The very thing that was suppose to set us free and serve us, as internet creator Tim Berners Lee had hoped, has now evolved as Lee said “into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas.” The capture & commodification of our data, the predatory construction of user profiles and surveillance is in the DNA of surveillance capitalism. Cambridge Analytica is only the tip of the iceberg, , as Shoshana Zuboff points out in Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
Zuboff shows in her brilliant book how all pervasive and omnipresent surveillance capitalism has exploited human experience to collect free raw material for translation into behavorial data. The “behavioural surplus” – our emotions, fears, our voices and our personalities-is then fed into “machine intelligence”, then reconfigured into predictive products. Products designed to anticipate what you will do today, tomorrow, and next week, as well as modify our behaviour through personalised and intrusive targeted advertising.
As Zuboff memorably puts it: once we searched Google, now Google (and the rest) searches us. We have been digitally dispossessed by the big tech’s remorseless drive for profit. Every aspect of our human experience is now ripe for extractive profit.
