Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism
Zuboff coins the word “surveillance capitalism” to refer to the growing trend of commerce in which the commodity being bought and sold is consumers’ personal information. The documentary roughly follows the frankly horrifying rise of surveillance capitalism, and how Silicon Valley has seemingly found it more profitable to cater to investors and venture capitalists by creating technology that extracts these massive amounts of what was considered “residual data” to track, predict, and manipulate human behavior by essentially tricking users.
What I found interesting about this is how Zuboff addresses common questions regarding the loss of privacy – for example that big tech companies are simply using the data to improve the user experience, by countering that those companies take far more information than they need so they can sell to advertisers what will most likely emotionally affect you. Many times discussions around this topic tend to avoid or otherwise assume that readers/viewers understand why this mass surveillance is an overt intrusion of privacy. What’s more, Zuboff validates by presenting work from academics, so that the rhetoric of these companies dismissing accusations of privacy infringement as very “tinfoil-hat” is delegitimized. It’s really easy to simply give into apathy and accept that there is no longer a such thing as a personal, private life, but I felt Zuboff makes the case that as a society we ought to be very worried.
Cadwalladr, “I made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool”
Cadwalladr follows the story of Chistopher Wylie, the whistleblower who broke the news on Cambridge Analytica, how far and deep the story of election-meddling goes, and his own role in it. Wylie is portrayed as a kid who really liked tech, was good at it, and came up with the idea of linking personality traits and interests to habits, political views, and even willingness to support new ideas. He didn’t think about the broader consequences of working with people like Steve Bannon, Robert Mercer, and SCL, all of whom had their own agenda they wanted to implement.
What’s wild is that as easy as it is to criticize Wylie for irresponsibly allowing and helping with this massive data collection scheme, none of us five years ago would’ve ever imagined that something like having your one weird aunt take a personality quiz the one time would’ve lead to you and everyone linked to said aunt’s data being compromised as part of a larger scheme to unethically reap data to influence the presidential election of a major world power. If anyone, the people who took advantage of Wylie’s ideas are to blame. Facebook especially knew that something fishy was going on, but they turned the other cheek, knowing that they’d profit off of the ad revenue. This incident was even referenced in Zuboff, and I think it’s important to address the human cost of our (more specifically, companies’ and bad actors’) pursuit for power and wealth.
Questions:
Do you think Wylie is adequately taking responsibility for the harm his actions have caused?
How urgent do you believe the issue of infringement of privacy to be?
Near the end of her documentary, Zuboff points out that there was a time when we lived without all this smart technology, as a means to point out that we do not have to be reliant on these companies. What do you think of this? Can we go back to a time before data became our greatest obsession?
Do you believe the parties involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal were properly punished/held in check? What laws or rulings could be put in place to limit the ability of this sort of scandal to happen again? Do you think it’s even possible to prevent it at this point?
Define briefly “residual data” and its purposes.