance, they want foot patrols, where “officer friendly” walks a beat — not Big Brother spying from a surveillance tower.
In addition to the towers, the NYPD is making use of what is referred to as “Stingray” technology, which enables them to track citizens’ cell phones without warrants. Since 2008, it was estimated that the NYPD tracked cellphones over 1,000 times, according to public records obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union. As of now, they do not have a policy guiding how police can use the controversial devices (McCarthy).
The way the stingray devices work is that they mimic cell tower signals and track a cell phone’s location at a specific time. Law enforcement agencies can use the technology to track people’s movements through their cell phone use. Stingrays can also detect the phone numbers that a person has been communicating with, according to the NYCLU. The devices allow law enforcement to bypass cell phone carriers, who have provided information to police in the past. Moreover, they can track data about bystanders in close proximity to their intended targets (McCarthy).
Mariko Hirose, the NYCLU attorney who filed the records request, said the records reveal knowledge about NYPD’s stingray use that should have been divulged before police decided to start using them. “When local police agencies acquire powerful surveillance technologies like stingrays the communities should get basic information about what kind of power those technologies give to local law enforcement” (McCarthy).
The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism
Re-blog article by Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.”
You have probably noticed it already. There is a strange logic at the heart of the modern tech industry. The goal of many new tech startups is not to produce products or services for which consumers are willing to pay. Instead, the goal is to create a digital platform or hub that will capture information from as many users as possible — to grab as many ‘eyeballs’ as you can. This information can then be analyzed, repackaged and monetized in various ways.
Recently, Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010 (back then each company was worth less than 200 billion – now each is valued at well over 500 billion.) While Google’s lead lasted only a few days, the company’s success has implications for everyone who lives within the reach of the Internet. Why? Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior. This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high-velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors.
While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency. What are the secrets of this new capitalism, how do they produce such staggering wealth, and how can we protect ourselves from its invasive power?
“Most Americans realize that there are two groups of people who are monitored regularly as they move about the country. The first group is monitored involuntarily by a court order requiring that a tracking device be attached to their ankle. The second group includes everyone else…”
Some will think that this statement is certainly true. Others will worry that it could become true. Perhaps some think it’s ridiculous. It’s not a quote from a dystopian novel, a Silicon Valley executive, or even an NSA official. These are the words of an auto insurance industry consultant intended as a defense of “automotive telematics” and the astonishingly intrusive surveillance capabilities of the allegedly benign systems that are already in use or under development. It’s an industry that has been notoriously exploitative toward customers and has had obvious cause to be anxious about the implications of self-driving cars for its business model. Now, data about where we are, where we’re going, how we’re feeling, what we’re saying, the details of our driving, and the conditions of our vehicle are turning into beacons of revenue that illuminate a new commercial prospect. According to the industry literature, these data can be used for dynamic real-time driver behavior modification triggering punishments (real-time rate hikes, financial penalties, curfews, engine lock-downs) or rewards (rate discounts, coupons, gold stars to redeem for future benefits).
Bloomberg Business Week notes that these automotive systems will give insurers a chance to boost revenue by selling customer driving data in the same way that Google profits by collecting information on those who use its search engine. The CEO of Allstate Insurance wants to be like Google. He says, “There are lots of people who are monetizing data today. You get on Google, and it seems like it’s free. It’s not free. You’re giving them information; they sell your information. Could we, should we, sell this information we get from people driving around to various people and capture some additional profit source…? It’s a long-term game.”
Who are these “various people” and what is this “long-term game”? The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit. This is the gateway to a new universe of monetization opportunities: restaurants who want to be your destination. Service vendors who want to fix your brake pads. Shops who will lure you like the fabled Sirens. The “various people” are anyone, and everyone who wants a piece of your behavior for profit. Small wonder, then, that Google recently announced that its maps will not only provide the route you search but will also suggest a destination.
You Are Being Measured
You probably don’t give it much thought, but you are constantly being measured. This occurs even when you are doing mundane things like driving your car and walking down the street. License plate numbers are being harvested en masse, alongside the faces in the cars that are attached to them. The data is typically stored and there is very little regulation currently on the books to govern who and how someone might access it. For more on this, check out the article “Algorithmic Regulation.”
The goal: change people’s actual behavior at scale
This is just one peephole, in one corner, of one industry, and the peepholes are multiplying like cockroaches. The Chief Data Scientist of a much-admired Silicon Valley company that develops applications to improve students’ learning once told me, “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us”.
The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying. The sports apparel company Under Armour is reinventing its products as wearable technologies. The CEO wants to be like Google. He says, “If it all sounds eerily like those ads that, because of your browsing history, follow you around the Internet, that’s exactly the point–except Under Armour is tracking real behavior and the data is more specific… making people better athletes makes them need more of our gear.” The examples of this new logic are endless, from smart vodka bottles to Internet-enabled rectal thermometers and quite literally everything in between. A Goldman Sachs report calls it a “gold rush,” a race to “vast amounts of data.”
The assault on behavioral data
We’ve entered virgin territory here. The assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests. This is a different kind of challenge now, one that threatens the existential and political canon of the modern liberal order defined by principles of self-determination that have been centuries, even millennia, in the making. I am thinking of matters that include, but are not limited to, the sanctity of the individual and the ideals of social equality; the development of identity, autonomy, and moral reasoning; the integrity of contract, the freedom that accrues to the making and fulfilling of promises; norms and rules of collective agreement; the functions of market democracy; the political integrity of societies; and the future of democratic sovereignty. In the fullness of time, we will look back on the establishment in Europe of the “Right to be Forgotten” and the EU’s more recent invalidation of the Safe Harbor doctrine as early milestones in a gradual reckoning with the true dimensions of this challenge.
There was a time when we laid responsibility for the assault on behavioral data at the door of the state and its security agencies. Later, we also blamed the cunning practices of a handful of banks, data brokers, and Internet companies. Some attribute the assault to an inevitable “age of big data,” as if it were possible to conceive of data born pure and blameless, data suspended in some celestial place where facts sublimate into truth.
Capitalism has been hijacked by surveillance
I’ve come to a different conclusion: The assault we face is driven in large measure by the exceptional appetites of a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation that might be thought of as surveillance capitalism.
Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary mechanisms associated with its historical success and corrupts the unity of supply and demand that has for centuries, however imperfectly, tethered capitalism to the genuine needs of its populations and societies, thus enabling the expansion of market democracy.
Surveillance capitalism is different; it’s a novel economic mutation bred from the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies. It is an unprecedented market form that roots and flourishes in lawless space. It was first discovered and consolidated at Google, then adopted by Facebook, and quickly diffused across the Internet. Cyberspace was its birthplace because, as Google/Alphabet Chairperson Eric Schmidt and his co-author, Jared Cohen, celebrate on the very first page of their book about the digital age, “the online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws…it’s the world’s largest ungoverned space.”
While surveillance capitalism taps the invasive powers of the Internet as the source of capital formation and wealth creation, it is now, as I have suggested, poised to transform commercial practice across the real world too. An analogy is the rapid spread of mass production and administration throughout the industrialized world in the early twentieth century, but with one major caveat. Mass production was interdependent with its populations who were its consumers and employees. In contrast, surveillance capitalism preys on dependent populations who are neither its consumers nor its employees and are largely ignorant of its procedures.
Internet access is a fundamental human right
We once fled to the Internet as solace and solution, our needs for effective life thwarted by the distant and increasingly ruthless operations of late twentieth-century capitalism. In less than two decades after the Mosaic web browser was released to the public enabling easy access to the World Wide Web, a 2010 BBC poll found that 79% of people in 26 countries considered Internet access to be a fundamental human right. This is the Scylla and Charybdis of our plight. It is nearly impossible to imagine effective social participation ––from employment, to education, to healthcare–– without Internet access and know-how, even as these once flourishing networked spaces fall to a new and even more exploitative capitalist regime. It’s happened quickly and without our understanding or agreement. This is because the regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation.
Taming this new force depends upon careful naming. This symbiosis of naming and taming is vividly illustrated in the recent history of HIV research, and I offer it as analogy. For three decades scientists aimed to create a vaccine that followed the logic of earlier cures, training the immune system to produce neutralizing antibodies, but mounting data revealed unanticipated behaviors of the HIV virus that defy the patterns of other infectious diseases.
HIV research as analogy
The tide began to turn at the International AIDS Conference in 2012, when new strategies were presented that rely on a close understanding of the biology of rare HIV carriers whose blood produces natural antibodies. Research began to shift toward methods that reproduce this self-vaccinating response. A leading researcher announced, “We know the face of the enemy now, and so we have some real clues about how to approach the problem.” The point for us is that every successful vaccine begins with a close understanding of the enemy disease. We tend to rely on mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes ( i.e. the twentieth century’s totalitarian nightmares or the monopolistic predations of Gilded Age capitalism). But the vaccines we developed to fight those earlier threats are not sufficient or even appropriate for the novel challenges that we face today.
An evolutionary dead-end
Surveillance capitalism is not the only current modality of information capitalism, nor is it the only possible model for the future. To be sure, however, its fast track to capital accumulation and rapid institutionalization has made it the default model of information capitalism.
A cure depends upon many individual, social, and legal adaptations, but I am convinced that fighting the “enemy disease” cannot begin without a fresh grasp of the novel mechanisms that account for surveillance capitalism’s successful transformation of investment into capital. This has been one focus of my work in a new book, Master or Slave: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization, which will be published early next year. In the short space of this essay, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on this problem.
Fortune telling and selling
New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered by people in a time and place and then perfected through trial and error. Ford discovered and systematized mass production. General Motors institutionalized mass production as a new phase of capitalist development with the discovery and perfection of large-scale administration and professional management. In our time, Google is to surveillance capitalism what Ford and General Motors were to mass-production and managerial capitalism a century ago: discoverer, inventor, pioneer, role model, lead practitioner, and diffusion hub.
Specifically, Google is the mothership and ideal type of a new economic logic based on fortune telling and selling, an ancient and eternally lucrative craft that has exploited the human confrontation with uncertainty from the beginning of the human story. Paradoxically, the certainty of uncertainty is both an enduring source of anxiety and one of our most fruitful facts. It produced the universal need for social trust and cohesion, systems of social organization, familial bonding, and legitimate authority, the contract as formal recognition of reciprocal rights and obligations, and the theory and practice of what we call “free will.” When we eliminate uncertainty, we forfeit the human replenishment that attaches to the challenge of asserting predictability in the face of an always-unknown future in favor of the blankness of perpetual compliance with someone else’s plan.
Only incidentally related to advertising
Most people credit Google’s success to its advertising model. But the discoveries that led to Google’s rapid rise in revenue and market capitalization are only incidentally related to advertising. Google’s success derives from its ability to predict the future – specifically the future of behavior. Here is what I mean:
From the start, Google had collected data on users’ search-related behavior as a byproduct of query activity. Back then, these data logs were treated as waste, not even safely or methodically stored. Eventually, the young company came to understand that these logs could be used to teach and continuously improve its search engine.
The problem was this: Serving users with amazing search results “used up” all the value that users created when they inadvertently provided behavioral data. It’s a complete and self-contained process in which users are ends-in-themselves. All the value that users create is reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved search. In this cycle, there was nothing left over for Google to turn into capital. As long as the effectiveness of the search engine needed users’ behavioral data about as much as users needed search, charging a fee for service was too risky. Google was cool, but it wasn’t yet capitalism –– just one of many Internet startups that boasted “eyeballs” but no revenue.
Cambridge Analytica
Shift in the use of behavioral data
The year 2001 brought the dot.com bust and mounting investor pressures at Google. Back then advertisers selected the search term pages for their displays. Google decided to try and boost ad revenue by applying its already substantial analytical capabilities to the challenge of increasing an ad’s relevance to users –– and thus its value to advertisers. Operationally this meant that Google would finally repurpose its growing cache of behavioral data. Now the data would also be used to match ads with keywords, exploiting subtleties that only its access to behavioral data, combined with its analytical capabilities, could reveal.
It’s now clear that this shift in the use of behavioral data was an historic turning point. Behavioral data that were once discarded or ignored were rediscovered as what I call behavioral surplus. Google’s dramatic success in “matching” ads to pages revealed the transformational value of this behavioral surplus as a means of generating revenue and ultimately turning investment into capital. Behavioral surplus was the game-changing zero-cost asset that could be diverted from service improvement toward a genuine market exchange. Key to this formula, however, is the fact that this new market exchange was not an exchange with users but rather with other companies who understood how to make money from bets on users’ future behavior. In this new context, users were no longer an end-in-themselves. Instead, they became a means to profits in a new kind of marketplace in which users are neither buyers nor sellers nor products. Users are the source of free raw material that feeds a new kind of manufacturing process.
While these facts are known, their significance has not been fully appreciated or adequately theorized. What just happened was the discovery of a surprisingly profitable commercial equation –– a series of lawful relationships that were gradually institutionalized in the sui generis economic logic of surveillance capitalism. It’s like a newly sighted planet with its own physics of time and space, its sixty-seven hour days, emerald sky, inverted mountain ranges, and dry water.
A parasitic form of profit
The equation: First, the push for more users and more channels, services, devices, places, and spaces is imperative for access to an ever-expanding range of behavioral surplus. Users are the human nature-al resource that provides this free raw material. Second, the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science for continuous algorithmic improvement constitutes an immensely expensive, sophisticated, and exclusive twenty-first-century “means of production.” Third, the new manufacturing process converts behavioral surplus into prediction products designed to predict behavior now and soon. Fourth, these prediction products are sold into a new kind of meta-market that trades exclusively in future behavior. The better (more predictive) the product, the lower the risks for buyers, and the greater the volume of sales. Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily, if not entirely, from such markets for future behavior.
While advertisers have been the dominant buyers in the early history of this new kind of marketplace, there is no substantive reason why such markets should be limited to this group. The already visible trend is that any actor with an interest in monetizing probabilistic information about our behavior and/or influencing future behavior can pay to play in a marketplace where the behavioral fortunes of individuals, groups, bodies, and things are told and sold. This is how in our own lifetimes we observe capitalism shifting under our gaze: once profits from products and services, then profits from speculation, and now profits from surveillance. This latest mutation may help explain why the explosion of the digital has failed, so far, to decisively impact economic growth, as so many of its capabilities are diverted into a fundamentally parasitic form of profit.
Unoriginal Sin
The significance of behavioral surplus was quickly camouflaged, both at Google and eventually throughout the Internet industry, with labels like “digital exhaust,” “digital breadcrumbs,” and so on. These euphemisms for behavioral surplus operate as ideological filters, in exactly the same way that the earliest maps of the North American continent labeled whole regions with terms like “heathens,” “infidels,” “idolaters,” “primitives,” “vassals,” or “rebels.” On the strength of those labels, native peoples, their places and claims, were erased from the invaders’ moral and legal equations, legitimating their acts of taking and breaking in the name of Church and Monarchy.
We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own behavior. They are erased in an astonishing and audacious act of dispossession by surveillance that claims its right to ignore every boundary in its thirst for knowledge of and influence over the most detailed nuances of our behavior. For those who wondered about the logical completion of the global processes of commodification, the answer is that they complete themselves in the dispossession of our intimate quotidian reality, now reborn as behavior to be monitored and modified, bought and sold.
The process that began in cyberspace mirrors the nineteenth-century capitalist expansions that preceded the age of imperialism. Back then, as Hannah Arendt described it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “the so-called laws of capitalism were actually allowed to create realities” as they traveled to less developed regions where law did not follow. “The secret of the new happy fulfillment,” she wrote, “was precisely that economic laws no longer stood in the way of the greed of the owning classes.” There, “money could finally beget money,” without having to go “the long way of investment in production…”
“The original sin of simple robbery”
For Arendt, these foreign adventures of capital clarified an essential mechanism of capitalism. Marx had developed the idea of “primitive accumulation” as a big-bang theory –– Arendt called it “the original sin of simple robbery” –– in which the taking of lands and natural resources was the foundational event that enabled capital accumulation and the rise of the market system. The capitalist expansions of the 1860s and 1870s demonstrated, Arendt wrote, that this sort of original sin had to be repeated over and over, “lest the motor of capital accumulation suddenly die down.”
In his book The New Imperialism, geographer and social theorist David Harvey built on this insight with his notion of “accumulation by dispossession.” “What accumulation by dispossession does,” he writes, “is to release a set of assets…at very low (and in some instances zero) cost. Overaccumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use…It can also reflect attempts by determined entrepreneurs…to ‘join the system’ and seek the benefits of capital accumulation.”
Breakthrough into “the system”
The process by which behavioral surplus led to the discovery of surveillance capitalism exemplifies this pattern. It is the foundational act of dispossession for a new logic of capitalism built on profits from surveillance that paved the way for Google to become a capitalist enterprise. Indeed, in 2002, Google’s first profitable year, founder Sergey Brin relished his breakthrough into “the system”, as he told Levy,
Honestly, when we were still in the dot-com boom days, I felt like a schmuck. I had an Internet start-up— so did everybody else. It was unprofitable, like everybody else’s, and how hard is that? But when we became profitable, I felt like we had built a real business.”
Brin was a capitalist all right, but it was a mutation of capitalism unlike anything the world had seen. Once we understand this equation, it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck or a cow to give up chewing. Such demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival. How can we expect companies whose economic existence depends upon behavioral surplus to cease capturing behavioral data voluntarily? It’s like asking for suicide.
Google “Home”
More behavioral surplus for Google
The imperatives of surveillance capitalism mean that there must always be more behavioral surplus for Google and others to turn into surveillance assets, master as prediction, sell into exclusive markets for future behavior, and transform into capital. At Google and its new holding company called Alphabet, for example, every operation and investment aims to increasing the harvest of behavioral surplus from people, bodies, things, processes, and places in both the virtual and the real world. This is how a sixty-seven hour day dawns and darkens in an emerald sky. Nothing short of a social revolt that revokes collective agreement to the practices associated with the dispossession of behavior will alter surveillance capitalism’s claim to manifest data destiny.
What is the new vaccine? We need to reimagine how to intervene in the specific mechanisms that produce surveillance profits and in so doing reassert the primacy of the liberal order in the twenty-first century capitalist project. In undertaking this challenge we must be mindful that contesting Google, or any other surveillance capitalist, on the grounds of monopoly is a 20th century solution to a 20th century problem that, while still vitally important, does not necessarily disrupt surveillance capitalism’s commercial equation. We need new interventions that interrupt, outlaw, or regulate 1) the initial capture of behavioral surplus, 2) the use of behavioral surplus as free raw material, 3) excessive and exclusive concentrations of the new means of production, 4) the manufacture of prediction products, 5) the sale of prediction products, 6) the use of prediction products for third-order operations of modification, influence, and control, and 5) the monetization of the results of these operations. This is necessary for society, for people, for the future, and it is also necessary to restore the healthy evolution of capitalism itself.
A coup from above
In the conventional narrative of the privacy threat, institutional secrecy has grown, and individual privacy rights have been eroded. But that framing is misleading, because privacy and secrecy are not opposites but rather moments in a sequence. Secrecy is an effect; privacy is the cause. Exercising one’s right to privacy produces choice, and one can choose to keep something secret or to share it. Privacy rights thus confer decision rights, but these decision rights are merely the lid on the Pandora’s Box of the liberal order. Inside the box, political and economic sovereignty meet and mingle with even deeper and subtler causes: the idea of the individual, the emergence of the self, the felt experience of free will.
Surveillance capitalism does not erode these decision rights –– along with their causes and their effects –– but rather it redistributes them. Instead of many people having some rights, these rights have been concentrated within the surveillance regime, opening up an entirely new dimension of social inequality. The full implications of this development have preoccupied me for many years now, and with each day my sense of danger intensifies. The space of this essay does not allow me to follow these facts to their conclusions, but I offer this thought in summary.
Surveillance capitalism reaches beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm. It accumulates not only surveillance assets and capital, but also rights. This unilateral redistribution of rights sustains a privately administered compliance regime of rewards and punishments that is largely free from detection or sanction. It operates without meaningful mechanisms of consent either in the traditional form of “exit, voice, or loyalty” associated with markets or in the form of democratic oversight expressed in law and regulation.
A profoundly anti-democratic power
In result, surveillance capitalism conjures a profoundly anti-democratic power that qualifies as a coup from above: not a coup d’état, but rather a coup des gens, an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty. It challenges principles and practices of self-determination ––in psychic life and social relations, politics and governance –– for which humanity has suffered long and sacrificed much. For this reason alone, such principles should not be forfeit to the unilateral pursuit of a disfigured capitalism. Worse still would be their forfeit to our own ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, habituation, or drift. This, I believe, is the ground on which our contests for the future will be fought.
Hannah Arendt once observed that indignation is the natural human response to that which degrades human dignity. Referring to her work on the origins of totalitarianism she wrote, “If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, then I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities.”
So it is for me and perhaps for you: The bare facts of surveillance capitalism necessarily arouse my indignation because they demean human dignity. The future of this narrative will depend upon the indignant scholars and journalists drawn to this frontier project, indignant elected officials and policymakers who understand that their authority originates in the foundational values of democratic communities, and indignant citizens who act in the knowledge that effectiveness without autonomy is not effective, dependency-induced compliance is no social contract, and freedom from uncertainty is no freedom.
Sources
Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.”
The NYPD has Tracked Citizens’ Cellphones 1,000 Times Since 2008 Without Warrants, by Ciara McCarthy, 2016 (originally published in The Guardian)
Does having your personal data harvested and stored and potentially sold to future employers concern you on any level?
Do you think it is possible to have a system of social organization like capitalism without the negative aspects asserting themselves in such a dominant way (i.e. exploitation, aggressive policing, total surveillance)?
How might you draw from both Goffman and Foucault’s theoretical frameworks to explain these contemporary developments?
Will surveillance capitalism become the dominant logic of capital accumulation in our time, or will it be succeeded by yet another mode of capitalist accumulation?
What is the solution? What might you as an individual begin to do differently with regard to limiting the exposure of your personal data?
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Thanks!
The best part about capitalism is that there will always be a new way of accumulating wealth, and that way will most likely out date surveillance capitalism. We can either wait for someone to do it or try to do it ourselves! Will the new way involve our personal information? Will it involve companies’ transparency? These are questions we should have to answer soon or later.
Having my personal data gathered and accumulated is very concerning to me, I may be old fashioned, but surveillance capitalism is scary. I much prefer being the consumer and not the product. I also like to interact with people when they are real, in this world of “like” clicks people are friendly so that they will be rated higher.
Capitalism unchecked will always run out of control; government regulations are regularly needed to keep companies from running out of control. These companies that profit from collecting and selling personal data need to have regulations put in place, limiting what it may and may not collect. People also need to be educated on what companies are doing; most older people on Facebook freely provide personal data without any concern about putting their information out there.
Yes having my social media sold and stored does make me a little startled. With all of the new technology being created, I’m afraid that people can hack into things of mine. Also that we are always being monitored is weird because everyone needs privacy, and if we never are considered to have privacy then maybe things need to change. Honestly it feels like we are no longer safe without video surveillance to show proof of what really goes on in the world. People are starting to rely on it and are no longer going to do things to experience themselves.
My personal data being stored and given to future employers does bother me in different ways. My main issue with this is the fact that it is called personal information, but people have the option to look at it as they please. I think anything is possible, but with capitalism there is always a power hungry, suspicious leader that makes this type of thing impossible. I would think capitalism surveillance is the best for keeping an eye on your citizens and keep people safe in some respect, but there should be a point where the surveillance should be kept below. What I might do is lessen my time with electronics to lessen the chance of my personal data being thrown out in the public, but what the government can do is to strict their reach with things concerning people’s personal information.
Does having your personal data harvested and stored and potentially sold to future employers concern you on any level?
The answer to this question would be yes, it concerns me. There are many reasons as to why it does concern me as this personal data is supposed to be private and companies should not take this information without my knowing permission. The first reason as to why it concerns me is that companies will get a hand on certain information that could put them one step ahead of you in things such as markets, job opportunities, etc. They could basically blackmail you. Second, I believe that this information should be private and not sold. If anyone should sell it, it should be me.
Do you think it is possible to have a system of social organization like capitalism without the negative aspects asserting themselves in such a dominant way (i.e. exploitation, aggressive policing, total surveillance)?
The answer to this would be no. I believe this because without aggressive policing, people would be able to hide many things without repercussions.
Yes, having my personal data stored and sold bothers me. Social media has becoming increasingly popular throughout my generation. I was on social media ever since the sixth grade. Meaning, that my immature self had access to social media. That was long before i matured and began to think critically about my actions and the words i speak. I also believe that people can change. So if a company is going to look at someones social media account they should look to see how they have changed throughout the years.
This “panopticon” observes our everyday actions and profits from the information about us that they collect. Various social media sites and other websites in general are watching our every action and learning about us. It’s kind of creepy. However, this type of surveillance that keeps track of all internet activity has been useful in detecting and preventing criminal activity.
Over the years I have started using social media a lot more frequently. Although I do not post much on my accounts, I find it interesting to see what others have to say and hear their opinions on the most recent topics that the world is focused on. I believe that it would be safe to say that many people are “addicted” to social media and the drama that it causes but to me it is something that I would not mind giving up. A lot of people that use this technology do not understand how important some of the things that they post truly are. People believe that they are able to put all of their information on their account and it will be protected from the public. Unfortunately this is not the case. Nobody should ever post too much personal information about themselves, and this is something that I believe I have been pretty good at compared to others.
The “panopticon” as a modern-day theoretical watch tower watching all of us, actually isn’t that far off from what is actually happening to millions, possibly billions, of people who use the internet daily and absolutely just cannot seem to be able to take their eyes away from their phones for five minutes. We’re all guilty of this habit but it may be more dangerous than at first glance. This is giving governments and large corporations (like Google and Facebook) immeasurable amounts of power over individuals. They have so much data on a person that they probably know more about someone then their own friends. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a vacuum, but in reality it’s primary purpose is to make more and more money for the corporations and give more and more power to the superpower governments of the world, while simultaneously taking more and more individual power away from the individual. The watch tower panopticon theoretical model seems to have come quite true, possibly without the prison aspect in most cases, in the digital age where everyone and their brother has a smartphone in their pocket at all times with no shortage of datalogging “features” built right into them.
The idea of my personal data being stored and potentially being sold to future employers does concern me. I do watch what I post but employers do not need my personal data to decide whether or not I am qualified for the position or a promotion. I can understand employers wanting to look over your public profiles, but going through every single nook and cranny is not necessary. Unfortunately, this is the day we live in, we post everything on social media and then think about what we are saying or posting about later. I do not think it is possible to have a system like capitalism without the negative aspects being so prominent. People will exploit the smallest things against someone or something that they do not like for their own benefit. People are greedy and will do almost anything to get themselves ahead of competitors. There will always be a group of people who think their friend or family member were handled too aggressively by the police. I’m not saying there isn’t a problem with police using excessive force, but even in the smallest situations there will always be someone to disagree with what is going on. With people being so open on social media, total surveillance is inevitable. Some people post anything and everything on their Facebook account with where they are and what they are doing. Do I think total surveillance is right? Absolutely not, but it is here and we cannot continue to pretend like it’s not going on.
Having my information being sold to future employers does not really concern me that much because I feel that I do not post inappropriate things. However, I do feel that it is an invasion of privacy. There are many people who post inappropriate things on social media, and that would put them at great risk of losing job opportunities in the future. They view as a place to freely post about their life and do not understand that there could be possible negative effects in the future. Having my information be sold to possible future employers is a bit alarming to some degree because it makes me wonder what the next step will be. What will this escalate and lead to in the future regarding privacy?
I have personally given this topic a lot of thought in regards to what information I allow the internet to access. I am not at all concerned with my personally data being sold. Social media is “free” although nothing in life truly is, that’s the price you are paying for using these sites. If I wanted my data to be kept to myself I would not use social media. Capitalism and it’s affects have been going on long before social media had this platform. However, I think the negative effects have been amplified. Goffman addressed the control and corruption of hospitalization, especially in mental institutions. The patients conformed to the institutions. This is a similar pattern we are seeing in capitalism. Foucault say the negative effects to people not conform to societal norms which again we see in capitalism. I personally don’t see many solutions to “surveillance capitalism” even with privacy settings and your own censor it is still hard to control what your affiliates can put up about you. It seems as though we are constantly in the public eye at this point.
In my opinion, your personal data is YOUR personal data. I do not think that it should be able to be stored and “potentially” sold to future employers even though no information is safe nowadays. But with how technology is advancing today, almost every single application that you use stores your data, whether or not that platform shares the data they collect or not. When you download new apps onto your smartphone, you always get prompted on if you would like to share data with the app creator and whether or not you would like to share your location. Why would they need to know your location? If they have access to that, what else do they have access to? Another thing to think about is Facebook. Almost every single person in the world has either heard of Facebook or has a Facebook account to see what all their friends are doing. Facebook is constantly sharing information and you can basically find stuff out about people with a basic google search. Where they live, their phone number, who their family is, and where they work can all be found out from google. Yes, this concerns me, but I do not think that anyone can do anything about it anymore. Private data is constantly being shared with other people especially if you have every social media account under the sun including, myspace, twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and WhatsApp. The future is inevitable and is coming whether we like it or not.
I believe if my personal data is going to be stored than it should be in a trustworthy place. However, in today’s society, being on the internet makes us much more susceptible to having our information stolen then ever before. These websites should not be able to access your personal information without your permission. Even though it’s so dangerous, it’s easy to see why we give up our own privacy in order to maintain these social norms to keep up with the rest of the world we live in. When huge organizations like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram introduce a new social service, they usually are successful, due to their ever-growing popularity. These organizations sell our information without our knowledge and make a huge profit on it. I think this is concerning and is very invasive in many different ways. The only way something will change is if people become aware of what the companies are doing to them. Once people become more informed, they will realize how dangerous these companies really are.
To have my personal data stored and sold to companies does not primarily concern me mainly because I stay aware of how these things are retrieved and I protect myself. Employers are usually going to do a background check to begin with. Being careful about what you post on the internet as a starter considering its there forever whether its deleted or not. People need to be proactive about what they are doing on the internet today and how it can easily effect their future. Sharing something might just be the reason that somebody else gets a job over you someday.
When it comes to the concern of my personal data being hacked, and also collected by facebook, I really don’t find myself worried. Ever since social media, online banking, and just surfing the web in general; we have seen more reports of hacking and stolen identities. Now since all this personal information is all already out there, there is not much we can do. It doesn’t matter if you only sent one payment, that information is stored in a server among millions of others. If a hacker wants to access this information, and they know what they’re doing, then it is not hard at all. We have talked about it in some of my former IST classes, and it is actually incredible how easy it is to tap into someones internet and to steal information. I think three good safety precautions for anyone is to: encrypt their data, refrain from using public wifi as much as possible, and store sensitive data offline. Although I believe that if someone wants access to most of your information, they can retrieve it in 20 minutes, it really can’t hurt to take some precautions. Another thing addressed in this post was government surveillance. I saw someone mention that a good precaution is to turn off location services. The sad thing is, this only allows that specific app not to share your location. If you own a new smartphone, then it is almost certain it is equipped with an accelerometer. This is a chip that measures if you phone is horizontal or vertical. Just like your fingerprint, your phone and it’s signal is significantly unique on a micro-level. By analyzing the data the accelerometer data signals in detail, you can obtain all the data that is has ever collected, or your “fingerprint”. The scariest thing about this is that the accelerometer is not the only thing collecting data in your phone without prompting you.
Capitalism without the the negative aspects just doesn’t work. The government is so far deep into surveillance that it would be almost impossible for them to stop monitoring completely. Phone or social media surveillance has become the new norm. The only reason some people are in an uproar ie: younger people who don’t read terms and condition, is because the media is now blasting Facebook all over for personal information leaks. in 2018 we’re more concerned with that next like or that random survey of what kind of pizza would I be if my name is Kyle then understanding that all your locations, hometown and name is easily traceable and monitored by God knows who. What you out on and social media platform can be looked up by a future employer, you could have just had your first interview and you’re up against a fellow partner that has all the same qualities. They do a little background digging and come to find there are pictures blasted all over Facebook of you smoking weed and partying and using foul language when your counterpart doesn’t have Facebook but has Twitter and the only posts he has are of sports events, games and talk shows. They choose him over you. You have to be cautious about what you’re posting!!
In all honestly, I am very concerned. It is disturbing to think that my personal information is being sold for advertising. Is the only thing they care about money?? It makes me so angry that all of my information is saved, frankly, it is unfair. I use google every single day and it makes me uncomfortable knowing all of that information is saved, especially when the ads pop up on instagram and such. It’s jus weird. Especially when I think about something and know for sure I never searched it. Seems suspicious to me…Anyways, I for one do not have a Facebook, I have no use for it and think it is overrated, but that does not mean I am not at risk just as everyone else. It really bothers me that no one sees anything wrong about this, except those who are being monitored. This is a complete invasion of privacy but nothing is being done about it. It’s completely wrong! This really makes me think about the book 1984, because in all honestly it’s true. Big brother IS always watching. I am a part of 4 or 5 social media sites and all of my accounts are not private and seeing what has been happening really makes me second guess my choice. However, I have nothing to hide. I don’t think I am doing anything wrong, I don’t post on Twitter so my unpopular opinion isn’t out there. I’m just worried this could all be a part of something bigger, I know I’m just being paranoid, but you never know. I haven’t done anything to minimize what is being collected about me because what am I supposed to do? Stop using the internet? Delete all social media? For as sad as it is to say I could not delete it. Maybe Twitter, but not anything else. I’m worried for the future and what else this information can be used for. Technology keeps advancing so we don’t know what the future as in store for us.
I have been aware of the problems coming from privacy and data being harvested for quite some time now, which is why whenever I am ware of what information I keep on the web and what cookies i have enabled on what sites. Even though I have been aware, it is still concerning knowing that personal information can be stored on YOUR own clicks without being aware. I don’t think it possible to have anything without having some sort of negative aspect. If we were under total surveillance the idea of freedom of speech is already being attacked. Even though are some positives, the cons from the idea completely outweigh the pros. Goffman and Foucault both look at the same idea but from a different perspective. Goffman is supporting the idea of surveillance so there is a standard for the population and anyone who falls out of that standard can be marked as suspicious and people can be aware. Foucault believes that having standards leads to regression to everyone falling to the same monotonous standard and anyone who chooses to have a voice will be made to be out of the social standard making it harder for people to have an individual voice. It’s actually really difficult to tell which way our generation will swing when it comes to dominant logic. Some are aware, some aren’t, but with how easy it is to spread news and messages, it shouldn’t be difficult to make people aware. At this point, there really is no solution. Just be aware of the places you’re putting your information.
Reading about this whole dilemma of privacy and surveillance and advertising and etc. has actually already been something I’ve thought a lot about. With this article in particular, however, the whole idea that one’s information is never safe, that once it’s on the internet, it’s there for good, isn’t a brand new one. I find that this fear that people have with security settings never being enough to properly protect someone’s information, or living in the constant fear that our valuable information may get hacked, that identity theft is such a growing problem it seems like you would have ample reason to be paranoid no matter what you did on the internet. Just Google alone has hundreds and thousands and millions of people’s information, including social security and credit card numbers, and it would seem that one privatized company having that much power is extremely dangerous. I’m not saying it isn’t dangerous, but to be frank, I find that all of this fear is a result of people not having faith and trust in others. Yes, the world is a terrible place, where people wage wars on each other and people can get sued for even performing CPR to try and save someone’s life, but this idea that privacy is something that can always be cherished and valued is one that can’t be upheld anymore.
Sure, it may be simple enough to think that keeping your information offline may keep it safe, but you also forget other instances of information theft as well. Cameras and scanners are put in gas station machines, cash registers, ATMs, etc. to capture pictures and the numbers of credit cards are just one instance of this.
It doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter how much you hide yourself. Privacy is a thing of the past, especially with the society we live in. To give an example, a man named Eric Clanton violently attacked multiple people with a bike-lock during a riot in May of 2017. In video footage, he was cloaked from head to toe in all black, and even had the crowd to slink back into to further hide himself, even after hitting a man in the head so hard, he fractured his skull. It wasn’t even professionals that caught him, people from Reddit of all places tracked the man down, went through every single piece of footage possible of the event. They found his address, phone numbers, pictures, occupation, and then forwarded all the information to the police. He was arrested, and is now in prison for over 5 years on assault with a deadly weapon. A good telling of this event is done by a Youtuber found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muoR8Td44UE
But that instance doesn’t even bring into mind what actual professionals can do, not just random strangers on the internet. A company called Persistent Surveillance Systems has the ability to take pictures of entire cities using drones from miles above, and track down cars and people individually to track down crimes. For a more detailed story, I’d suggest listening to RadioLab’s podcast on this subject found here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-eye-sky/
So I get back to my point. This entire dilemma of privatized surveillance, or from capitalism from surveillance, much like Persistent Surveillance Systems, may seem scary, and it may seem like some horrid breach of privacy. But I’ll reiterate that in this modern day and age, with technology at our fingertips, with cameras on every person. Nothing can be kept secret anymore. To try and fight against this ideology is a fight completely and utterly in vain.
Having my personal data stolen without my consent and sold to anyone- employers, advertisers, government entities, ect. is extremely concerning. I have a very limited social media presence and I never put any personal data or even post at all on social sites, but I definitely look things up on google and use the internet daily. If my preferences or habits or personal information are being taken from those sites, its even more concerning than if it was just being harvested from things that I post because I clearly intended it to be private. Capitalism and the drive for government and large companies to know everything they can about their consumers or citizens certainly drives the data harvesting that we see Facebook being called out for now. While knowing their customer base can help profit-driven organizations to better sell their products and can make things more accessible for us consumers (when ads are catered directly to us, they have more relevance than randomly generated ones ones), the fact that data is an easily exploitable, minimally regulated commodity means that companies who have the ability to gather personal information and sell it to a third party to turn a profit have the legal right and financial imperative to do so, at least until privacy laws catch up with the current state of digital technology. Some people might be nostalgic for the days-gone-by when smartphones and computers weren’t such an integral part of daily life, but now that they are, the idea that the devices that we use to make our life easier or function-able are capable of being used to monitor us and that information sold to the highest bidder is nothing short of Orwellian.
While concerning, I don’t feel that having my information is a threat. If I were up to no good I might feel worried, but I have nothing to hide. And if I did, I wouldn’t be using the clear net… Companies just want to know what to make more of and what to start advertising. They want to know how they’ll profit the most. Good on them I guess. The thing that worries me a little is how easy it is to hack someone. Having your money and identity stolen from you is so easy. And hackers don’t get caught.
There are search engines that totally dismantle any usable data that a user inputs. While I don’t use one of these, I use a search engine that uses much of it’s profit to plant trees. At least I know the money they’re making from using me is going to a good place. I believe that in order to make a lot of money, companies have to be in your face. There are good companies out there that do good things with the money we make, but we don’t hear about them because they aren’t all over our screens and billboards.
Technology is still changing and so will the ways that companies gather our information. Cars are getting more advanced, they were tracking our GPS’s but now they can just track the car itself. Like the blog said, there are clothes with technology that can allow the company to track the customer. Snapchat keeps track of peoples’ snaps. iphone categorizes your pictures by tracking what’s in the picture. All kinds of crazy stuff.
The fact that all that I work for and all that I do successfully can be given and then positively harvested and grown from with another person is actually pretty interesting. But the fact that in a way that my success can be harvested in a negative way and ruin what I can grow to have is what concerns me. It is not the fact that someone is “taking” what I have, but rather the fact of it being ruined from another name. I do not believe that the society can have a social organization like capitalism work successfully without ANY corruption. The reason I believe that is because that I think corruption is everywhere. From any category, or any organization there is corruption somewhere. I think it has a lot to do with greed and the need for people to need more and more money. I think the surveillance system should and will be successful because of the constant need for it. Keeping everything valuable safe you need a heavy surveillance to do so. Obviously what I would do is like most others, stay off of social media. I do stay away from social media, but I might be on others and that is what I can steer away from. People do not need to know what you are doing at all times, and it can save a lot and prevent a lot from being stolen.
Honestly, I’m absolutely concerned. Every single thing we do is being monitored and captured in some kind of way. It is terrifying that all that we do is observed and no doubt deteriorating. I realized that all my stuff could be followed however I didn’t realize that it could be sold to present and future managers. From a young age my folks dependably instructed me to be watchful what I post since it can simply be followed regardless of on the off chance that you erase it. It’s startling to believe that one poor choice or post could destroy an opening for work. What’s more, who says anybody is a similar individual they were 10 years back when they settled on a poor choice or posted something they shouldn’t have? I don’t feel that obviously demonstrates somebody’s hard working attitude. I don’t have anything to cover up however it takes away my protection. I am not worried in the matter of what they will discover in light of the fact that I am not continually posting each seemingly insignificant detail about my life via web-based networking media. I need to possibly work for an administration office and I know for certain they will get all my data from the day I am conceived. This is something I am as of now mindful of and attempt my best to recollect forget that when I post via web-based networking media. I don’t accept there is an answer for this we may all simply need to live with it and watch what we post. Shockingly there might be individuals who have effectively demolished open doors for themselves.
I believe if my personal data is going to be harvested and stored that it should be in a safe place. I do not think it is right to be able to sell and give out peoples private information or private things. They should not be able to access or even save your personal things without your permission. I think that surveillance capitalism is starting to become a very big thing. It seems that you are being watched no matter what you are doing. I do not think that this should be the futue, I think this is concerning and is very invasive in many different ways. I agree with both Goffman and Foucaults theoretical frameworks. Although im not sure there is a correct solution. As an individual, i will start to be more careful with my personal business and what i allow to be out in the open and what i do not. I belive people can control their own doings and what is and is not posted. I do not believe that the surveillance will ever stop.
In today’s society, being involved in and on the internet is a social norm and it seems like we as people can’t function without it. That being said, it’s easy to see why we give up our own privacy in order to maintain these social norms to keep up with the rest of the world we live in. When mass corporations like Facebook, Twitter and even Netflix introduce a new social service, they tend to be successful due to their ever growing popularity and this popularity is what drives the capitalism machine. These corporations run the world and have it by their finger, allowing them to not only let us give up our own privacy but to also sell our privacy to other corporations for a profit. They are making money off other people’s lives simply by displaying their life by giving up there privacy and that kind of not right when you think about it. We are essentially selling our souls to fit in, giving up our own independence in the process.
I do have a level of concern for the privacy of my data, but I don’t have Facebook and I rarely post much about myself on other forms of social media. The latest Facebook controversy is a big reason why I don’t use it, but I also don’t feel the need to tell the world what I’m doing on a daily basis. I always try to be careful what personal information that I give out, and I never give out more info than I need to. All this also leads me to believe that I should be of no concern to future employers if they decide to look in to my social media habits. I always try to be as safe as possible online and safe with the technology I use, so I will probably never end up buying a product like Alexa or Google Home, besides the fact that I don’t see a good use for them. I firmly believe we should all have the right to a level of privacy with the personal data that we post online, however, we should also be careful what we post, because it seems nothing is safe these days no matter what measures are taken, which is a scary fact to face.
The increase in data harvesting by big companies diffidently has me concerned because it is a huge rights violation and these company’s seem to also be getting away with it. I honestly don think any social organization can have negative aspects, that is primarily because of human nature somebody is bound to be out for themselves and willing to screw it up. Based on todays security infringements by large company’s theorists Goffman and faucult were correct in the idea knowing is power because it is Definitely seen in company’s like google, Walmart, Facebook and so on. I believe surveillance capitalism will take over regardless if we want it to just because its gotten this out of hand already wants to stop it from going any further. The big thing you can do is push the fact that these are crimes and there should be a investigation in all these company’s maybe that would stop this
Having my personal data sold days pose a concern for me. I wonder what exactly they could see and think if it invades my own personal life. In theory it may sound beneficial thinking that, well if I need a job any future employer would know all about me. I do not think it is possible to have a social organization because people in power tend to abuse it after being exposed to it for so long, eventually they’ll get comfortable in their position and eventually start bending rules to fit their needs. As you had mentioned previously in the web post,” Foucault proved how each process of modernization has resulted in disturbing effects with regard to the power of the individual and the control of government”. It will only be a matter of time until there is total anarchy against the government for their reign of abuse and injustice.
Over the years society has changed greatly, especially when taking the internet into account. People’s data is often “harvested” and sometimes exploited to other business or entities. Companies like Facebook or Movie Pass, do this such thing. They often store other people’s personal data who utilize their products and in return these companies are using them as a way to benefit themselves. However, in my opinion, these kinds of methods used by companies actually does not concern me on any level. I say this because, I don’t have any secret personal data that can be used by companies. On top of that, I actually have Movie Pass myself and I specifically sign a contract knowing that this company does these kind of things as a means to make a profit. Many people would ask, why I would want to expose my personal information willingly? The main reason is the benefit of having a Movie Pass card itself. Being able to watch “one movie a day for only $9.95 a month”. Therefore, in my opinion taking such a risk is definitely worth it in the long run.
On the other hand, those who do not agree with companies storing there personal information may want to know a solution to this controversial problem. Some solutions to this problem is Congress (the government) stepping in to try and fix the situation from ever occurring. For example, Congress is currently questioning Mark Zuckerburg on how Facebook is profitable and what they do with their customers viable information. As well as trying to discover how Facebook played a key role in Presidents Trump’s election victory. Because of this, individuals can also take key steps on limiting exposure of personal data. For instance, simply purchasing a stronger firewall, and purchasing a better quality computer system are all easy steps that can be taken. At the end of the day, many people, such as myself, can save thousands of dollars simply taking a small risk such as this.
Having my personal data stored is a little strange to think about but I don’t believe it’s all that concerning so long as I’m not putting anything of real value out there. I don’t really dive deep into most of the social media that people use today and when I do it isn’t nearly as much as everyone else. Not to mention, it’s hard to avoid nowadays with how quickly everything is evolving and shifting to rely more and more on technology. Apps are tracking locations and photos, nothing is ever really completely “safe” on the internet anymore. There’s always a catch no matter how you look at it, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. As stated above, a lot of these websites are more closely related to a “jail” or a “trap”.
However, the thought of having one unfortunate post ruin future events is a little more threatening. It makes me aware of what I post especially now that I’m growing older when all of this will leave more a weight on my shoulders. Though I’ve never posted anything extreme and never plan to, I’ve never been one for the public which is part of the reason that something like this wouldn’t affect me as much as it would everyone else.
As far as the entire idea of having our information tracked, I believe that it’s absolutely wrong for companies to take advantage of this. While it’s morally wrong to take advantage of others’ vulnerability and enjoyment, from a business point of view it’s a rather bright idea.
Personally I do not really think anything of having my personal data stolen. At this point in Time, Facebook has taken everyone’s data and there is no turning back. Without knowing We have been sharing data with these companies for years. I feel like my additude to towards this issue might be different had I heard about this at a younger age, and earlier in the process. but as I said before , it’s too late for us to really get our data back. I do believe now that we know companies are taking part in this type of business we should punish them for it, and put laws in place to keep them from doing this in the future, but as of right now, with what is out there on me, I don’t feel like I need to try and get all information on me off the web. I feel like it’s already too late and There is nothing we can really do.
I do not believe capitalism can run correctly without corruption. If you go up into any big companies nowadays there’s always corruption In there somewhere. I do believe we need to take more steps to keep corruption out of the workplace and out of these big businesses, but I do not think it is possible to truly do this, and keep many of the businesses we have grown so accustomed to stable. There are always bad people somewhere in a company as big as Google or Facebook. all we can do to combat that is really hope they don’t gain too much power, or hope that they don’t damage the economy or become a monopoly.
As we know from what we’ve seen technology is always changing. Karl Marx, as stated in the reading, did not know his ideas would apply to capitalism, and the type of technology we have today. I believe in the future What we will see is a increase in surveillance capitalism, but then a slow decline in it as we find something else that will be making even more money for these big businesses.
I think that having my personal information stored and sold to future employers does not concern me that much because I don’t post anything that I would consider inappropriate for work. I always think about what I’m posting before I post it. I think it is difficult to have a system of social organization without the negative aspects being so assertive. I believe this is because the system doesn’t seem to understand that social organization can be achieved without such force and abuse of power. Total surveillance is not necessary whatsoever. Surveillance capitalism is already a huge part of capitalism as seen with Facebook recently. I think big businesses will use your information a lot when hiring new employees. It is very possible though that something else will overcome surveillance capitalism. I think the solution to the problem would be just to make laws against corporations being allowed to sell users’ information. I would suggest doing what you can to prevent corporations from getting your information in the first place. Putting in false information for your personal information might be a good idea as well.
Having my personal data harvested and stored and potentially sold to future employers is very concerning to me. This makes me realize that nothing I do is safe or protected even though they like to tell us that we are. If all of our data is stored and harvested, anything can happen to it. That’s why there are so many identities are stolen, and people’s bank accounts are being hacked.I do not think there is a way for us to have a social system of organization without there being some sort of negative aspect of this organization asserting themself in a dominant way. Surveillance capitalism can be the dominant logic of capital accumulation because everyone is monitored even without knowing. Every time we log into our computers or use our phones to send a text message, we are always being monitored. There really is no solution to limit yourself from exposing personal data unless you do not use the internet or your phone.
Having my personal data stored and potentially sold to my future employers does not concern me on any level. I feel that employers are going to do a background check either way. Also, I feel like once you share your personal information on the internet that it is on the the internet forever even though you might of deleted it. People also have to think about what they share and post on the internet today and how it might effect their future when trying to find a job.
Personally, I am not overly concerned with my personal data being sold. However, I would definitely prefer if it was not shared. It is no secret that data is being collected every time someone does something online. It is made obvious when you see ads to buy things on the internet for things you commonly search for, or when youtube puts recommended videos on its home screen. In most cases I feel as though the collection of this data is mostly harmless and the truly harmful things usually come from social media. If someone chooses to post something on social media that turns away employers it is that person’s fault for sharing it with the world. I don’t think that capitalism can exist without there being some negatives especially exploitation. In our society businesses will do whatever they can to make money and if that means selling private information, they will do it. Unfortunately, not much can be done about this because of how much we have become reliant on technology. Also, if social media has done anything, it has shown that many people are okay with giving out personal information to complete strangers.
Having my personal data stored and sold to future employers is a little concerning because personal information should stay personal and only be let out to people if you want it to be. If I do not want my personal information out there than I should have a say in whether it can be stored and given to other people. I feel like there cannot be a social organization without negative aspects. I feel like there is always negative aspects with everything and nothing can be perfect. Surveillance capitalism can be the dominant logic of capital accumulation because everyone is monitored even without knowing. Every time we log into our computers or use our phones to send a text message, we are always being monitored. There really is not solution to limit yourself from exposing personal data unless you do not use the internet or your phone. Everyone is always on the internet/phone so it is basically impossible. We are being monitored all the time and personal data is easy to be harvested and stored so I cannot think of a solution that will help. Everyone’s information can get hacked no matter what. Things get hacked with people not even knowing about it. If you do not use your laptop or phone then you have a lesser chance of being exploited, but you basically need the internet for everything.
Having my personal data stored and potentially sold does not concern me. I already knew that any website I visited was tracking and selling the information I was creating for them. As well as the fact that google maps tracked my location at all times. how else would it know when to send surveys about my experiences at certain restaurants or stores.
No I don’t believe that there can be a social organization without negative assertions. There are such things as necessary evils in this world we live. Such as the government or the police, yes people have negative connotations with them, but without them there would be no order, only chaos.
Surveillance capitalism is already the dominant logic of capital accumulation. Due to the ability of the surveillance we can be monitored without even being aware of it. Any type of information can be gained from the surveillance.
There is only thing that would work, don’t use the internet or a smartphone, but in 2018 this is basically impossible. The easiest way to learn, travel, communicate, and express one self is to use the internet.
Having my personal data ‘harvested’, stored, and potentially sold to future employers does concern me. It concerns me because its personal stuff which should stay personal. Future employers should seek out information legitimately by asking candidates that are applying for a job instead of purchasing the harvested data. There could be a simple solution to the debate on whether or not to have harvested data, if a citizen wants their data to be harvested and sold to different companies, they could have that option. On the other hand, if a citizen doesn’t want data to be harvested, it shouldn’t be. Making sure the information is stored correctly could be another problem because if it is hacked into, there could be various problems. One way that I could limit exposure of my personal data would be to delete social media, or post less things on it. Along with this, making responsible decisions online would also make a big difference on what information is exposed to different people that want to use it. Making sure social organizations (capitalism) doesn’t have negative aspects would be solved by implementing more checks and balances within different forms of organizations so that one particular part of the system doesn’t exploit anything.
Having my personal data harvested, stored, and potentially sold to future employers does concern me because I think it is incredibly invasive. It is scary that everything we do is monitored and most likely getting worse. I knew that all my stuff could be traced but I did not know that it could be sold to current and future employers. From a young age my parents always told me to be careful what I post because it can always be traced no matter if you delete it. It’s scary to think that one poor decision or post could ruin a job opportunity. And who says anyone is the same person they were 10 years ago when they made a poor decision or posted something they shouldn’t have? I don’t think that clearly shows someone’s work ethic. I don’t have anything to hide but it takes away my privacy. I am not concerned as to what they will find because I am not constantly posting every little thing about my life on social media. I want to potentially work for a government agency and I know for certain they will get all my information from the day I am born. This is something I am already aware of and try my best to always remember that when I post on social media. I don’t believe there is a solution for this we may all just have to live with it and watch what we post. Unfortunately there may be people who have already ruined opportunities for themselves.
Having my personal data stored and sold does not have me worried. People at so addicted to social media and the online world it is already all out there. Employers can already see online what type of person someone is just by googling their name. You should always be aware what you put online because it stays out there even if you try to delete it. In todays world we are always being surveillance, and technology is only going to get more intense.
This falls short of word count requirements…if you want extra credit, you will need to write more.
Of course it is wrong and even somewhat disturbing that all our information, whether we put it online or not, can be used and harvested by hundreds or even thousands of different organizations; some that we’ve probably never heard of or aren’t aware of. But in the end, there really is not much that we as citizens can do about it. Unfortunately, it seems to be a power that we cannot control. The only thing that you can really do is delete all your social media accounts, don’t spread around your information, and hope that any personal information about yourself isn’t being spread around. It is something that really seems inevitable in this age of technology. People can stand up and voice their opinions and concerns on the matter, but everything that anyone has ever done on the internet or any kind of mobile device has most likely already distributed and harvested by various organizations.
Data marketing is just the name of the game these days, and I’ve more or less come to accept that. As horrible as it is, I just can’t bring myself to be agree about it. I know that this is wrong and will only hurt our rights in the future, but having a personalized experience for technology is simply too helpful in my daily life. It’s wrong, but that’s how I am. I’m not completely at risk though. Although Google has my travel information, Amazon has my purchase history, and then my texts and call are probably stored by some agency in some way, I never made any kind of social media account. I would attribute it to the fact that I got a cell phone later than most of my peers, but I never saw the need to create an account on Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, etc… The availability of my information ultimately doesn’t bother me because I A) have nothing to hide and B) with technology becoming increasingly powerful and invasive, they can find my information without my help in the matter.
This sentiment seems to being relatively shared among many. We’ve had leaks and scandals all saying that the NSA was spying on us, Facebook was selling our information, Equifax lost all our credit information, and so on. Yet, we haven’t seen any real repercussions or legislation to protect us. Many seem to view that as an inevitable side effect of the government that we chose.
Having my personal data harvested, stored, and potentially to other people very much does concern me. My personal information is for me and anyone I choose to share it with. It is not right that other people can see your personal information without your consent. Regardless everyone should be careful with what they put on the internet because its there forever even if you delete it. I believe that there can’t be a way that there can be a way to have some sort of social organization without surveillance because these companies always have t monitor there stuff and it will always be possible for someone to hack into the system. I believe surveillance capitalism will be around for a long time, and I believe it has been here for some time now. Technology is advancing every year and I think this issue will only get worse. I think the solution is to watch what you keep on your phone as well as social media.
As someone who regularly uses social media, I find it concerning at the thought that my information can be sold or harvested. With that being said, I also know to be cautious when it comes to posting anything anywhere. What I post has the ability of being seen by future employers or schools. My location is more often then not turned on because I use my GPS all the time. I feel there is some form of invasion at the amount of surveillance be it on location services or social media. What I can do to keep my information from being hacked is to not have any forms of social media. But lets face it, in todays age social media is a very large part of our culture and I don’t know how easily I can do away with it. I can do things like avoiding games on Facebook requesting to use information or posting anything I would not be okay with displayed in front of the entire world. My usage online need to become more cautious than it already is. After reading this post, it makes me wonder why anything like social media needs to be surveilled or stored. If the government is keeping track of us, wouldn’t there be a more discrete useful way instead of hacking our Facebooks?
I think having my personal data harvested does concern me. I think it is not right for them to look into things you are doing and your personal life. You always have to be concerned and careful about what you do or post on social media because it can be easily tracked back to you. I do not think its right for businesses to look at your personal life to determine whether they want to hire you or not. That is your personal life which normally does not relate to what you would be like at your job. What I do to fix this problem is I just don’t post anything on social media anymore. The reason I don’t post anything is just for this reason. You have to be very careful about what you post and I feel that it is not worth the time of making sure the post is acceptable. One thing that scares me the most about being tracked is your phone being tracked. We talked in class about phones tracking being used to get leads on who was around when an accident happened or something. This is alarming because I could be near the area where a murder happens and just because I was in that location I would be considered a suspect. It just makes me feel that no matter what you do now a days there will always be a way that someone could find you or know what your doing at every moment of the day.
Having my information harvested and stored and sold in any level is okay in my opinion. What I post on social media, I watch to be sure it doesn’t contain any information that could be used in any way to find my address, or other significant information that could be used to find me. There are certain things that could be posted onto the internet, those who type and generate there phone numbers out to the public wonder why they are always getting calls from annoying phone companies and so forth. If you do not allow your information to be shared out in the public, why would you have to worry about your information being sold? I firmly believe it is based on the person that we are talking about. If a person like my self who is basically never on social media has his information being sold out to the public, I hope you like my pictures because that is all you’re getting.
Having my personal data harvested, stored, and potentially sold to future employers does concern me on a high level. I am on Facebook a lot, as it is a way for me to keep up with friends and family that I don’t get to see very often. I am not the kind of person who posts every thought in my head and picture on my phone, though. My profile page doesn’t have anything too personal on it. However, I have some friends who have no filter when it comes to Facebook, and I have unfriended quite a few people because I did not want to be associated with them by others in this kind of situation. I have a cousin who was refused a job at a daycare because she had a picture on her Facebook page of her consuming alcohol, despite being over 21 years old and having a strong passion for working with children. My parents had warned me for years that whatever I post on Facebook is public and I can never take it back, but I just rolled my eyes at this advice. What happened to my cousin was truly eye-opening for me. People mature and change as they get older. If personal data is being stored for long periods of time, then the data employers are purchasing could be from when a person was 13 or 14 years old. I don’t know about everyone else, but I know that I didn’t think everything through at that age. Very few people that age think through how every single decision could affect their chances of getting a potential job in 10 years. Are responsible, and qualified people going to be refused jobs because they made a poor decision when they were younger?
Social media is a scary thing when it is thought about. Although you can hit a delete button and it may not show up anymore, it is still in cyberspace somewhere and can be saved and stored forever. My parents always told me to be careful about what I put on the internet and I understood why but after reading this website article, I now want to make sure that I am extra careful with what I post and put online. I did not know that the things I post online can be taken and stored to be sold to employers. I feel as though now knowing that my personal information could be available to people to buy and sell somewhere in the world kind of makes my privacy feel invaded. I understand that sometimes it is needed to track bad people down and to find things regarding crimes, but is there a line drawn when it comes to privacy and the internet anymore?
Having my personal data stored and sold to anyone willing to buy it is scary. Not that I have anything to hide really, but this diminishes the individuality of people. Reading this article reminded me of a Black Mirror episode. All the memes about an “FBI agent” in your computer or phone may not be too far fetched at this point. Google and Facebook are literally rolling in money because of people’s personal information. And where does this stop? Google tracks your location, so that would not make it hard for someone with the wrong idea in mind to track someone down and cause them harm. I barely use Facebook because of all the ads they blast into your face (that and most people share too much and are annoying). And those who share all aspects of their lives to who they think are their “friends” are in for a rude awakening when their future employer knows all the ins and outs of their entire life before they even set foot into an interview.
I know that everything I post on social media is fair game to current and future employers. What I did not know was that my posts and information are taken and stored just to be sold to current and future employers. That just seems insane to me. What could I be doing that is interesting/bad/wild enough to pay to see? As a female, I feel like I need to watch what I post even more. I worry about some of my posts being held over me from various social media websites, but not enough to trash me to potential serious employers. Everyone posts what they think people want to see, which is usually them partying, drinking, and smoking marijuana. To think that your drunken, underaged decisions may impact your future career, makes social media slightly less fun and a lot more scary. There really is no solution to this currently, besides not allowing the storing of information in the same ways anymore. It is 2018, social media is a huge part of life and I can guarantee it is not going away. It is a way people connect to each other, show their accomplishments, give insight to their daily life, and lately it is how people meet. Everyone knows that when you post something on the internet, it is out there for good, but I would bet not many know what is done with their posts. I feel that the only way to go about this is to educate people more seriously on the importance of watching what you post. One click and you could ruin something good for yourself.
I always knew we were being watched but not as much as learned due to recent studies. I find it very disturbing how we are being watched this much. They say this a free country, yet we are being watched like we’re prisoners. The fact they also collect our data from social media is very disturbing, it makes me who is a user of social media to stop using it. It bothers me how we can’t do much about it either. No matter how much we try to avoid it they will still have a way to continue watching us. Surveillance is never going to stop but we can limit the surveillance by taking actions as in covering your laptop camera and staying off social media websites.
I feel a deal of concern that all of my personal data are being stored and might get sold to different company for just a couple of dollars. Also, it really concerns me when I get a job in the how hard it will be depending on what I post on social media.
Capitalism his really difficult to be positive because the people behind it are trying to become more wealthy than they already are. It is hard to think of the world as kind because at the end of the day people are killing each other off to get money and rise from the society. The part that society is being watched with everything they post on social media increases the negative aspects.This is what makes policing aggressive, and being monitored by a device with cops it’s horrible too.
I do not know many solutions but one thing I would do is start monitoring what I do online more often. This is important because in a couple of years from now when I graduate college it could possibly affect the job I apply for so I should start now to avoid that risk.
Having my personal data harvested and stored and potentially sold to future employers doesn’t bother me all that much, mostly because I have never done anything bad or stupid on the internet. I feel that it is possible but I also feel to a certain extent it is good and helps keep the American people safe. The way I feel about it is, if you don’t do anything bad or illegal you shouldn’t having anything to worry about. Personally, I’m not sure what the solution is. One of the solutions can be to limit the stuff one posts on social media that shows illegal things or doing stupid stuff that a future employer could possibly see. Surveillance is a good thing and can keep people safe, but it doesn’t allow for secrets, bottom line, don’t do anything illegal and one will have nothing to worry about.
I find it terrifying that the government is consistently viewing what I am viewing to profit off of me. I see why it is a thing, because in todays society it is all about making money and if this something that we allow when we sign up for these social media sites. My concern comes in when I’m reading something on the New York Times and I see advertisements for something that I previously viewed the night before. It is really creepy to me. Something needs to be done because personal information is not something we knowingly signed up for or want, but will anyone actually ever stop using the internet?
Having my personal data harvested and stored to later be sold to future employers does bother me, but that is the only part that bothers me. I don’t think I do anything exciting enough on the internet that I am concerned about the government or law enforcement knowing about, it is not something new or shocking to me that they do this. I also think I’m very private in anything I post on social media, so even if a future employer would look up my Facebook, they wouldn’t find much. If things are being posted publicly then you are the one responsible for what you say and do. The fact that employers could buy private information is troubling though. To me that is the part that feels like an invasion of privacy, not that my data is collected and stored.
I’m not sure if there is a solution, people will never stop using the internet and its convenient to use for schoolwork, job searches, shopping, etc. I think newer generations will just grow up with this as the norm and accept that they’re always being spied on.
Yes, I think that having my personal data harvested, stored, and sold to future employers concern me because I believe that it is an invasion of my privacy. Thinking that theres people out there that know exactly what I’m doing or what I’m going to be doing in 20 minutes is insane. I think that Capitalism can have a system of social organization without the negative aspects. For example, aggressive policing and total surveillance because they can easily get their points and ideas across without having to become violent and invade other’s privacy. I will look into ways to avoid surveillance capitalism. If that is even possible since I haven’t really known about this in such a long time. I’m sure that many others don’t either. I don’t think that this is ever going to be fully stopped, but I think to help yourself, you could limit on the things you do online. Wether that means what you post, like, dislike, everything. Just being online can give them a reason to look at you so I would say try to stay off.
Yes, I think that having my personal data harvested, stored, and sold to future employers concern me because I believe that it is an invasion of my privacy. Thinking that theres people out there that know exactly what I’m doing or what I’m going to be doing in 20 minutes is insane. I think that Capitalism can have a system of social organization without the negative aspects. For example, aggressive policing and total surveillance because they can easily get their points and ideas across without having to become violent and invade other’s privacy. I will look into ways to avoid this “surveillance capitalism”, if that is even possible since I have been in the dark concerning this issue for so long.I don’t think that this is ever going to be fully stopped, but I think to help yourself, you could limit on the things you do online. Wether that means what you post, like, dislike, everything. Just being online can give them a reason to look at you so I would say try to stay off.
Having my data sold does concern me because i feel that nothing is private and no matter what you look up somebody is always watching you. If a future employer looks at your personal data use i believe that is a huge invasion of privacy and i would rather not work for them but if you are in a line of work like the FBI for instance then you might have to deal with them knowing everything about you. I do not think there is a solution for containing all of this information because its already out there now so what will stop them from doing it in the future. I would like to try to lessen my personal data from being online by not giving up my email to store whenever i go to buy something. I think stores feel that you have to give them your email just to buy a product which is ridiculous but thats how they get there ads out to the public now, if you give them your email then they just keep feeding you ads in hopes that you come and spend more money.
Yes, having my personal data harvested and stored and sold to future employers concern me because I believe that it is an invasion of my privacy. If I don’t want certain things to be shared with my future employers then it shouldn’t be, especially for a profit. I believe that Capitalism can have a system of social organization without the negative aspects like aggressive policing and total surveillance because they can peaceful get their points and ideas across without having to become violent and invade other’s privacy. There isn’t any permeant solution as to having personal data saved and stored that can be used against you. My personal solution would be to limit the things I would post and or like. There is always this reminder to think about what I post, share, or like, so that way I still have some privacy and not have certain things out there for anybody to see or can be bought and used against me in the future.
I think that the amount of of data and information about us that is collected is deeply disturbing because it is all data that we as individuals have given freely without knowing it. However, for myself and many of us, we only learned how much data was being collected far too late in our lives to do anything to protect it. Because of this, I have always been of the mindset that since the information was already taken from me, I may as well keep using the services that took it.
Obviously, having data harvested so that it can be used to make a profit can be perceived as a serious issue. Do I think its an issue? Of course I do, the means to make money off of another by exploiting their privacy isn’t right. But in a capitalist society, is such a thing too far off from the expected? I do think this is an issue, but I don’t think the people doing this can truly be to blame. As a capitalistic society we’re here to make money. If someone is smart enough to use media surveillance to make money then are they to blame? I don’t think there’s anyway around the collection of data, nor do I think this form of capitalism has even nearly reached its peak. As for if it will be succeeded by another form of capitalism in the future, I’m sure it will. Capitalism will changes with time, whenever a new technological advancement is created, a new type of way people can make money will ensue. There are no straight forward answers to the problem of media surveillance, however, limiting exposure on social media sites, changing what browsers you use, and limiting what types of information these browsers can collect are temporary ways to protect information that still might be somewhat private.
Yes, personally this does bother me if future employers have access and the tools to see your social media and personal data. Content you post online that is called “personal data”, should not be seen and exploited by future employers and these business should not have access to your own information. Overall personal data and future employers should not intertwine and have an impact on you and your work life.
I do believe it is possible to have a social structure without having any negative contributions in society. For example, United States congress passed an act called the “Patriot Act”, allowing the CIA to spy on every american civilian. Instead of the government spying on every civilian, the government, local and state police should create equipment able to track down those who are breaking the law, like Terrorists, bank robbers, and drug deals. By doing so will not only keep society happy and at peace but will influence stronger relationships between officers and civilians.
The solution to fix these key issues in society, is if the government spy’s only on those committing crimes and not watching every individual living the the US. To limit exposure on my own personal data, I will think twice before posting personal content online because certain content posted may hurt me in the long run when attempting to search for new career paths.
I don’t think I have any personal data harvested and stored and potentially sold to future employers yet, nut maybe in the future. I think it is to have a such system if all citizens can actually follow the rules from the system. But in our time surveillance capitalism is still the dominant logic of capital accumulation, because those dominant ways, such as aggressive policing and total surveillance, are necessary on some point for protection before another more efficient and safer way emerges. For now, there is no real solution because everything we do will leave a history for others to track, so what we can do as an individual is to limit the exposure of our personal data, such as stop giving our phone number to website as many as possible, but our personal data are still handed to other people.
Yes it is very concerning that every picture or video I have taken or anything that is my personal information is out there and can be used by certain people at any time. It is weird to think that everything we do is monitored and looked at by someone. I do not think capitalism would work. This type of government will always have its problems. Everyone always wants something better than what they have and is all about someone’s self interest instead of thinking about everyone else. There is no clear solution for this. I do not think I would necessarily change anything regarding to limiting the exposure of my personal data. I feel like there is not much we can do because somehow people always get other people’s information. Maybe we could keep our emails or phone numbers private and not hand them out everywhere and keep everything to ourselves, but data about everyone is everywhere and it is something that will never go away.
Yes, because you truly never know who is looking at your information and what the
information is being used for. Your information is very personal to you, and for it to be sold like its nothing is concerning. Things happen in your past, especially in your youth. Employers looking at your life like that is a violation of your privacy and in my opinion does not demonstrate your work ethic. The fact I do not think it is possible to have a system of social organization like capitalism without negative aspects because society would not be compliant. I feel like surveillance capitalism is just the thing of now, and that companies will figure out something else to be even more extensive (how i am not sure but I feel it will). For now, I think it will be the dominant logic of capital accumulation. Frankly, the solution of this issue is for people to have a sense of privacy. I will keep thoughts and opinions off of social media because they can come back later, and I will keep my following limited to those I know.
Absolutely, I am concerned about my data being sold to future employers. The career I’m interested will require a in depth background check. They are going to want to know everything about me since birth until the day I am sitting down being interviewed by them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they knew what type of music I am listening to while typing this. Everyone is under surveillance, and there is not much we can do about it.
No it is not possible, capitalism is a system controlled by people with the desire to be wealthy. We are in a world where people will go to the extreme, like killing for money. It is just impossible for the society to not be monitored under these conditions. If anything I think their would be more of a increase in these negative aspects; exploitation, aggressive policing, total surveillance.
Is there a solution? I’m not quite sure of it, if there was one. The best thing to do is to be more aware of my personal data. The damage could have already been done for some of us. Everything we post is recorded and documented even though not all of us are not conscious to it. It is kind of like we are dropping treats for the government to follow if they need to know specifics about us.
I am concerned at some level with my information being harvested because we as a society are constantly being warned of identity theft. However, the same people that warn us of identity theft are the ones who are commercializing our profiles. There’s no point in protecting your own information if businesses are already selling it. It is crazy to think that if those major businesses get hacked all of our information will be in the wrong hands, that is, if it isn’t already.
In many ways I believe our country is slowly moving away from capitalism (and it has been for a while) into socialism. There is no such thing as pure capitalism or pure communism in a society as big as ours. In short, it is not possible to have the benefits of capitalism without having the negative aspects.
Surveillance capitalism is the “new thing” for businesses these days and it does not get better than that for the owners and the executives of major corporations. Why struggle trying to figure out your consumer’s preferences, if you could just spy on them?
As an individual you’re forced to limit what you post and what you reveal about yourself on social media or any platform. The ugly truth is that we have no privacy and there is very little we can do about it because it is the way the market functions. It doesn’t matter what we say because it is our word against the billionaires who own our information.
Yes! Having my personal data harvested and stored and potentially sold to future employers do concern me. Especially if this action is not granted. After watching the short video in class I learned that social media and the internet are just ways to make money from your information. No, I don’t think it’s possible to obtain perfection through the systems of social organization. In some cases aggressive policing and total surveillance is necessary and the only way to catch or subdue a suspect. I think in the future either surveillance will enhance even more or the government will find another way to dominate our society. As an individual it’s hard to limit the exposure to your personal data. Many things like credit cards, using the internet, signing up for reward cars, and many more put you at extreme risk of having your personal information given out. There is no real solution to limiting the exposure in the social media era we live in.
Having my personal date harvested and stored and potentially sold to future employers does concern me on a certain level. Nowadays all our personal information is all on our mobile phones. Our passwords, our bank information, even our own personal family life is all out there for people to potentially find and see. At a simple search of a persons name on google, you can get their basic information, where they live and their likes and dislikes. It seems as though we just post our everyday lives on social media or other sources and do not even consider the risks involved with putting out their personal information. I believe that a way for us to limit our exposure on the internet with our personal data is to not put out any information on where you live or anything of that nature. Also be careful about trusting certain websites, as they may look secure but in all reality they are only there to take your information and use it for their own benefit. With limiting our social media use and being aware of the information we are putting out there, you limit the risk of having your personal data taken from you.
Having my personal data taken and stored for potential profit for employers does concern me to an extent. On some level, I feel like I have nothing to hide and have known for a while, or least been told, that we are being watched through several means of technology. On the bigger level of that concern, I do not agree or appreciate my personal data being sold to future employers, even though I give that right up every time I use the “free” internet. I definitely would prefer to have my privacy as would everyone else. It is really creepy to even think of what goes on behind the scenes of things regarding this topic.
At this point, things can only get worse as far as privacy being taken away or us blindly giving it away and of course the government and whoever else can say, “oh this is used for your safety” and “we only use the data we need to for your protection”.
I would assume in years to come more high tech ideas of surveillance will come into play. Some idea is probably already being tested somewhere – who knows. Hypothetically, even if the society as a whole disregarded technology or even in just some large amount, the government, the wealthy, everyone else involved would think of some other way to obtain information for their benefits and their wallets. Once people know what they have, there is no way they would ever let it go. They just think of newer and sneakier ways to get what they want.
My dad has always been weary of social media websites because he always said, its just another way for the government to get your information. & it’s true with the smartphones that are out … the facial recognition, the finger prints, even snapchat facial features, it’s all information that someone now has on base of people. All saved in a database and they can research you to no end, but anyway, he has limited himself to what websites he puts his information on and you can still do a websearch on his name and it will tell you his background history, where he lives, past addresses, family members, and for a small price, someone can even get more information on him and his personal information is on a variety of websites. So regardless of how much you limit yourself, you base information is out for the world to see.
Another scenario of how creepy this can be. My mom and I were talking about things I liked – verbally outloud, in person, talking to each other. She did no searches on the website of what I was telling her I liked, but it was like the next day or so, she went on FB and there were ads of the same exact thing her and I were talking about… talk about weird! It was out of the blue too! Maybe it was just a coincidence, but with how much whoever is tapped into our every day lives, I wouldn’t doubt her smartphone (siri or google) picked up on our conversations.
Yes, it does scare me at the fact that employers are looking at personal history, and the fact that they are paying for the information scares me just as much. I don’t think it is possible to have a capitalistic society without negative effects. No matter what kind of society we will have there will always be negatives. In my opinion, the only thing we can do when we use the internet is to be careful how much information we put on the internet, by putting every little thing online gives employers something to buy or nose around it.
I’m absolutely concerned. Scared. as. hell. That’s more like it. Every single thing we do is being monitored and captured in some kind of way. That’s the main reason why I haven’t used my full last name for any of these comments. I have this innate fear that somehow, someway my comments here might be used against me and the system at large will somehow decide to monitor me even closely. I’m a threat to this Matrix-like system that has commodify my entire existence.
Is it possible to have a social organization like capitalism without any of the negative pieces? No. I don’t believe so. We’re so far past that. Capitalism was built on the basic premise that someone has to win and others have to lose. Capitalism is always been about the neverending chase for more. More money, bigger house, bigger “boxes” (read: 15 Million Merits). Philosophically, how can you surgically remove the explicit ramifications like exploitation, constant surveillance, and policing from this kind of structure? Capitalism is like an organism that is absolutely invested in its own self-preservation – no matter what the cost.
We can draw from Goffman and Foucault’s frameworks to explain these contemporary developments fairly straightforward. Foucault shows how each process of modernization has resulted in disturbing effects with regard to the power of the individual and the control of government. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison provides a clear example of contemporary society that mimic’s George Orwell’s 1984. He explores the ways that government has claimed ever greater control over and enforcement of ever more private aspects of our lives. Goffman’s framework of total institutions in which people become immersed in an organization that consumes every aspect of their lives. A total institution guides and monitors the inhabitant completely, taking over life’s daily habits with its routinized and highly structured bureaucratic patterns. Both Foucault and Goffman’s work aligns to help us critique surveillance capitalism.
I don’t have clear answers as far a solution. It almost begs the question of whether we’ve gone too far down a rabbit hole – is there any way we can get back out? As the founder of Google has made clear – the online space is largely still unregulated and most of the illicit activities are happening so fast and under the radar, how can we stop it or slow it down? The digital footprint we tend to individually carry has grown in size and scope. We’re starting to make it so easy for people to do things like have their credit card information already pre-populated online. Who needs to swipe a card? Just insert or flash a chip. We’ve been so brainwashed around thinking about all of these small electronic conveniences when we’ve really just handed everything about ourselves over to these data-mining large corporations. Without stronger governmental regulations and a hard push for the restoration for individual privacy, we will continue to see this sort of surveillance continue and expand.
A system of capitalism depends on how people act for it to function properly and since many are often too driven by money, they will do anything and everything whether its negative or positive. A system dependent on people will have problems as long as there are “bad” people in the world. It has always been this way. Arendt talks about how we used to take land which he labels the “original sin of simple robbery.” Gathering information and using it to our advantage has been something we have always done since people first started living in America. I think that this should be of concern to all of us. Many people have a problem with being surveyed at all times regardless of whether their actions are legal or illegal. However, to me, the major problem is where that information goes. When Google was tracking information to help the user, there were no complaints but now they are turning a profit off of it. Does it not feel like my soul is being sold to the devil for a few dollars? It also makes people hesitant in the way they act. They know at any moment their information is being recorded such as where they’re going or what places they’ve stopped in to actually being physically recorded on technology.
Surveillance capitalism will most likely become the dominant method of capital accumulation in our time. From the eyes of an institution, it is the most definite form of information gathering or “fortune telling and selling” as labeled in the article. There may be new forms with new developments of technology that cannot even be imagined now. During this era, however, this will be the most dominant source. It is basically like having eyes everywhere. The collapse of surveillance capitalism would most likely be due to legal restrictions rather than a new mode of capitalist accumulation. There are certainly others but that does not mean they will be as effective. The solution now is certainly unclear. People are forced to make the decision of living their life the way they want or constantly second guessing because they fear their activity is being monitored. Considering there are other ways of capital accumulation, legal action may help to resolve some of the problems. The solution for many may just be to eliminate surveillance capitalism entirely. Some data gathering may be required but the idea of selling it seems extensive as previously mentioned.
There are several forms of surveillance capitalism in the modern day which have been advanced by surveillance capitalists which are the envy of several state security companies. However, there are several issues that arise like the exploitation to the customers and anxiety due to self-driving cars based on its business model. Presently, information on our location, our destination, how we feel and our communication are being used as areas to attract revenue like Google (Trappen). Based on research, this information can be used in areas that prove useful as well as bad by the agents.
Surveillance capitalism is an economic mutation that arises from the spread of digital prowess in several nations all over the world. There is also the case of intrinsic narcissism of financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that saw better days in the last three decades. It is a market that thrives in a lawless space. It acquires is invasive power from the internet as where capital is formed and wealth is created. Similarity is drawn from the fast distribution of large scale production and administration in the developed nations. On the other hand, surveillance capitalism is reliant on people who are not its customers or its staff and do not acknowledge its processes.
Gofffman and Foucault Theoretical Model
The theoretical models presented by Goffman and Foucault creates a better awareness of the general power-based model. A keen analysis shows thoughts related to surveillance and how to apply this in the real world. Though it is dependent on their accuracy as defined in the two societies in this contemporary. There is a commonality in the two where the belief of power is linked to knowledge; one is not able to exert power while they do not have knowledge. It is in these two where facts are created and the scholars are the vehicles that produce them. They consider individuality as vital in assessing surveillance. The individual progresses in the contemporary period of infinite. As surveillance is a vital element to setting of an infinite analysis just like documentation (Trappen). Those who were rich are the only ones who are able to acquire a sense of individuality. As one goes on to possess power the more they are considered as an individual. Adding to this there is a connection between capitalism and violence where the authors noted that the connection was so tight that could not be continuous.
As Dominant Logic
It is worth noting surveillance capitalism is among several other modality of information capitalism and is not the only logic of accumulation in the contemporary day. Adding to this, there are several other models that may take up the lead in the future. There is notable connection with capital accumulation and institutionalization, though, there is a standard from of information capitalism (Trappen). The cure for this not be a dominant logic is reliant on people, the society and legal frameworks. There is a notable level of awareness that this cannot start without awareness of the mechanism that is linked to capitalism’s well-crafted development to capital.
Solution
A solution to this is to ensure that everybody has access to data in responsible manner. This means that those who handle data have the role of data are of high integrity. For instance, they use them for reasons that they are meant. This is based on code of professional acts where when they are accorded confidential information they need to be of high ethical level. This means that they need to use the data for reasons it is meant. However, this may not in whole solve the issue. This is since there are notable bureaucratic issues that advance the application of the data acquired from the company perspective. The tax institutions net to acquire the relevant data to make sure that they get the relevant share of tax. On the other hand, marketers have been collecting data from their customers in the frame of seeking to improve their level of service. It is believed that surveillance is necessary to safeguard from crime.
There are those who state that attitudes are rationalizations for legal guidelines that help to be advantageous to those protecting surveillance like the wages of government bodies. Though, it would not be good to accuse people on ill intended acts. There are just a small number of people who desire to use data for the reason they are meant (Trappen). There is also the solution for the government to come up with laws and companies to help protect data. This is more opted for by most proponents. These laws would be useful in meeting several things. They make the end users to note and rectify data held, they are able to make some practices illegal like sharing information storage sites and making sure that privacy is top priority for companies. This will make it a standard method that is applicable in all companies that deal with huge customer’s data that are sensitive. Hence, allowing for data protection from the wrong hands.
Humanity, despite its breakthroughs and successes, has always been hindered by the nagging and relentless attachments to humanity itself: no human creation is ever perfect. As a species, we create and desire endlessly. Humanity creates and pushes forward with an infinite hunger for limitless information and knowledge and this desire has riddled our history with setbacks and barbaric behavior. In this way we have conducted ourselves in hopes to reach a more perfect future whilst never truly achieving any such perfection. We repeat the process of build and destroy, create and dismantle in order to more closely resemble that which we, ironically, deem perfect. Irony has it that no human creation can ever be perfect yet as a species our one true goal is to relentlessly strive for better. Ultimately the fact remains firmly entrenched within our nature: we desire an unachievable perfection.
To create something is to leave oneself vulnerable to mistakes; to venture an attempt is to risk failure or insufficient success. The beauty of living as a human being is that nothing is ever static. Despite any claim towards the contrary no person ever knows the outcome of events which are to come nor do they know the true likelihood of success for any daily trial. We know that we may fail yet our failures promote change in us. Like in nature where the weakest animal is eaten while the strongest goes on to reproduce, our failures make us stronger as a collective. The human unit is built upon an empire of mistakes, setbacks, and errors.
Capitalism was created as a means toward a fairer system of transactional exchange. Before capitalism reigned in the influence it has, tyranny was a form of life all too common to the majority of people. Capitalism, socialism, communism, religion, and any other form of lifestyle guideline, we constructed in their purest forms as ways to enhance life. Whether that meant making financial stability more accessible to more people or simply giving people hope, people have created ways of living in order to further society: to do things faster and more efficiently. A loose definition describes technology as the application of scientific findings, this is the human motto. We create things such as capitalism, the wheel, mathematics, and even the internet, as a means to further enhance our lives and the heights we can reach. We strive to make things better despite any and all opposition and this is what makes humanity so admirable. Of course our creations will always have flaws. Things like capitalism will always be susceptible to mistakes and the cruel or selfish intentions of other creators wishing to extrapolate personal gain from the creations of others, but these setbacks will never terminate the overall desire to keep creating. It is impossible to create something like the internet without opening oneself up to the dangers of credit card scams, information harvesting or even annoying ads. However, since the undying universal wish of humanity seems to be improvement, I doubt pop ups will be an issue forever. Eventually a solution to information harvesting will be found and this problem will be replaced by another issue to address and the cycle will continue; problem, solution, problem, solution, until the end of time.
The true nature of technological corporations are hidden and barred from common knowledge and in humans ability to think that these technological gadgets are innovative changes in technological development; and the advancement for betterment of human lives. These ideas are preposterous and was not created to better humans existence in all aspect of life. Individuals within society are constantly being scrutinized, and exploited for profit by Google, Microsoft, and apple that do not care about humans well being. As individuals within society, it is extremely critical that people question what they buy and the input of privately personal information into these so called “technological inventions”. This is a ploy to gather people’s information and store it in a digitalized data base to be used against individuals to control them, and to further the advancement of these corporations.
The Guardian article, “Google and Microsoft Have Made A Pact To Protect Surveillance Capitalism” states that,
“this public relations gambit masks two far more interesting tales. One is about Microsoft and its desperate chase for relevance. The other is about Google, money and power. Both are part of a broader, deeply worrying narrative – a story about how tech companies are busy redrawing the lines around our lives, and facing little resistance in doing so” (www.theguardian.com). This maneuver is nothing more than constant monitoring of people’s conversations and activities to control humans existence within society. It is time for individuals to be more thought conscious and think on a more critical level, and look deeper than what is presented on the surface.
I haven’t taken any active steps in order to minimize the data that is being collected of me. Now that almost everyone has smartphones, all of our information is already in our phones. I also have social media accounts under my childhood nickname. What concerns me is the fact that we have to give up so much information in order to get a smart phone. When I first got a smart phone, they asked me for my email, and an active credit card and my birthday. I even had to put my address “for security purposes”. I thought to myself, in order to connect my phone, I have to give up all of this information. I am law abiding citizen and I don’t commit any crimes and there are times I worry that someone is using my identity. When I go shopping for anything, I usually use my debit card to purchase items because I don’t usually carry cash. I am always constantly cautious on the activity that is on my credit card and making sure it hasn’t been used anywhere. I just think surveillance is just something that we can’t escape, especially to the fact there is more new technology and social media is becoming more popular.
To be honest, I haven’t actively taken any steps in order to minimize the data that is being collected on myself. The only thing that I actively try to do is obey the law and stay under the radar at all times. As a veteran, I have a responsibility to represent other veterans and myself in a way that is positive instead of what the public generally sees. Often when civilians picture veterans they see the typical homeless veteran in a wheelchair asking for money. If not that then they picture someone who isn’t able to hold a job because they’re “crazy” and can’t fit in with normal society anymore. That shouldn’t be the case and it all starts with one’s self in order to depict a positive image of themselves in society because surveillance is a huge factor. This goes back to minimizing data on one’s self in this Capitalist society and not further enforcing this false stereotype.
Surveillance is a crucial entity that exists and we ignore or willingly disregard it in our everyday lives. We pay it no mind. There are cameras increasing everywhere from buildings, common in stores, even in cars it is becoming more popular. We know this. We can see the cameras. We can also see that people around us are always aware and watching each other. The not so obvious is Internet/Information surveillance (for lack of a better term) which is the scariest and people are vulnerable because they’re blind to it. People give out their information online shopping, contest to win prizes, gift cards, rewards cards, discount cards, etc., without thinking where the information can end up or if it’s really secured. We are more aware of Hackers these days and they are getting into databases, getting information that can be exploited. With increasingly new technology and programs, it’s becoming easier and easier to do so. Technologies are advertise one way, but are misused for something else. Now technology is being created more to supervise society. It’s a scary thing to think about.
Before I read this article, I never think about everyone is the target to be monitored and to used by the capitalism to make the profit. But I do concern about persona information is easily stolen by others, especially on the internet, thus, I will consider using the computer outside the home as public, I rarely save my personal stuff on the computer at the school computer labs. But after I read these article, I realized using the computer at home is not safe enough, especially after I noticed after research a kind of product at Amazon, and then I would the certain product at the advisement of every website I browsed.
There are some active steps I have taken to minimize the date that is being collected on me, I would never put my phone number and official name on the social media, like Facebook, Instagram and so all. At the same time, I realized it’s hard to avoid such data is being used, for example, the function of our cellphone not allowed us to do this, such as location services, maybe we can set that to “off” for all other apps, but how about when we need to research a destination, we have to turn it on.
Then I understand why I always receive letters from the different bank, I only apply for my credit card at Citi bank, but I always receive letters from other banks, like Capital One, Chase and so on. I never give them my address, so I assume Citi bank sell customers’ personal information to other company as profits, the same as the “Google profit by collecting information on those who use its search engine and then boost revenue by selling customer driving data.”
What concerns me the most, is that the capitalistic empire is willing to satisfy their money greed selfish desires, in any way possible, even if that means taking drastic measures to invade your personal information. This country is not about working together progressively or interconnecting a beneficial relationship within society. This country is about the greedy rich people on top and the rest of us, middle class lower class people who just happen to be to be living in it. Marx takes note of this and he’s saying capitalism is the main reason people get alienated because of how it works. They are not only alienated by the modes of production, but there also alienated by their human essence. The mode of production back then used to be about that idea that people can find positive fulfillment through work. With someone who beautifully creates things by their own hands; craft man. Clearly we can see, that is not the case today. Today, there is no ethics or values, as any business is willing to invade your personal information, or manipulate you into this cycle of continuous purchasing. If you look at statistics, consumer shopping has increased drastically over the years. That is no surprise, including that all these business constantly entice you to purchase their products, in any way they can, even if that means stealing and selling your personal information to other companies.
One way that helped minimize the data that is being collected on me, is turning off the location services on my android device. Also, some apps can record the websites you browse, track your location and access your personal contacts. One way I’ve recently prevented that from happening, is being more cautious about the apps I download and reading the terms and conditions, before downloading and purchasing them. Ive also recently downloaded great spyware programs that have tremendously help remove viruses from my laptop.
Capitalism cannot exist without exploitation. Capitalist have a selfish drive for profit. Marx thought that exploitation would end if we put a finish to capitalism, rebel and bring communism. So in a sense, even he agrees that exploitation is coexisted with capitalism. Through his eyes, the only way to rid yourself from it, is eliminating private property and classes. In this way there would no longer be a continuous competition between companies and no need to maximize profits, which means no exploitation of workers. Capitalism thrives on exploitation, and total surveillance, it’s a way of increasing their money. Capitalist compete with each other and they will do anything to maximize profits even if that means exploiting or surveillancing your personal information.
Goffman says that the hospital is a force that make the patients suffer. They are completely stripped out of their old identity and find themselves conforming their behavior to the power of total institutions. Particularly, in the asylums if the patients don’t accept the role of the mental patient they will be judged by the institution and it will be very hard for them to get out. In today’s society, the members of the working class people are left without alternatives for survival other than selling their labor power. The people who buy this labor are those who control the means of production. We working class people are stuck between a rock and a hard place. In order to live and continue paying our bills we need to conform to the expected behaviors of the institutions we work for. So these institution regulate and completely strip our identity in order to create us into their robotic machines and exert complete control over us. Foucault brings light to the fact that our bodies become manipulated regulated and transformed in social space. Through his perspective, we are disciplined and the institutions exert power on us, until we internalize their disciplinary apparatus. We start to regulate ourselves and accept the roles of these institutions. In the same way we allow capitalism to regulate us in every way possible. For example Instead of going out with friends, I’ll take the extra work shifts so I can maximize my profits. So my body is regulated by capitalism, I have internalized it. The power of capitalism exerts force and disciplines into people so deeply, to the point where there controlling their every move to make sure they’re getting the most profit out of what their doing.
America Capitalism is increasingly starting to look like a police/surveillance state that is run for profit and the benefit of those with wealth. Teachers are being turned into prison guards; smart phones and other devices are reporting our vital personal information (and we are willingly giving it up).
Does this concern me? Of course it does, but i also do think its necessary at times. I live next to West Point the United States Military Academy and the security there is crazy as you can imagine, and I understand why that is but i also believe that they take advantage of their resources and let me explain why; when you go there you have to go through a security gate, where you either have MPS (military police) or regular security guards checking cars and IDs. Now they have to scan every persons ID which in most cases is your license or a passport and all your information comes up starting with your social security. A police Officer is allowed to be able to see all this information from my understanding but a security guard is not. a couple of years ago they had removed this and they were just allowed to check the ID but NOT scan it, but now they are allowed to scan them again and even though people are questioning it no one is doing anything about it. I understand why they have to do it but I also feel like there is no privacy if you want to enter this place.
It’s a military installation – no different from any other military base. It functions according to its own laws (not civil law). There is no presumption of privacy when entering these social spaces. The more interesting question to look at is how civilian social spaces are becoming to some extent “militarized” and subject to similar surveillance.
Once you start realizing how much personal information is taken from your devices you begin to worry. I have tried to use the “private” mode on the internet but then when I want to know what website I was on before or a specific link I saw something on, I can’t go to it because it doesn’t show it. This is probably a good thing but it’s also an inconvenient thing. It’s sort of impossible to get away from data being collected on us because everywhere we go, every key we press on a keyboard, every swipe we make on our iPhones, gets taken and used to get information on us. Let’s say you want to download an app on your phone; the first thing that pops up is a list of things they want access to. If we press “no” or “decline” then we cannot download the app. Why Instagram, gmail, and American Express want access to my pictures, camera, contacts, location, phone log, and etc is beyond me. If you want to pay your Discover bill, you download the Discover app. I want to pay my bill, not send you selfies. So, why do you need access to my pictures? You want food delivered, bills paid, instagram followers, games that we spend too much playing?….Fine, then we need access to basically all of your personal information. Why do we need it?It’s simple, data collection on you to use as surveillance. We are constantly getting personal data collected on us and personally, I should do more to prevent it. I press “accept” to those apps that want all my personal information and most people do too. What are we REALLY pressing “accept” to? We are essentially handing over our rights to app developers and corporate. If I sent the payment by mail, then I wouldn’t have to give access to all my personal information on the app. So, I try to prevent data collection on me but it’s very hard to do in this day and age with the technology we have. Technology makes it easy to get stuff done but it also makes it easy to get our personal information taken and used for who knows what.
The topic of surveillance is manipulated into a civil act in which members of a society don’t consider being monitored a threat. Some of the most common responses include “if you’re not doing anything wrong it shouldn’t be a problem” but what these people chose to ignore that the surveillance isn’t there for their benefit. Frankly I believe that’s the least of the governments concern. Everything with surveillance is about profit and manipulating the capital market in a way that is most beneficial to them.
Surveillance concerns me because my freedom doesn’t actually mean that I’m free. It means that I can feel like I’m making choices (as long as I follow society’s rules) but reality is my choices are being manipulated by subliminal messaging and every step that I take is being monitored under the pretense that it’s for national security. The option to have private information has disappeared because everything is becoming “modernized” which I feel is a code word for exploitation. The fact that everything that you’ve ever shared online or purchased can be traced back doesn’t aid the idea that I’m being protected. When new devices are produced as exciting as they are there’s always that assumptions that individuals choose what they share, when in many circumstances your denied the product if you can’t conform to it. With Facebook messenger there are some circulating beliefs that with updates Facebook can access personal photos from your device and if you choose to not update your unable to access your messages. I have not taken steps to minimize the data being collected because I feel like I don’t have the option too. In some contracts when starting the use of a new device you have to consent to their agreements, you do not have the option to negotiate. Either it’s done that way or you don’t have access to it, they are allowed to share your information. Another example is with the protected option of the internet in which your information isn’t shared, if you do choose this version you have to apply more time to this simple task. It’s a way of manipulating us to regulate our behavior into sharing our information. Because of our class status if we aren’t part of the one percent we have multiple tasks to complete throughout each day in order to “secure” our lifestyles, whether its multiple jobs or a career that requires you to spend more time in the office than at home, so unfortunately we don’t have additional time to question in depth when someone asks for our information.
It’s not possible to have capitalism without exploitation. I’m pretty sure that’s the definition of capitalism. To monitors people’s behavior and prey on them acknowledge their weaknesses and then advertise it. Capitalism isn’t about what’s right for the US it’s about how profitable it is. The game is to make the rich richer and the keep the poor at their current status. The way to know that a policy is working is to watch the people in which it’s enforced upon force it on each other.
Goffman would agree that the compliance with surveillance is because there are ground rules in which everyone should be aware of the appropriate behavior, there are rewards for reporting someone who does not satisfy this ideal and then there’s punishment for those who are caught in which enforces the appropriate behavior. If someone looks suspicious on the train, people’s automatic response is to alert the authorities and avoid behaving in that type of behavior. The feel good of a social responsibility is how they get people to report. This is how behavior is changed with equals profit for capitalism. They monetize data, commodify behavior and then make the profit from the adjusted behavior.
The problem that I see here is that individuals really don’t understand that we are being surveilled at all times. People are addicted to using electronic devices such as iPhones and other electronic devices and do not know the severity that comes along with it. If you were to take a tally of how many people have a smart phone in Hunter College alone, mass majority of this population would be seen to have one. Now if you take a test to see how many people block off their location settings, and know how to set their information as private in their phone, the results in my opinion would be low. I am a person myself that did not know that you can put sites that you search in a private folder that cannot be shared with anyone else. The technology that we have today are allowed to take any information that you put, which is just ridiculous to me. Surveillance capitalism happens 24/7 in our society. “Each individual is seen” as Foucault explains, mainly stating everyone is being watched unknowingly for information if needed. All devices we have are reporting our vital information.
Online shopping for example is a way that a lot of people use to buy clothes etc, but in order to buy things you must put ALL your information in such as your full name, address, credit card number, security code etc. It is very easy for hackers to get all of this information just by you entering it on a page. Our information can be taken and stored for anyone else’s use which is what concerns me the most.
To minimize the data that is being collected on me, I have turned my location services off, and after the discussion we had in class about being able to put what you search on the internet to private, I have done so. In a way I still know it is still easy to get my personal information, but I am slowly but surely trying to find other ways to minimize that.
American capitalism is starting to look like a police/ surveillance state that is run for profit and the benefit of those of wealth. Where does that leave or do for the rest of us who aren’t wealthy? It leaves us as just victims that are being surveilled to better them. Teachers are being turned into prison guards which I see as a huge conflict mainly because that is not what teachers are there for. They are here to help educate students, having them become like a prison guard in the classroom just blocks out the teaching and can just make students uncomfortable. This concerns me mainly because when these teachers are shown to be prison guards it just harms the educational environment.
1. Capitalism has always thrived on an exploited class. Now with surveillance, capitalism is now capable to thrive on every class because despite what socioeconomic class, race, gender, or age an individual is, capitalism will most certainly have a method to find profit. However, capitalism cannot be entirely blamed for the increase in surveillance. In fact, consumers are also at fault. . . indirectly. Since the invention of Windows 95 (back in 1995), technology has exponentially improved, but at a certain risk. For example, simply getting Wi-Fi in a public setting can make one’s privacy vulnerable. Yet, if you cannot get wi-fi, work cannot be done, and therefore time is wasted. In a capitalist society where everything done must be of use-value, wasting time almost seems like a sin. And therefore, privacy is exchanged for work/use-value. Therefore, consumers intentionally decide to risk their privacy in exchange for being useful in a capitalist mindset society. Without consumers, how would any business run? Surveillance just makes profit easier and more accessible.
2. As for my personal laptop, I do not practice any data-minimizing routines. However, once I use a different computer, or phone, etc I immediately go on incognito/private mode. This is actually more to prevent others who often around said technologies, obtaining access to my information. For example, after inputting my gmail name and password, the platform immediately stores that information and then the next person using the computer can see my name under “suggestions”. As for my phone, I never put on location/gps. Furthermore, I’ve edited my social media settings so that it shows the minimal amount of information about myself.
3. As said before, Capitalism cannot exist without exploitation. It can survive without surveillance and aggressive policing, however the system would just run slower and not as effectively.
4. Foucault mainly expressed “Each individual is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication”. Which, in relation to collecting data among Google users and customers, rather true. Even though the relationship between prospective advertisers for Google and the consumer is rather apathetic, yet each individual is vital for profit. The consumer’s habits are the basic sort of information a capitalist needs and therefore once the base outline of said customer is clear, then exploitation become useful and most tactful in such situation
The idea that we are constantly being monitored and that classrooms, and other work environments are no longer what they used to be does concern me. I remember being in my first year of high school and having to read 1984 by George Orwell. The entire class disliked the book, and the majority of the people, including my teacher, were “creeped out” by the dystopian society that Orwell describes in the book. Not a single person in the classroom ever thought that our society was heading in that direction or that 1984 could really be applied in our lives. The kind of monitoring seen in the book is so blatantly obvious, that it becomes almost ironic to think that the kind of scrutiny seen in our lives today is just as bad if not worse than that seen in the book.
Yet, there seems to be no end to the surveillance now that it has begun simply because every new software that comes out is bought with the idea that we are doing it for our own safety or convenience. Society as a whole has become so dependent on it all that even if we wanted to end the surveillance somehow it would be like trying to put an end to a part of who we are.
The one thing I can say I have consciously decided to do about this, is to set all my search engines to private, although this may not entirely end the surveillance in a large scale, it does help with the little things such as advertisements or pop-ups.
I find both Foucault’s writing and George Orwell’s book an interesting way to view surveillance capitalism from because both men did not witness anything from the 21st century, yet they are more than accurate with their writings. Foucault’s panopticism theory is incorporated into the daily behaviors of people, although the form of punishment society would choose for an outcast is not as straight forward as it would be for someone in a prison, there is certainly a negative reaction to someone who does not follow the norms. Therefore, most people are raised to behave as though always being watched, and continue to behave this way throughout their lives. Orwell’s idea of having a television monitor your actions while at home can be compared to webcams on computers when they first began. There were many people who did not know how webcams were used and there were points in time when people were being monitored on a daily basis because of their lack of knowledge. An even more recent example would be the app Periscope, which lets you constantly stream anything you wish as long as the app is installed on your phone.
I will answer the first question because I honestly don’t know what measures I can take to thwart the hijacking of my own behavioral data. I always see a pop up on the bottom of my screen which asks whether or not my location can be used. I always answer no because I feel its not necessary, but there are the times when I’m paying my phone bill online and I’m asked for my location which I allow. Both of these instances make me question why that information is needed. It feels invasive and after reading this post I’m sure as hell feeling mighty indignant right about now. I will look into ways to avoid this “surveillance capitalism”, if that is even possible since I have been in the dark concerning this issue for so long.