Surveillance Capitalism

-- By MerveKirmaci - 03 Nov 2016

Introduction

“We are the last generation that human beings are able to make a choice”. In a world made up of pipes and switches, the odds for this claim to become true in the near future is not unlikely. The networked sphere has paved the way for increasing surveillance, calculability and record of human-beings to commodify human awareness and intelligence. The social relations are reduced to the authority of switches that regulate all sorts of transactions. Commercialization strategy is grasping the organizations and its relations to populations and yet humans are not aware of a bigger threat awaiting "information civilization". Capitalism once again haunts the individual through the logic of accumulation; this time in another setting called the digital platform. It uses data about individuals and the environment they are situated in to know, control and adjust behavior in order to continue new forms of commodification and control. My argument is that, given its endogenous relationship to mankind, the internet is not an autonomous process. It originates in the social and that is why we must find it and acknowledge it. In this paper, I would like to explore the position of the Internet as a consequence of data accumulation and a net for surveillance capitalism through which the capital constantly reproduces itself.

Accumulation and Liability

The fuel of capitalism has always been enhanced by the accumulation process. In 1900s it was the mass production based on corporate capitalism which then turned into a financial capitalism at the end of the century. In the 1990s, it was software's time to be patented and that's how non-liable objects were made liable and extended the capacity of what's accountable. Even the use of molecules and mathematical formulas gained a function to be materialized. What was promised as a result of this liability, was greater consumer choice, greater amounts of data; thus more pervasive material accumulation. Yet again, the agency in the digital platform, like its former manifestations, vies for hegemony and restricts the physical actor from existing in any sort of reflexivity. It only allows for its own ideals and level of awareness. Therefore, its main goal is to exercise upon the individual behavior as means of making profit. With access to constant predictability, it goes against the uncertainty of nature. Like the voice of a politician echoed through radio technology, it is the new super organism that represents political power, economic profit or legal autonomy a capitalist agent aims for. It is the super organism of today which leaves no place for what is social.

New Regime

The internet goes faster than any regime past or present in how it records lives, keeps track of human behavior and trades it. Private has lost its meaning. Policies are shaped around “big data” and even the White House reports that; “The technological trajectory, however, is clear: more and more data will be generated about individuals and will persist under the control of others” (White House, 2014: 9). This legitimacy ensured by the political authorities frankly made commercialization of human consciousness easier and the false consciousness stronger where it is no more hidden in the material, but in the net systems where human data is stored. Harvesting data is the new trend in which the quantity is more important than quality. As a result, companies like Facebook and Google collect tremendous amounts of data about the very personal details of human behavior. Given that every click brings profit and more predictability, a huge interest is devoted to data access by this exemplars, regardless of its content.

Panopticon

As the means of ownership can only be reached by more and more data, the net embedded the user in an alternate geography and made observation more available than before. surveillance became a wide spread practice. Centralized command and control which was once physical lost its power. Foucault’s panopticon which used to explain the dictating nature of the hierarchy and surveillance, remained insufficient to explain this new network arhictecture; as in the panopticon the observation of certain behavior could be dismissed once the observed object left the physical place. Conversely, the participant in the net is not unwilling today as it was in Foucault’s study. Whether conscious or unconscious the object acts in the internet and there is no escape from the “Big Brother” of the current time. Yet, for many, there is also no place to be where the Internet does not exist.

Conclusion

The internet overall repurposes the understanding of privacy and redistributes it in order to capitalize and modify behaviour for profit. Through data accumulation, the omnipresent structure of the net provides pervasive surveillance. It is indifferent to individual and traditional forms of production, consumption and employment. Hence, power which was once associated with access to the means of production, now identified with ownership of data. The capitalist who extracts data to control and modify everyday experiences hold the power. In this case companies like Google, Facebook and other exemplars of surveillance capitalism who have the means to own data, control and modify the totality of human action which should be achieved by the rule of law. Thus, this new regime offers a new logic of accumulation with new social relations that replaces all traditional forms of exchange, trust and social relations with the soverignty of the internet.

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