Surveillance Capitalism
Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2019 6:33 am
Have just recently watched Netflix's The Great Hack which concentrates on the UK tech company Cambridge Analytica's role in both the Trump victory and the Brexit referendum result, in which the company basically applied "weapons grade" behavioural modification techniques to whole populations in order to achieve the results that they were being paid by their employers to deliver, and which we now experience in our daily lives. This is all good as far as it goes, said a review of the film I read after my viewing, but misses the bigger picture by focusing on a couple of individual instances rather than getting the point across that this has become the defining ethos behind the operation of silicon valley as a whole - that Big Tech has morphed from the open toed sandal wearing friend of the people into a mass surveillance machine whereby our data is harvested, scraped, analysed, and quantified, before being converted into prodding and nudgeing techniques, little carrots and sticks that are turned back on us in the form of testable methods of rewarding 'good' behaviour and punishing 'bad'.
Why is it, the review asked that people are so resistant to state surveillance, but not in the slightest bit concerned about the same if not much higher lever of peering into our lives carried out by Tech - and put to uses way more subtle and potentially disturbing. In a Ted Talk in which she speaks the 'truth to power' Guardian journalist Carol Cadwaladr asks of the Big Tech bosses, are they ok that their businesses are being used in such a way that "there may never be a fair election again?" This said the review, is to let Zuckerberg et al of waaay too lightly. There is ample evidence that they simply don't care - that their 'bigger picture' is one that goes much bigger than one that concerns what goes on in individual countries like the UK or USA.
The film argued that we simply don't take the care we should about what we are agreeing to when we skip the 'terms and conditions' pages of these sites, blithely ticking boxes agreeing to things we simply are too lazy to read about in our desire to get to the goodies. But this stuff is being harvested on a huge scale - about 5,000 personality/lifestyle indicator points on every citizen in the US and growing - from which incredibly accurate assessment can be made as to what prompts and nudges will get you to behave in either this way or that, depending on who is footing the bill. Trump at the end of his campaign was spending a million dollars a day on targeted Facebook ads, numbering 56 million in total in comparison to Clinton's 66 thousand. By simply identifying the 'undecideds' in the swing states and specifically targeting them, leading them in a direction, coraling them like sheep into the correct pen by utilising a series of targeted prompts and nudges (in the form of news stories likely to arouse anger as well as positive prompts toward the side doing the paying) the desired results could be achieved. In one case we heard how Cambridge Analytica was contracted to work on the Trinidad and Tobago election campaign. There were essentially two parties representing the Indian and Afro-Carribean communities respectively. The party representing Indian interests contracted CA to help them. CA, rather than trying to promote the Indian party positively, instead identified that the youth vote would be the deciding factor in the election and set about to influence it. But rather than to get the Indian youth out to vote, instead they decided to try to influence the Afro-Carribean youth not to vote. They started a social media instigated movement (represented by a pair of crossed black arms) purporting to be a 'ground-up' swelling of popular discontent with the voting system, pumping out the message of witholding your vote in order to register your dissatisfaction. The 'hipness' of belonging to this movement was pushed with dance bands pumping out the message, graffiti appearing on walls etc. The message was not directed at any particular group of the country's youth - but CA knew that only the Afro-Carribean section would get sucked in. The Indian youth would join the fun, dance the dance - but then go out to vote as their parents instructed. The results were of course a predictable win for the Indian party: job done. CA was using methods it had honed in it's work for the defence industry in war theatres across the globe, but applying them to civilian populations in the form of mass behavioural changing experimentation. Once tried out on smaller countries, the US and UK were the next targets and here we are now.
This then is the price we pay for the fun of our instant connectivity: for all of those likes and dislikes we pop off without a thought, those personality tests we think of as fun while we tell our phones our most intimate details without so much as a seconds consideration. We become the rats in a mass social experiment that gets ever better, ever more sophisticated in it's methodology, ever more subtle and specific in the behaviour it can elicit, and we kiss goodbye in all but the most banal of manners, to anything worthy of the name of freedom.
Ref; www.vice.com, "Netflix's 'The Great Hack' misses the bigger picture"
The Great Hack, Netflix films.
"Facebook's Role in Brexit - and the Threat to Democracy" , Carol Cadwalladr, Ted Talk on YouTube (please watch this one - it's only 15 mins and is so, so moving. Give me this quarter hour of your lives as a gift.)
Why is it, the review asked that people are so resistant to state surveillance, but not in the slightest bit concerned about the same if not much higher lever of peering into our lives carried out by Tech - and put to uses way more subtle and potentially disturbing. In a Ted Talk in which she speaks the 'truth to power' Guardian journalist Carol Cadwaladr asks of the Big Tech bosses, are they ok that their businesses are being used in such a way that "there may never be a fair election again?" This said the review, is to let Zuckerberg et al of waaay too lightly. There is ample evidence that they simply don't care - that their 'bigger picture' is one that goes much bigger than one that concerns what goes on in individual countries like the UK or USA.
The film argued that we simply don't take the care we should about what we are agreeing to when we skip the 'terms and conditions' pages of these sites, blithely ticking boxes agreeing to things we simply are too lazy to read about in our desire to get to the goodies. But this stuff is being harvested on a huge scale - about 5,000 personality/lifestyle indicator points on every citizen in the US and growing - from which incredibly accurate assessment can be made as to what prompts and nudges will get you to behave in either this way or that, depending on who is footing the bill. Trump at the end of his campaign was spending a million dollars a day on targeted Facebook ads, numbering 56 million in total in comparison to Clinton's 66 thousand. By simply identifying the 'undecideds' in the swing states and specifically targeting them, leading them in a direction, coraling them like sheep into the correct pen by utilising a series of targeted prompts and nudges (in the form of news stories likely to arouse anger as well as positive prompts toward the side doing the paying) the desired results could be achieved. In one case we heard how Cambridge Analytica was contracted to work on the Trinidad and Tobago election campaign. There were essentially two parties representing the Indian and Afro-Carribean communities respectively. The party representing Indian interests contracted CA to help them. CA, rather than trying to promote the Indian party positively, instead identified that the youth vote would be the deciding factor in the election and set about to influence it. But rather than to get the Indian youth out to vote, instead they decided to try to influence the Afro-Carribean youth not to vote. They started a social media instigated movement (represented by a pair of crossed black arms) purporting to be a 'ground-up' swelling of popular discontent with the voting system, pumping out the message of witholding your vote in order to register your dissatisfaction. The 'hipness' of belonging to this movement was pushed with dance bands pumping out the message, graffiti appearing on walls etc. The message was not directed at any particular group of the country's youth - but CA knew that only the Afro-Carribean section would get sucked in. The Indian youth would join the fun, dance the dance - but then go out to vote as their parents instructed. The results were of course a predictable win for the Indian party: job done. CA was using methods it had honed in it's work for the defence industry in war theatres across the globe, but applying them to civilian populations in the form of mass behavioural changing experimentation. Once tried out on smaller countries, the US and UK were the next targets and here we are now.
This then is the price we pay for the fun of our instant connectivity: for all of those likes and dislikes we pop off without a thought, those personality tests we think of as fun while we tell our phones our most intimate details without so much as a seconds consideration. We become the rats in a mass social experiment that gets ever better, ever more sophisticated in it's methodology, ever more subtle and specific in the behaviour it can elicit, and we kiss goodbye in all but the most banal of manners, to anything worthy of the name of freedom.
Ref; www.vice.com, "Netflix's 'The Great Hack' misses the bigger picture"
The Great Hack, Netflix films.
"Facebook's Role in Brexit - and the Threat to Democracy" , Carol Cadwalladr, Ted Talk on YouTube (please watch this one - it's only 15 mins and is so, so moving. Give me this quarter hour of your lives as a gift.)