The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
Download 2.09 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- of people’s behaviours and the world people live in becomes an
- All the four steps contain elements that are
- The surveillance capitalism that operates the market for future behaviour is simply not people-facing, unlike the industrial capitalism that relied on the masses
- active
- According to a report made by the US Federal Trade Commission
- The clients of the data broker industry include a wide range of commercial enterprises as well as
- What underpins the surveillance capitalism’s relationship of production that excludes people’s active engagement and
- This epistemic shift already poses significant
- on them and to decide what to do with them
- to realize and overcome the inherent limitation of someone’s experience and judgment even more
- . And
| Cong ’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. 17-22] SPark
So, digital surveillance of people’s behaviours and the world people live in becomes an integral part of the capital economy. Zuboff describes the four steps in the new way of value extraction in surveillance capitalism: “First, the push for more users and more channels, services, devices, places, and spaces is imperative for access to an ever-expanding range of behavioural surplus. Users are the human nature-al resource that provides this free raw material. Second, the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science for continuous algorithmic improvement constitutes an immensely expensive, sophisticated, and exclusive twenty-first century “means of production.” Third, the new manufacturing process converts behavioural surplus into prediction products designed to predict behaviour now and soon. Fourth, these prediction products are sold into a new kind of meta-market that trades exclusively in future behaviour… Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily, if not entirely, from such markets for future behaviour.” All the four steps contain elements that are exploitive and nondemocratic. To start with, the installation of equipment and technologies for surveillance online and offline by the surveillant companies are often unilateral and creepy, and often in the disguise of providing better services, more convenience and customizing user experiences. People’s realization and complaint about the intrusiveness of commercial surveillance often come too late and make little difference, because the tech giants’ have the capacity to shape users’ habits and way of thinking and to make users increasingly dependent on the services that create more behavioural data. What follow the generation of behavioural data are even more obscure to ordinary users, not least because people normally lack the information and knowledge about the means of production by which their behavioural data are processed into commodities. The surveillance capitalism that operates the market for future behaviour is simply not people-facing, unlike the industrial capitalism that relied on the masses for labour input and consumption and had to constantly face the demands of the working class. In surveillance capitalism, commodities are produced by information technologies and consumed by other data-driven entities. This economic structure largely precludes any meaningful active engagement of people from the processes of capital production and accumulation. The exploitative nature of this surveillance economy lies precisely in this preclusion. As people are often unaware of how their behavioural data make profits and how they are ultimately consumed by the companies who trade the data commodities about the predictions of their future behaviours, people hardly consider themselves as being “working” for the surveillant companies and hence deserve a share of their profits, especially as the services and devices that extract and collect behavioural data are often used in the time and space of leisure and domicile. 35 Unable to actively engage in the processes of surveillance capitalism as either labour input or consumers, people are converted into data and become raw materials for value extraction by the surveillant companies. This structural exclusion of surveillance capitalism is perhaps most dramatic in the socalled data broker industry. Data brokers acquire the data typically not by way of direct interaction with people themselves. 36 According to a report made by the US Federal Trade Commission on nine major data brokers in 2014, data broker companies acquire the data by buying them from commercial entities, government agencies or other data brokers, trawling public information such as court records and census data, and running programmes – the socalled web crawlers – to systematically browse and capture data on the internet. 37 Once acquired, data are developed into various commodities to be sold for various purposes, including targeted advertising and marketing, identity verification and fraud detection. The clients of the data broker industry include a wide range of commercial enterprises as well as governmental and nongovernmental organizations. There are also often long-term relationships where the client entities are also the data sources for the data brokers by way of cooperative arrangements.38 The products of the data broker industry can be the actual, raw, unstructured data from the data sources or the processed data segments such as group profiles. While quality control of the data product is necessarily important, it does not mean that quality control allows for people to have access to their data and to ask for correction or deletion of the wrong or inaccurate information about them. For one thing, as data brokers are not consumer-facing, their existence and business activities are invisible and unknown to people, and their invisibility effectively pre-empts possible information requests. For another, individual verification of the accuracy of the personal data matters little when the data-driven companies deal with massive amount of raw and derived, non-personal data or rely on these data products for decision or strategy-making. The solution to quality control is often technical: increasing the investment in advanced data analytics and enlarging databases to make better inferences, validate the data products and remove the chances of false positive. 39 The means of production, hence, is a technological and organizational enclosure that does not need any active engagement of the people. What underpins the surveillance capitalism’s relationship of production that excludes people’s active engagement and renders people into raw materials is an extraordinary epistemic presumption. It is the belief that people’s behaviours have patterns which can be observed and extracted into a form of probabilistic knowledge based on which decisions can be made. This belief is itself not new. Biological studies tell us that life itself requires constantly monitoring the living environment and adapting oneself to the environment and that the recognition of patterns is inherent in this process. But it is not simply that the epistemic presumption has caused the means of production and economic structure of surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism, embracing this epistemic presumption, also produces its own form of knowledge about human beings, market and the world and superimposes on them such probabilistic knowledge as facts through massive expansion and deepening of digital mediation and conversion. The primary task is to render human behaviour and interaction increasingly and evermore transparent by these digital devices and technologies. Whereas knowledge or information obtained from human interactions can only be limited and partial, surveillance capitalism believes that a universal, complete knowledge about human affairs through digital mediation is more and more attainable. The barriers on the way to this complete knowledge are just technological, which means what we need are more tools to create, extract and process more data. 40 This epistemic shift already poses significant challenges to the traditional liberal humanism on which democracy is premised. Whereas the inherent finiteness of human knowledge requires us to constantly reflect on the acquired knowledge, and as Mireille Hildebrandt argues, this conscious reflection on our limited knowledge gives us the freedom to deliberate on them and to decide what to do with them, 41 the acclaimed full transparency and complete knowledge of human affairs and the living environment would eliminate the need for such conscious reflection and deliberation. It does not just make self-determination, autonomy and the moral capacity to realize and overcome the inherent limitation of someone’s experience and judgment even more fictive. It also makes institutions such as the rule of law and market unnecessary, precisely because these are the institutions designed to foster the mutual trust and common interest in a world where human behaviour and interaction are uncertain and cannot be fully known. 42 The execution of this epistemic presumption by surveillant companies in practice is a particular way of making people passive objects whose current and future behaviours become always knowable and hence controllable. And by making people passive objects, surveillance capitalists have no need to maintain a positive feedback loop and a social pact of reciprocity with them and hence no need for democratic institutions to address their needs. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
|