The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Link + Internal Link - Capitalism reinforces surveillence by replicating its characteristics of monopolization and inequalities - cause dispossession of the self
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- Such an illusion reassures the one-sided ownership and control over the means of production
Link + Internal Link - Capitalism reinforces surveillence by replicating its characteristics of monopolization and inequalities - cause dispossession of the selfCong ’18 [Wanshu; September 30; Faculty of Law at European University Institute - Department of Law (LAW), Global Academic Fellow at The University of Hong Kong; “Privacy and Data Protection: Solving or Reproducing the Democratic Crisis of the Neoliberal Capitalism?” p. 22-24] SPark Emerging from the background of the neoliberal financial capitalism, surveillance capitalism exhibits and reinforces some of the key features of financial capitalism which pose critical challenges to democracy. The mutual interdependence and reciprocity between the capitalist economy and the masses, already significantly undermined by financial capitalism, are further eliminated in surveillance capitalism where people are technologically mediated, structural excluded from the processes of capital extraction and accumulation and rendered merely as raw materials. Due to the exclusion from the processes of value creation and accumulation, people are deprived of their bargaining power to ask for more equal redistribution of the value that surveillance economy creates. In surveillance capitalism, the deprivation of the bargaining power is more covert and subtler thanks to the unprecedented consumerism of our age. The surveillant capitalists give people little treats such as customized services, convenience and ideas about smart life and meanwhile create an illusion for the consumers about greater control over one’s life. Such an illusion reassures the one-sided ownership and control over the means of production of surveillance capitalism by the surveillant companies. They face little risk of a revolt of the consumers, since simply showing the consumers a new device can already make them happy and excited. The one-sided control over the means of production and processes of value creation causes not only economic inequalities in the sense that the raw material-like consumers whose behavioural data have generated enormous capital value do not have a fair share because their use of the services such as social media is not recognized as labour. 43 It also creates the inequality about who get to determine and control one’s way of life. In surveillance capitalism which operates a market for future behaviour, the predictions of future behaviour guide all sorts of economic activities, and the products and services offered to consumers are designed to maintain this business model and to keep it evermore lucrative. As people’s way of life is increasingly mediated and conditioned by those services and products, the surveillant companies become more and more effective in superimposing their predictions of future behaviour on consumers. The totalization of a hyper surveillance capitalism creates the feelings of dispossession and appropriation of one’s own lifeworld and lack of alternatives except resignation from such a cybernetic world. Surveillance capitalism also reinforces the idea of an impersonal and perfectly rational market that neoliberal capitalism has been propagating for a few decades. Wolfgang Streeck describes such a rhetoric of Hayekian market justice, “it is claimed that market justice, with its ostensible impersonality and price-theoretical calculability, functions in accordance with universalist principles, in a ‘clean’ manner in the sense of untouched by politics.”44 It is important to notice that such a rhetoric often defends the capitalist economy against state’s redistributive interventions and depicts the latter as political and therefore corrupt. The claim of surveillance capitalism about the full transparency and complete knowledge about human affairs through datafication and digitalization certainly strengthens the rhetoric about the perfect rationality and purity of the capitalist market, and hence makes the redistribution policies addressing social justice issues not only unnecessary but a threat to the market’s purity and rationality. The acclaimed impersonality, objectivity and rationality of the knowledge produced by surveillance capitalism are simultaneously accompanied by its authority of truthfulness and facticity and hence the legitimacy of its superimposition on human affairs. But such knowledge is accessible and intelligible only to the elites of the surveillance capitalism. The rationalization and legitimation of their power are a significant step forward to what Wolfgang Merkel calls a “dictatorship of the market”. 45 Internal Link + Impact - Their use of the government to expand technology is entrenched in the concept of surveillance capitalism - it destroys democracy by viewing humans as products to be rendered AND is an epistemological catastrophe that is ultimately falseDownload 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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