Surveillance implies law enforcement. Capitalism implies commerce. So surveillance capitalism is basically the business of creating tech that police and feds use to capture criminals. I suspect thus, that Motorola would be the biggest surveillance capitalists, and whatever hedge funds create ETFs for surveillance devices. What’s the controversy?
I don’t think the phrase means what you think it means. Zuboff has invented a phenomenon that is little more than common sense. Google and Facebook are not anything more than guidance counselors for the masses. They pay attention to the forgotten people who are the consuming public and they are the new Madison avenue with psychographics in addition to demographics.
In one way, people should be glad that narrow behavioral psychographics are being used rather than broad racial and ethnic stereotypes. One should prefer mathematically disciplined behavioral predictions rather than religious biases or bigotry.
If you watch the new comedy by Chinese comic Ronny Chieng[1], pay close attention to his bit about Amazon Prime, and you will see the essence of what is driving this market. It is the fanatical drive of consumers for instant gratification. Without that, no capital would be raised because revenue driving such matters would not exist.
I have had at least two Echo Dots in my house for at least three years and I have purchased absolutely zero from Amazon via that electronic pathway. All they do is tell me the weather and turn on my lights. Occasionally they will solve trivia questions and tell me what movies are playing. But they cannot shop for me because I don’t ask them to. It is entirely unprofitable for them to try and guess my shopping needs because I shop for myself.
So here’s the thing that I understand having been in the Business Intelligence field since before Zuboff wrote her first excellent book, The Age of the Smart Machine, and Rockarts The Rise of Managerial Computing. The gruff way to put it is that non-STEM academic disciplines have been selling a pig in a poke to generations. We have overproduced in IT and the reason why millions of people are staring at mobile computing devices is because of the failure of Humanities. You have created a programmable generation that behaves quite predictably enough for us to profit with digital understanding better than your philosophy. Maybe next we’ll start a religion. Pokemon Go manages peoples time better than most business managers. Who’s fault is that?
If you are a consumer, consuming the content of Hollywood writers and all of that can be delivered digitally rather than in person, perhaps you were mistaken to dismiss the human contact and physical environments provided by Starbucks.
Again I say it this way. For all of the millions of unheard people who want “our voices to be heard”, why shouldn’t we be pleased that Facebook is listening, every day?
The alternative is a protocol I am working on tentatively called the Circle Protocol. You can read about it here[2].
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