The digital revolution began with great promise. However, it also brought with it the ability for tech giants to "harvest" data on human behavior. This has accelerated what Shoshana Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism" and big tech becoming more interested in exploiting us, than serving us.
There was a time, albeit short, when a phone was a phone first, a semi-computer second, and efforts to improve either of those functions via data tracking and harvesting, was to genuinely make a better phone for consumers. This same principle of improving a phone can be applied to most other technological developments. Surveillance capitalism has changed this economic model.
What is surveillance capitalism?
Shoshana Zuboff defines surveillance capitalism as the:
"unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later"
Google was the first to learn how to capture surplus behavioral data, more than what they needed for services, and used it to compute prediction products that they could sell to their business customers, in this case advertisers.
The digital revolution, in particular the internet, was expected to bring empowerment, the democratization of knowledge, and help with real problems. However, the lucrative nature of surveillance capitalism has meant that democratized knowledge and our access to it has come at a significant expense. While there has been a proliferation in knowledge and resources available due to the internet, the cost of engaging in this knowledge has been the exchange of human behavioral data flows, often without the consent or understanding as to the extent of this economic logic.
This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to new surveillance based ecosystems in virtually every economic sector, from insurance to automobiles to health, education, finance and customer goods, to every product described as “smart” and every service described as “personalized.” It is becoming virtually impossible to participate effectively in society without interfacing with these same channels that are supply chains for surveillance capitalism’s data flows.
For example, ProPublica recently reported that breathing machines purchased by people with sleep apnea are secretly sending usage data to health insurers, where the information can be used to justify reduced insurance payments.
Will surveillance capitalism come to an end?
It is unlikely that large tech companies will change this new found capitalism and economic model on their own. This is because the competitive dynamics of surveillance capitalism have created powerful economic imperatives that are driving firms to produce better and better behavioral-prediction products, which in return are fueling profits and the desire to keep things as they are.
Tech companies like Google and Meta (Facebook) have discovered that this requires not only amassing huge volumes of data, but actually intervening in human behavior. It can be applied to steer humans to purchase products, but also to participate and engage in a false political discourse. Data scientists call this process “actuating.” Surveillance capitalists now develop “economies of action,” as they learn to tune, herd, and condition human behavior with subtle and subliminal cues, rewards, and punishments that shunt us toward their most profitable outcomes. The Cambridge Analytica scandal highlighted this problem and how surveillance capitalism was used to divide and create social discourse.
Is this really a problem?
By ignoring surveillance capitalism, we end up sacrificing a right to the future tense, in other words, the liberty to properly make decisions without being influenced artificially by a computer set, social media app, phone, and other such things. This is not an argument against developing technology, but merely removing "surveillance" when it is not required, from such technological developments.
Our freedom to make decisions without interference is the essence of our free will, the idea that I can plan my future is the essence of autonomy and human agency. Surveillance capitalism’s “means of behavioral modification” at scale erodes democracy from within because, without autonomy in action and in thought, we have little capacity for the moral judgment and critical thinking necessary for a democratic society. It is a common misconception that the extent of the problem is limited to an overly predictive smartphone.
Democracy is also eroded from without, as surveillance capitalism represents an unprecedented concentration of knowledge and the power that accrues to such knowledge is held in centralized companies for the highest bidder and/or governments that wish to use this concentration of knowledge.
What can we do to protect ourselves and how can crypto change this?
Cryptocurrencies offer an alternative solution to centralized control. Though, being aware of the extent of the problem and regulating against it is always a potential solution.
On the one hand, a decentralized application or Dapp built on a blockchain is by nature less prone to corruption given it is a shared protocol. On the other, certain cryptocurrencies make it possible to limit the data you share so that your data is in your hands and you are incentivized to forego only the data you wish to give up, and be paid to do so. Cryptocurrency projects like profila.com are already working on solutions to this issue.
Algorithms that are hidden behind a black box can be made transparent in a blockchain so that a person knows what data is being used. For example, in cases where applications like YouTube and social media are concerned, if there is a sudden censorship response to something said or done, a person can check the reason behind this by reviewing the algorithm responsible on the blockchain.
Cryptocurrencies also make it possible to limit bad actors (think corrupted and corruptible directors and CEOs of companies) so that governance of a protocol is decided not by a central body in a company, but via decentralized autonomous organizations or DAOs. In a DAO the decisions are effectively made by the token holders who vote on the protocol.
Cryptocurrencies are more than a means of transferring "magical internet money" from one person to another, the utility goes far deeper than anything we can presently imagine.
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