The saying 'If You're Not Paying, You're The Product' is often cited to differentiate between companies that respect your privacy by charging you for a service and those that desire to make money off your personal information.
Sadly, this is not true. In both cases, your personal information, by and large, is being monetized. Whether you pay for a service, or receive it for free, you are being watched, tracked, and manipulated for profit.
A free market, capitalist system in its most simplistic form, involves the exchange of goods and services for money with as little interference from the government as possible. In the not-so-distant past, companies would do market research, innovate and develop products, and then market them to the public, hoping to drive interest and lead to sales.
But Steve Jobs offered insight into a new way of thinking about the old saying “know your customer.”
“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do.” - Steve Jobs
This sentiment is the essence of a new form of capitalism, deemed “Surveillance Capitalism,” a term popularized by Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff in her book by the same name.
Surveillance capitalism is a newer, and more sinister, version of capitalism that relies on gathering and exploiting personal data through large-scale surveillance. This phenomenon is different from government surveillance, although they often reinforce each other as we’ll get into shortly. In this model, companies collect, analyze, and use vast amounts of user data to predict and shape human behavior, usually for commercial purposes.
Surveillance capitalism involves companies extensively collecting user data from online activities without explicit consent although we all agree to their terms of service which are purposely hard to understand as we have moved far beyond generalized advertising.
Advanced analytics and machine learning predict user behavior, enabling personalized products and hyper-targeted advertising. Algorithms in automated decision-making processes influence content, recommendations, and even job opportunities. Many apps and platforms incorporate gamification elements to encourage specific behaviors, essentially leading you to a desired outcome. This includes rewards, badges, and other incentives to keep users engaged and motivated.
User data then becomes a valuable commodity, which is quickly and systematically monetized through sales, targeted ads, and strategic decisions that help organizations make informed decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and business expansion.
These practices often undermine user privacy, creating a power imbalance between companies and the customers they serve. Companies end up knowing everything about you, while you have little insight into how their surveillance operations work.
The knowledge gained by Big Tech, and their partnership with the intelligence community, has broader social and political impacts as well, allowing companies and governments to shape public opinion, reinforce social structures, and even influence and manipulate elections.
For example, in 2018, there was widespread alarm over the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, which had connections to President Trump's campaign and large conservative donors. The controversy arose from the unauthorized use of data collected from millions of users without their consent to target US voters with carefully tailored messages about Trump across Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
While the unauthorized use of data was, and is, a legitimate issue, the outrage from the left also stemmed from the fact that conservative campaigns were leveraging that data to target voters to gain an advantage, something the left had no problem doing long before Trump, and continues to do to this day.
As a matter of fact, back in 2012, the Obama campaign was celebrated for its use of technology to target individual voters, including “targeted sharing” protocols that mined an Obama supporter’s Facebook network looking for friends that the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade.
And let’s not pretend that this political fight is fair and that there is neutrality behind the scenes at Big Tech firms. During the 2020 election, 80 to 90% of all political donations went to Democrats while legitimate news that could hurt the Biden Campaign, such as Hunter Biden’s laptop, was suppressed by Big Tech as “disinformation.”
Just like how businesses today use our personal information as the raw materials for the new predictive surveillance economy, political campaigns on both the left and right are actively harvesting the data of individual voters, using it as a form of political currency that not only helps predict the outcomes of elections but actively shapes and cultivates the kinds of voters needed to win.
Where can this all lead? One only needs to look to China for an example. Technology firms help the Chinese Communist Party utilize data to impact human behavior. China's social credit system keeps track of individuals' "good behavior," with accumulated points resulting in rewards or penalties for citizens engaged in “bad behavior.” Private companies within the state even evaluate citizens' creditworthiness by considering these point tallies.
George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” have arrived. In our quest for convenience and connection, we have willingly given away one of our most precious human commodities, privacy. Human experiences are now treated as raw materials to be mined and manipulated in order to facilitate desired economic and political outcomes.
As we enter the age of Artificial Intelligence, failure to understand the technological machinations that are occurring behind the scenes will have devastating consequences for our individual lives, as well as for society as a whole.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
This is a thoughtful essay and a good way to think of where we are. When I Marshal McLuhan's book Mechanical Bride and his critique of advertising, I thought he was a bit of a crank. Yes, businesses were creating fantasies to buy, but bad ideas would eventually fizzled. And what was wrong with the average Joe and Jane aspiring to be part of the perfect life? Up until the post-modernist era, many paintings depicted the ideal forms whether fruit or people. McLuhan quoted Gertrude Stein making fun of American GI's with their conformity and how the war saved Europe from that mindset. Considering she was a gay Jewish woman who survived by collaborating and thus going along with the propaganda, with the Germans wasn't mentioned. But what we are entering into now is more akin to the criticisms of Herbert Marcuse. However, like Stein, he got the direction wrong. We are in a soft (for now) fascist state being dragged along by leashes. If we are good dogs, we trot along happily but as soon as we show our independence, the masters yank on our leashes to get us to comply.