My Thoughts on Surveillance Capitalism

My Thoughts on Surveillance Capitalism

I’m going to cut to the chase here; I’ve remained relatively apathetic or unreceptively critical of most claims and arguments discussing technology addictions. My feelings about Stolen Focus by Johann Hari and his description of Snapchat or the stunt he pulled in Graceland aren’t unknown, nor are they particularly nice. But if there is one thing that intrigues and ignites me, it’s conversations surrounding the abuse of users and consumers by the corporations they flock to. In the case of technology, this takes form in surveillance capitalism. Ever since I’ve been able to comprehend what comes of being an individual on the internet, it’s always lingered in my mind how strange it is for small pieces of our interests and day to day lives to be sold for a profit. But at what point in time do concede and ultimately become apathetic toward that fact too?

I’m not quite impassive yet. To be completely honest, assistant devices like Alexa and Echo have always given me unease, and they still do. When you think they only listen when using their activation word, it doesn’t seem that big of a deal. I mean, who cares if Amazon knows that I’m listening to the new Billie Eilish album three times a day or that I hate Pentatonix. It’s all fun and games and relatively unimportant. And then you make an off hand comment to your friend about the new body wash you bought and suddenly two things happen: the first is that you become bombarded with ads for any soap or soap adjacent products (that totally by coincidence are also coconut scented like the perfume you bought last week off Bath and Body Works) and the second is that for the next few hours, you can’t shake the feeling of eyes always on you as you hold your phone like an undiffused bomb in your hands.

The first time I ever googled myself was after I’d already done it for the rest of my direct family members, all of whom had accounts on either Linkdin or Instagram. But I had neither, so surely nothing would come up for me, right? Right? Wrong. In what I can best describe as a vivid unease that Google had microchipped me, I scrolled through search results and images to come upon thumbnails of Youtube videos I had left a comment on or my brother’s page on a music website. And while perhaps the latter is a result of an unfortunately uncommon surname, the first still haunted me enough that I never googled myself again. Well, until now, where under all the results about a popular pianist you can find my full government name along with the county in Florida I lived in due to registering for a license. 

You can argue that government and legal details being available on the internet isn’t exactly selling my data, but it makes it available to anyone who takes the five seconds to look. It brings into question if your privacy and personal information is ever safe from anyone when governments and companies can provide it with the click of a button. If anyone who knows my first and last name can check, so can any company or entity that has internet access. That’s why, knowing all this, I also think often about at what point it’s worth the effort to care. Anxieties don’t inhibit the ability for this to be done, nor do they give me the power to scrub my existence from the internet. 

I think it is an unnerving shame that our privacy has become little more than a commodity to be bought and sold by corporations for any extra penny they can get. In an era of surveillance capitalism, the feeling of paranoia loses its potency, because to some extent, it’s always validated. If not Google Maps listening to your destination, then it's the algorithm on Instagram, and if not that it’s the Alexa in your friend’s room listening to a conversation unintended for the ears of big tech.

This also brings up the harm surveillance capitalism causes in the algorithm, besides the already disconcerting accuracy of product recommendations. Many social media platforms are the breeding grounds for insecurity, making them also one of the easiest places for exploitative business practices to take place. You can search “healthy recipes” on TikTok and quickly tumble down a rabbit hole of eating disorders and fifty-dollar supplements. You could seek out solutions to help clear your acne and end up with a barrage of influencers pointing you in the direction of botox they earn a commission on. To observe people’s interests is simply the means to exploit them later on through insecurity or hardship.

I believe there are many reasons to be concerned about or even fear the surveillance state technology has the ability to create. However, in a time where Google owns data centers larger than football stadiums, I think it is impossible to not feel at least a little helpless against the information they already have and the rest they will continue to glean from you. Give it time to normalize and we’ll become apathetic too, even if that’s not for the best. Regardless, surveillance capitalism is a real issue, and one that I still hold a little hope for being changed. Perhaps there will be a day when the politicians selling out to Meta start to care more about their constituents than the cash in their pockets. But until then, I’ll have to put up with too many targeted ads and hold on to the desire for our privacy to be returned to us, even if for a lower price.