Surveillance Capitalism as Threat to Democracy | Hacker News Reader

Surveillance Capitalism as Threat to Democracy

nymag.com

23 pointsjashkenas7 comments

There are two points that I strongly disagree with:

1) The characterization of capitalism as a novel acquisitive behavior. This is ridiculous. People have always controlled things, such as they were able to. Capitalism is, if anything, the abstraction of ownership away from violence.

2) The notion that the digital industry is characterized by surveillance seems to me to miss the point. The motivating factors in instrumentation aren’t a desire to spy so much as a desire to ensure you’re wasting as much of your attention as possible. Facebook is less like big brother, more like a psychic parasite. Or drug dealer.

2) Or a government actor, given the revolving door between Facebook and the government, the army of lobbyists, the reliance of each and every political candidate on Facebook's advertising, and Facebook's influence on our democratic discourse. But sure, the digital industry is just trying to optimize time spent on their products, and these other larger concerns are besides the point. /s

I propose we make a new razor: Never assume machiavellianism when self-interest will suffice.

throwaway5167 didn’t imply that such companies are machiavellian rather than profit-seeking though, but that their profit-seeking nature leads them to be tolerant, even welcoming, of partnerships with actors who are machiavellian (ie driven by spying and propaganda) when that allows for more profit to be made, which is the worrying part

Regarding your first point, it was never the claim that such control is unique of capitalism, rather that it is qualitatively different in capitalism. Other have taken the point about the relationship to capitalism in the other direction:

>Once value is deemed to reside in individuals, everything changes. Firms no longer “create” value; they can only strive to realize the value that already exists in individual space. In this way, distributed capitalism further expands the concept of ownership. Not only is share ownership dispersed, but value itself is dispersed. Individuals “own” the sources of value, as all value originates in their needs, and all cash flows from the fulfillment of those needs. . . . As the origins of value and the source of all cash flow, individuals can no longer be written off as anonymous “consumers” who sit at the far end of the value chain, devouring the value created by managers and underwritten by shareholders. Instead, they are preeminent stakeholders in the new collaborative structures that are fundamentally aligned with the requirements of relationship value realization.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozo...

I do not leave comment because some surveillance process will make inferences about me.

So is censorship capitalism when it censors beyond what’s illegal (prostitution, illegal sales, cons, fraud, exploitation, etc).

Here, at least, with this, one would hope the owner has the ability and right to enable of disable unwanted features.

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