How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

Belief in conspiracy is a raging fire that has done real damage and poses real danger to our planet and species, from epidemics kicked off by vaccine denial to genocides kicked off by racist conspiracies to planetary meltdown caused by denial-inspired climate inaction. Our world is on fire, and so we have to put the fires out — to figure out how to help people see the truth of the world through the conspiracies they’ve been confused by.

But firefighting is reactive. We need fire prevention. We need to strike at the traumatic material conditions that make people vulnerable to the contagion of conspiracy. Here, too, tech has a role to play.

There’s no shortage of proposals to address this. From the EU’s Terrorist Content Regulation, which requires platforms to police and remove “extremist” content, to the U.S. proposals to force tech companies to spy on their users and hold them liable for their users’ bad speech, there’s a lot of energy to force tech companies to solve the problems they created.

There’s a critical piece missing from the debate, though. All these solutions assume that tech companies are a fixture, that their dominance over the internet is a permanent fact. Proposals to replace Big Tech with a more diffused, pluralistic internet are nowhere to be found. Worse: The “solutions” on the table today require Big Tech to stay big because only the very largest companies can afford to implement the systems these laws demand.

Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose.

I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.

Digital rights activism, a quarter-century on (...)

Tech exceptionalism, then and now (...)

Don't believe the hype (...)

What is persuasion? (...)

1. Segmenting
2. Deception
3. Domination
4. Bypassing our rational faculties

If data is the new oil, then surveillance capitalism’s engine has a leak (...)

What is Facebook? (...)

Monopoly and the right to the future tense (...)

Search order and the right to the future tense (...)

Monopolists can afford sleeping pills for watchdogs (...)

Privacy and monopoly (...)

Ronald Reagan, pioneer of tech monopolism (...)

Steering with the windshield wipers (...)

Surveillance still matters (...)

Dignity and sanctuary (...)

Afflicting the afflicted (...)

Any data you collect and retain will eventually leak (...)

Critical tech exceptionalism is still tech exceptionalism (...)

How monopolies, not mind control, drive surveillance capitalism: The Snapchat story (...)

A monopoly over your friends (...)

Fake news is an epistemological crisis (...)

Tech is different (...)

Ownership of facts (...)

Persuasion works… slowly (...)

Paying won’t help (...)

An “ecology” moment for trustbusting (...)

Make Big Tech small again (...)

20 GOTO 10 (...)

The surveillance capitalism hypothesis — that Big Tech’s products really work as well as they say they do and that’s why everything is so screwed up — is way too easy on surveillance and even easier on capitalism. Companies spy because they believe their own BS, and companies spy because governments let them, and companies spy because any advantage from spying is so short-lived and minor that they have to do more and more of it just to stay in place.

As to why things are so screwed up? Capitalism. Specifically, the monopolism that creates inequality and the inequality that creates monopolism. It’s a form of capitalism that rewards sociopaths who destroy the real economy to inflate the bottom line, and they get away with it for the same reason companies get away with spying: because our governments are in thrall to both the ideology that says monopolies are actually just fine and in thrall to the ideology that says that in a monopolistic world, you’d better not piss off the monopolists.

Surveillance doesn’t make capitalism rogue. Capitalism’s unchecked rule begets surveillance. Surveillance isn’t bad because it lets people manipulate us. It’s bad because it crushes our ability to be our authentic selves — and because it lets the rich and powerful figure out who might be thinking of building guillotines and what dirt they can use to discredit those embryonic guillotine-builders before they can even get to the lumberyard.

Up and through

With all the problems of Big Tech, it’s tempting to imagine solving the problem by returning to a world without tech at all. Resist that temptation.

The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it’s up to us to seize the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under democratic, accountable control.

I am, secretly, despite what I have said earlier, a tech exceptionalist. Not in the sense of thinking that tech should be given a free pass to monopolize because it has “economies of scale” or some other nebulous feature. I’m a tech exceptionalist because I believe that getting tech right matters and that getting it wrong will be an unmitigated catastrophe — and doing it right can give us the power to work together to save our civilization, our species, and our planet.

by Cory Doctorow, OneZero |  Read more:

Image: Shira Inbar

[ed. Comprehensive analysis of one of the biggest threats we face going forward (and no one better than Mr. Doctorow to exlain it). If this is too much to take in one sitting, keep coming back and dropping in to whatever chapter interests you. You'll learn more than you can imagine.]