Surveillance Capitalism

-- By MerveKirmaci - 03 Nov 2016

Introduction

"We are the last generation that human beings are able to make a choice".

Better to be accurate. Dan Geer said, "This is the last generation in which the human race gets 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 odds ... is not unlikely." The grammar should be corrected, but more important would be to ask what this sentence contributes to the expression of your idea. By the second sentence of the essay, we should be hearing from you, and tautology or the near-equivalent is not the way to go.

The networked sphere has paved the way for increasing surveillance and calculability 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; yet humans are not aware of a bigger threat awaiting the "information civilization". Capitalism once again haunts the individual through the logic of accumulation, but this time in another setting called the digital platform. This new form of capitalism 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.

No, that's my argument. What's your new contribution to it? So far, we are just reading summary of what has been said so far by others.

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.

No more than agriculture or fisheries. What is your idea?

Accumulation and Liability

Capitalism has always been enhanced by the accumulation process.

Enhanced? Of what is it constituted if that is an enhancement?

In 1900s it was the mass production based on corporate capitalism which then turned into financial capitalism at the end of the century. In the 1990s, the use of molecules and mathematical formulas gained a function to be materialized. Then it was software's time to be commodified and patent law made this non-liable object liable, thus extended the capacity of what's accountable. The ultimate promise was greater consumer choice, greater amounts of data and greater profit which led to more pervasive material accumulation. Yet again, the agency in the digital platform, like its former manifestations, continues to vie for hegemony and restrict 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, this new agent becomes the new super organism that embodies political power, economic profit and legal autonomy. Furthermore, it is this super organism of today which tries to annihilate the social aspect of human nature.

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; "...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. 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. They are salient actors in the market now as the power to record and modify the everyday experience is the new legitimate path to sovereignty.

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 hierarchy and surveillance, remained insufficient to explain this new network architecture; because in the panopticon the observation of certain behavior could be dismissed once the observed object left the physical setting. Conversely, the participant in the net is not unwilling and not capable of ending the observation process today as it was in Foucault's claim. Whether conscious or unconscious the object continuously acts in the internet and there is no escape from the "Big Brother". 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 constant 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, is now identified with ownership of data. The capitalist who extracts data to control and modify everyday experiences holds the power. Surveillance capitalism on that account challenges former evolutions of market capitalism and results in an alternate regime of a new logic of accumulation with new social relations that replaces all traditional forms of exchange, trust and politics. Concepts like freedom and privacy which should be achieved by the rule of law is being obliterated. Hence, it is this new regime that we should think ways to prohibit or slow down its ubiqutous form if we want next generations to be capable of making a choice as well.

References

Balkan, Aral. https://projectbullrun.org/surveillance/2015/video-2015.html#balkan

Mayer-Schönberger, V. and Cukier, K. (2013). Big Data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. Reprint edn Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net, First Monday, April 1997

Moglen, Eben. The dotCommunist Manifesto (2003).

Simonite, Tom. (2012). “What Facebook Knows”. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/428150/what-facebook-knows/.

Zuboff, Shoshana (2013). Computer Mediated Work. In Sociology of Work: An Encyclopedia, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/sociology-of-work/n41.xml.

What is the point of references in web writing? Make them links, to show how specific statements can be referred to them.

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The most important route to improvement here is to bring your own ideas to the front. Here we have good summaries of a range of ideas contributed by others, and some organization of those ideas within a structure that could be a platform for your own ideas, but they have not yet shown up clearly. Let's try a draft in which the introductory paragraph presents one of your own ideas in clear, compressed form, then develops that idea through the remainder of the essay by unpacking its relationship to ideas written down by others, including objections or doubts bearing on your proposition, and concluding with a way that the reader could take the idea further on her own. Then we will be cooking with gas, as the saying is.

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