Students for Snowden at the New School in New York, where platform cooperativism was theorised in 2015. Trebor Scholz/Wikimedia commons. Some rights reserved.It’s 2064 and Google owns your liver. Facebook owns your fingerprints, eyes, bones and brain, and a new platform called Mismo owns the rest – except your feet: the new global currency exchange circuit, FTSE1000, owns your feet. Feet are now fitted with chips at birth so your movements can be tracked. All of these platforms operate globally because they have replaced countries. There’s no longer any possibility of starting again on Mars, because that’s being used as a petri-dish for the endless regeneration of Richard Branson’s “ego”. He was cryogenically frozen in 2023 – had a heart attack frollicking with hammerhead sharks at former US president Barack Obama’s resort in the Pacific. But how did we get here, and how do we turn back?
In the midst of a growing controversy over the involvement of tech company Cambridge Analytica in the Trump and Brexit campaigns, it’s time a more thorough debate about how our data is used took off. The argument runs that Cambridge Analytica used data about citizens’ political preferences, personalities and habits to more accurately target political advertising, a key factor in the two campaigns’ successes. Cambridge Analytica denies having access to Facebook ‘likes’, despite an analyst at the company claiming they could process this information as early as 2015.
Other voices claim the prowess of this company has been exaggerated; still others argue that placing so much emphasis on what is essentially powerful marketing elides the deeper forces at play in these white nationalist victories. But there is obviously something murky about the fact that its involvement in the Brexit campaign was not declared to the electoral commission. The whole affair gets murkier still when it appears that tech billionaire Robert Mercer, Trump’s single biggest donor, friend to Nigel Farage, and the man behind Breitbart, is also the major financier behind Cambridge Analytica.
