Even though the text came in at 730 words, including more than 80 of quotation from Thomas Hobbes, it is wordy. So I would start with a strong edit. Every word that is not pulling weight must go. When all the slack words are gone, every sentence should be rewritten to use fewer words and simpler grammar. When that contraction has occurred, you can fit them into the outline you didn't make for the first draft. At this stage you will see clearly why the draft was loose: the central idea was missing.

This draft got lost in recapitulating what we discussed in the first weeks, during Part Four. You central idea arrived only late, in abbreviated form. This turned out to be about the false dichotomy between "disengaging" and losing freedom. The platforms spying on everyone by providing trivial services in return for collection of behavior can be defeated by not using them. That doesn't require disengaging; it requires using technology differently. Some of this is nearly-transparent, some of it requires considering changes in behavior as well as adjustments to software. But once the subject is no longer put in "everything or nothing" terms, another future is possible, and with that knowledge freedom begins.

The Tech Leviathan

-- By MichelleJong - 11 Mar 2022

“The attaining to … sovereign power is by two ways. One, by natural force: as when a man maketh his children to submit themselves, and their children, to his government, as being able to destroy them if they refuse; or by war subdueth his enemies to his will, giving them their lives on that condition. The other, is when men agree amongst themselves to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others.”

Big tech attains power through information. Now is there a part of our individual humanities that are not subject to invasion?

The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” by requiring the issuance of a warrant supported by probably cause. As of now, judges (including the very non-public FISA Court) can issue a warrant on an ISP authorizing a search and seizure requiring them to hand over documents for a “search and seizure” without the subject becoming aware of it. Meanwhile, with the rise of “surveillance capitalism”, where big tech companies extract growing swaths of information on individual users, the pool of comprehensive records that can be accessed for search and seizures has grown immensely. Tech companies, like Apple, now collect our biometric information, the most intimate, individually-identifying pieces of information. Facebook knows all about our inner and outer circles to the point of cognizing our political stances, our emotional vulnerabilities, prime for manipulation.

With the confluence of big tech’s rise and permeation into every vestige of our lives and this growing cooperation between big tech and government authorities (whether police force or national security), do we have a new governing power that we are unknowingly submitting to? A second government with more control and less accountability than the ones appointed from the ballot box. And is there a way out?

We started this journey by ticking off a “terms and conditions” box but that small act of ours was the act of consent that emboldened technology companies with a peephole into our psyche, expanding it incrementally with every update, and a way for governments to access insights into our lives that we ourselves have yet to discover. As individuals, we don’t necessarily contemplate the possibility that this email or that Facebook message might one day be the subject of public inquiry (justified for example through the lens of state security) or even worse, weaponized against us through technological warfare.

However, despite the rise of government-tech cooperation, one might ask who has the real power? Francis Bacon coined the truism knowledge is power. In our modern age, data is the prevailing permutation of knowledge relating to the individual obtained through technological devices. So in some sense, big tech has usurped governmental authority by expanding the artificial realm and closing in on reality, crowding out our autonomy and creating an opportunity for a surveillance culture granting access to more intimate information. So now, the half of the government-tech dyad that we, as civilians, scrutinize more regularly and have the chance every four years to vote out, is not even the more powerful half.

So why haven’t we done anything to resist this growing power? The guise that privacy can even truly exist is gradually dwindling and yet as consumers, we remain complacent to protecting ourselves from these invasions. Perhaps the opportunity cost (as social beings) of disengaging is far too high. But let’s be honest, aside from the brief flashing thought, none of us really make a risk-benefit analysis of losing our privacy vs. engaging in society. If anything, we’ll never be able to make an informed decision because the whole point of surveillance is that the act itself remains secret. We will never have enough information to know exactly what we are giving up. That is the most insidious part of this whole thing, that we won’t know what we’ve lost until we’ve lost it.

So then perhaps instead the answer is that the consequences we’ve seen so far haven’t been dire enough. To avoid having to contend with the cognitive dissonance (long term loss of privacy vs. short term social engagement/validation), we compartmentalize these thoughts and store it away, thinking only of the fact that Instagram or TikTok? provides enough entertainment in our day-to-day lives that it warrants a download.

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