Surveillance Capitalism

The surveillance state is real and it's destroying freedom, democracy and privacy. But it's not the state that's threatening those core values and rights; it's capitalism and capitalists.

In traditional capitalism there are the traditional roles and classes; the capitalists own the means of production, and the rest of us are workers and consumers. That system's based on exploitation of nature and labor, and creates an ever worsening power-imbalance between the owners, the infamous "1 percent," and the rest. Whereas in traditional capitalism mass-production and managerial capitalism was pioneered by the likes of Ford and General Motors, surveillance capitalism was pioneered by Google and Facebook; in capitalism's never-ending quest for more growth and more profits, we, the consumers, have become products as well. The Big Tech companies have entered the next stage in capitalism's evolution, where mass-production is replaced with mass data collection, analysis and trade; it's information capitalism that collects and sells our personal data, with the government just being one of the buyers.

Furthermore, these companies don't produce anything else, they don't produce goods or services that benefit society. Instead they use hardware and software as a foundation, a platform for others to conduct their business on. This makes them the owners of the space in which we do business, which gives them unprecedented power over us; I'm sure we can all remember the world-wide panic when Facebook and WhatsApp went down for a couple of hours, we're no stranger to the frequent outrage over deplatforming on YouTube and Facebook, and we still have a sour taste in our mouths because of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Even the people at Facebook themselves are perfectly aware of how their platform is used to spread misinformation and incite hate and violence; they won't do anything about it though, because it's the hate, polarization and outrage that make them those profits in the attention economy. It must be said here that the political right wing has perfected this strategy of outrace economics; just look at Fox News or the culture war they wage over Dr. Suess children's books, Potato Head, Big Bird, or the yearly "cancelling" of Christmas by evil communists. Sex sells, they used to say. Nowadays anger, hate and outrage sell much better...

If you wanted to make it big in the hotel-business, you bought one hotel, made it thrive, and bought another hotel. By repeating that success you might end up with a chain of hotels. Nowadays you build a website called Airbnb which links people with a room to spare with people looking for a place to stay. No longer do you buy a bunch of cars and employ drivers to start a taxi-business. No, you build a website called Uber to link contractors and their cars to people who need a ride. You don't build a store where you welcome customers and try to make their experience as good as possible, instead you make a website called Amazon where you let others sell their stuff. This is the stuff dystopian corporatocracies are made of, and with Facebook's upcoming rebranding to Meta and the Metaverse, we're about to enter that dystopia for real, if we're not already in it. So watch the below linked video, but what I want you to take away from this post is that "the state" is only complicit in this hijacking of our freedom, democracy and privacy, they're not the main culprits. As with almost every major problem we face in our times, capitalism and capitalists are the real threat we have to face up to and conquer...

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