Surveillance Capitalism (Script & Sources)

Good morning, bad news: trillion-dollar tech giants have built an underground network of illegal surveillance and behavior modification systems, so intimate and invasive that they can accurately predict and change your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Your private human experience is being modified and commodified in exactly the same way that natural resources have been exploited through traditional capitalism.

We’re going to talk about surveillance capitalism, —namely, how Google, Facebook, and government intelligence agencies like the NSA are exploiting you politically and financially through a combination of pervasive data mining and algorithmic data analysis. This public-private partnership is so effective at manipulating us, that we’re literally losing our ability to make choices for ourselves.

The concept of surveillance capitalism isn’t new, and a lot of these concepts come from work done by researcher Shoshana Zuboff. Zuboff says that the development of capitalism began when capital owners were able to control, exploit, and commodify natural resources - but today, this control and exploitation is focused not on things like spices or oil, but on human nature. Companies like Google and Facebook make effectively all of their money by monitoring what you do, analyzing your smallest micro-behaviors, and conducting wide-scale experiments aimed at changing your real-world emotions and behavior without you even knowing. This ability to successfully predict and control human behavior is then sold to megacorporations, financial institutions, government agencies, and political campaigns.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. In 2014, Facebook had to publicly apologize for, quote, “conducting secret psychological tests on nearly 700,000 users” in which they experimented with emotional language to modify people’s reactions to them in what was called “emotional contagion”. This experiment was literally published in a scientific paper with academics from Cornell and the University of California. Moreover, the 2013 Snowden leaks showed that Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft send your data to the NSA, which builds detailed “pattern of life” profiles about each of us, and anyone we’re associated with - so it’s not a coincidence that the most advanced technology being developed today, is developed in service of surveillance capitalism. Hyperscalers, instant facial recognition, multi-million square foot data centers, exascale supercomputers for machine learning. This isn’t a fledgling industry, this an entire paradigm shift in how our behaviors are tracked, controlled, and manipulated.

And it’s not being done in secret. Mark Zuckerberg has unambiguously said, “privacy is no longer a social norm”. Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt said “if you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” And we KNOW, without a doubt that US intelligence agencies use mass surveillance to fight culture wars. In the 60s and 70s, the FBI led COINTELPRO, a project to illegally surveil, infiltrate, manipulate, and disrupt domestic American political organizations, particularly those dedicated to fighting racial and wealth inequality, like the Black Panthers. And let’s be real, in the 60s they could only tap your phone or bug your house. Today, they know exactly what you typed into Google at 4 in the morning, and we KNOW they KNOW.

On top of that, the tech companies that do this are unfathomably wealthy, and politically untouchable. They spend millions bribing congress, they install their allies into positions of political power, and political campaigns themselves use this targeted behavioral manipulation to force your vote. Literally, in 2016, Cambridge Analytica built behavioral profiles of Facebook users using data from 87 million people, which they then used to psychologically target and manipulate the votes of individuals in key swing state counties. This goes so far beyond political advertising, these are wide-scale privacy invasions. They know if you’re getting a divorce, or having a baby, or if you’re just having a bad day at work, without you telling them - and they’re tailoring psychological messages to manipulate you through “choice architecture”. This is when different choices are presented to you in a way that subconsciously forces you to make an involuntary choice. That’s the definition of control.

Facebook was fined 5 billion dollars in 2019 for these privacy violations, the largest fine of that type ever imposed. Meanwhile, that same year Facebook made 70 billion dollars, and another 86 billion the next year.

The fines, the apologies, the legislation, it’s all a joke. There is an immeasurable imbalance in information and power between surveillance capitalists and you: their exploitable natural resource. You may have heard this phrase in reference to Google or Facebook, that “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” - but Shoshana Zuboff makes it clear: you are not the product, you are the raw material being used to make the product - you’re the cattle made of beef, the ground bubbling with oil, the forest full of lumber. Your behavior is what’s being irreversibly extracted from you, and permanently changed in order to make an insane amount of money and change the course of history.