What does privacy mean under surveillance capitalism?
lithub.com
lithub.com
That's a decent quote, not really anything new for most of us around here, but I think that hits on quite a few points in just one paragraph. I think this post is part of her book on Privacy?
It's always funny to read stuff like this when it's on a site that shows almost 50 things blocked between Privacy Badger and uBlockO. I know it's out of the author's hands, but I wonder how she feels about being on a site that's part of the problem she's writing about.
"The internet is primarily funded by the collection, analysis, and trade of data—the data economy."
I liked the bit about data collection, the rest seems a little out there.
Who says what is in our interest to buy? If people are not interested, they don't buy.
Pit us against each other? Destroy 'our' society? What about individuals going their own way? Must we stay together and agree?
Who gets to decide what is disinformation? Again, must we agree? Predictably, the next words are about democracy.
The entire premise of democracy rests upon voters being able to consume and digest information on their own. If the author doesn't trust voters that far, then why trust them to vote on our lives and property?
Unless they're convinced by persistent-enough marketing[1].
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...
if people don't want to be abused, they won't stay near abusers? I think we are beyond the point where we need to recognize that psycology is a weapon and even knowing how it works won't make you immune to it
People that say "oh ads don't affect me" have always confused me and reminded me of a line
> The greatest lie the devil ever made was convincing everyone that he doesn't exist.
But I'm also from a society that's traditionally been far less consumeristic than the West. (Although we're slowly getting there, yay!) I'm often dumbfounded when I read anecdotes on here and other forums about the stupid shit Americans buy. Not casting a value judgment or anything, just reporting how it feels from over here.
But I guess some things to look out for. There are far more than just "you might be interested in this product" type of ads. There are political ads, public awareness ads, moral campaigns/religious ads. There are ads that aren't intended to get you to buy a product but rather to be satisfied with your purchase (see coke). There are ads that are used to sell prestige and status associated with a brand (see cars and watches). There's native advertising[0] which often goes unnoticed and is a frequent guest on HN. The tricky things of ads is that they come in a wide variety of flavors but people think "coke" is the only kind of soda. It is also a cat and mouse game. Old Spice created their ridiculous ads (called anti-advertising) to stand out because saturation of one type took over. Native advertising has been growing over the last decade and taken prominence in the space and the entire intent of native advertising is to be an ad without the reader/viewer knowing that they are watching an ad.
Sure, maybe they don't affect you. But how sure can you be? Especially with the knowledge of native advertising. But let's assume they do not work on you. Does it matter if they work on others? It would be an absurd notion to suggest that they don't. With hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on ads per year (by single companies!) it would be a bit odd for them to be throwing this money down the drain. It would be a bit odd for politicians to do this as well. And once you accept the notion that political ads are a thing I think you have to accept that ads can persuade people to do things beyond buying a product. Carnegie and Rockafeller both used advertising to increase their public image in the early 20th century.
It would be odd for people to spend so much money on something that isn't effective.
Edit: I wanted to give a good example. If you watch "The Boys" on Amazon Prime (great show) you can see how Starfire's memes are all in fact a part of a marketing scheme and about brand awareness. This would be a version of native advertising, and one we've seen quite frequently, especially around political campaigns. But I don't think these types of memes even register as ads in most peoples' minds.
While the actual product being advertised may be irrelevant, do remember the names of the companies selling them? Congratulations, the ad was successful
I can't think of any company names that I'm not a customer of. I can think of a few products (Raid Shadow Legends), but it seems like that's a pretty huge investment just to make me remember a product I know I'm not going to use.
There are only a few brands of toothbrushes in supermarkets here. I've seen ads from them, but the reason I know the brands exist is because I've used their toothbrushes or paste. In the store I pick whatever's cheap.
I actually find this hard to believe.
I can name at least several car companies that sell cars I can't afford and probably never will (Porche, Ferrari, Lotus, Aston Martin, McLaren, or even Tesla). I prefer Coke over Pepsi and don't buy soda unless I'm at a fast food place yet I recognize at least a dozen brands. I don't shop at Walmart when I don't need (< once a year) to and never been to a Sam's club. I don't own Cyberpunk or even a Windows machine. I haven't been to a McDonald's in the last 5 years except when presented with no alternative (~3 times?). I've never played CandyCrush yet you can't open a Windows machine or a phone app without being bombarded with it (Angry Birds used to be like that too). You can't open Reddit without political memes (many are actually ads). Every single one of these companies/products has also advertised to me and I'm willing to bet you as well.
Either you're able to afford a lavish lifestyle or I'd like to know how I could live in this blissful world that you found (and escape the advertised filled one I live in).
I think the difference is that I live in a different country. I don't consume much local media and even if I did there are few enough local products that you would've heard of all of them by word of mouth. Take the soda as an example. I've certainly seen Coke and Pepsi ads, but I've not seen (or at least can't remember) ads for about half the sodas in my local supermarket. Even when Coke released Coke Zero the first time I found out about it was seeing it on a shelf in a store.
But let's say that all of what you're saying is true. The effect from it seems quite small. I'd estimate that I spend at least 5 minutes a day seeing ads.
So what I'm trying to say is that you think you see 5 minutes of advertising but I'm fairly confident you see substantially more (and if not, you're not just an outlier, but an extreme outlier). I'll give another example: the link from this post not only contains several ads on its page, but is an ad itself([0]). And I want to re-emphasize that many memes you see are also ads (again falling under the native category).
Ads have changed a lot in the last decade and if you think ads are just popups, the things on the side of your screen, or what plays between your favorite show, then you're not keeping up[1]. And more importantly, you have to think beyond products (I think this is our major disconnect).
That said, I've seen some compelling ads this year - it seemed more a function of correctly guessing my interests and tastes than successfully influencing my behaviour.
On YouTube we’re up to 2 pre-rolls these days along with an interstitial per 10 minutes, the in-stream advertising by the programme itself, the youtube page furniture ads and the obligatory roll of affiliate links in the description box.
I see none of it because i know how to avoid it but i’ve seen family members change how they use youtube as a result. E.g. opening an episode of a show on their phone, putting the phone down to go do something else then come back and rewind to the start and begin watching. I totally see how they got there but its absurd.
I think we're finally back to how it used to be on video sites: ads everywhere. This was the norm before YouTube, because video hosting is expensive.
Today you can buy it but it’s more expensive here $16-$22 despite lower median household incomes than in the US and i think it might be missing some features - Iirc the US version includes YouTube Tv.
No, it never has. YouTube TV is $65/mo in the US, YouTube Premium (formerly Youtube Red) is $12/mo.
This is because a politically active group knowing your religion could reasonably lead to being murdered or expelled from a country on a mass scale (eg, the world's rich history of kicking Jews out of various places [0]). That could happen anywhere because change is quick. A for-profit corporation knowing my religion ranges from a non-issue to inconvenient except that it is likely to leak to political actors.
The government moving in to fix these issues has a pretty solid risk of doing more harm than good. Countries who had bad SARS scares tended to do well at handling the coronavirus, and other countries tended to do poorly. Similarly I really only trust the European governments to handle privacy at all well because they still have recent scars from what happens if the government can discriminate easily between its citizens.
The people who are of most concern in the privacy debate are much more likely to be hiding out amongst the vocal "oh no there is disinformation" crowd than a credit card company or medical insurer.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Expulsions_of_Jews
According to this logic, consumers are helpless children. If we accept this, (I don't) the nanny state managing the purchases of childish consumers easily follows.
Perhaps drug addicts would be a less inflammatory comparison. Drug prohibition has arguably done more damage, and failed to eradicate drug addiction. We aren't talking about protecting helpless victims from violence. We are talking about using violence to prohibit individuals from freely trading with each other.
We are back at the core of the issue which I presented above. Who should decide what is a 'legitimate' purchase?
I’m only pointing out that there is an imbalance of power: a company can use a drone strike on your mind, you can defend yourself with a popsicle stick. Good luck.
I’m not proposing a solution but seems clear to me that individuals don’t have the power nor the weapons to defend themselves from what corporations with teams of psychology trained employees want them to do or think.
The problem is not whether we should make the product illegal, it’s whether instilling the need/want for the product in the consumer, especially with creepy tracking, profiling, micro targeting techniques available for cheap nowadays should be regulated (I think it should, for full disclosure)
>(sales) techniques available for cheap nowadays should be regulated
If I am reading you correctly, you're saying that some sales techniques are illegitimate?
Aside from outright coercion, marketing is not violence. Comparing it to a 'drone strike' sounds like hyperbole. Fraud and violence should be regulated. Segmenting an audience and targeting them with products is neither of those.
I have trouble with, "there ought to be a law!". We have so many laws already. Regulations increase each year. The Internet has been a free and open place. It created so much growth because it was a new, largely unregulated frontier.
We've observed regulatory capture in other industries. More laws will do little to protect consumers. Gov has almost no incentive to punish those who are collecting data for them. History shows that the big players will gain an advantage, while smaller publishers won't be able to afford the compliance costs. More platforms and walled gardens will follow.
If regulation were a panacea, the developed western world would be a utopia. Perhaps individuals would be better served by educating themselves and thinking critically about advertisements, propaganda and the media they consume.
> Fraud and violence should be regulated
Fraud is just "fraud" because a law says so, otherwise it would just be a entity taking advantage of some other entity (that has a disparity of information about what is going on). It's not violence either, so I'm surprised you would want fraud to be regulated.
I was going to respond further but I think we are in agreement that in the ideal world there would be less regulation. In the real world regulation not always works and has side effects.
Some people still think that that imperfect solution is better than letting corporations do whatever they want, and that yes education is good, but (in my opinion) it's not only long term "solution", it might not be enough against psychology.
Not only that, but there's much more to advertising than goods. We have advertisements for political campaigns that try to persuade voters, pubic service announcements that try to persuade people to take certain actions, religious marketing, prescription ads that tell you to ask your doctor, etc. Ads have never been about awareness but persuasion. This is even more clear when you investigate why Coke has ads or car commercials. Coke already has the market. They advertise to make you feel like you're choice was good, and you to feel good. Car companies advertise to build prestige and years later when you buy a car you have brand prestige.
It's never been about awareness, it's about selling you an idea as much as it is selling you a product.
"Shop at XYZ Pharmacy! Our prices are 5% lower than our competitors!"
That's an ad, it's persuasive, but it's also about awareness. There doesn't seem to be any moral issue with it.
Even if I replace our theoretical 5% savings with a picture of a scantily clad woman, or a group of young and happening business people, that's still persuasion - but we haven't suddenly created some moral harm.
Vote for X! Y is going to destroy America! <insert imagery of America being destroyed under Y>
A political ad is substantially more than awareness (which I'm not denying as being a part, I'm saying it is a small part). But this ad, like most, are there to convince you. It is still an ad.
This isn't to say that there aren't awareness based ads. There's also shitty ads run by first year film students. But these aren't what people are being bombarded with on prime time TV, in Times Square, or on popular websites. This isn't a mathematical proof where a single counter example discredits an entire thesis, because we aren't working in absolutes here. Acting like it does is arguing in bad faith. For what it is worth, the examples I gave for Coke and car commercials are taught in first year marketing courses as well as psychology courses.
Politics without compromise doesn't sound like a democracy, or a healthy society in general.
If the people making up the democracy are too naïve and uneducated to defend against external and internal threats then democracy will fail. Reality is that which happens regardless of your political beliefs.
It's based on consenting and supporting a shared set of morals, values, and fundamental ideas that define how a nation is organized, and which rights and obligations its citizens have and are bound to. This is formally enshrined in a constitution.
Why support such a framework? Because you trust that it will provide affordances towards personal security, liberty, well being, happiness,... and so on.
Such a framework only works if enough people back it. This is what requires collective trust. You trust that your neighbours support the same basic principles and are willing to back and defend them when push comes to shove.
Democracies tend to fall apart when people stop supporting these basic principles, and start distrusting others. This typically tends to happen in times of crisis when the foundational principles no longer are perceived as adhered to by other members of society.
That perception can be real or false. Real as in an economic crisis causing millions to lose their home without receiving relief from the state they back. False as in being goaded or manipulated into believing that those foundational principles no longer are adhered to by large fractions of society. The latter typically happens by playing at strong emotions, and ignorance.
A good example is how populists leverage polarization. You define an out-group, you attack that out-group and you describe them as not adhering to the foundational principles that govern the state. The twist is to use rhetoric that gradually shifts the goal posts that define those foundational principles. Each step of the way, you keep building and retaining consent as you refine your ideas. Down the line, populists win when they succeed in transforming that consent into legitimate authority.
> Whatever democracy we have depends on how well organized the general population
Any democratic society is self organizing. This creates a paradox, then.
That is, it organizes itself by popular vote. And this includes, paradoxically, the potential to organize itself towards disbanding the very principles that govern it's democratic organization.
This is why a lawful democracy can only survive if enough people are willing to band together and keep defending its very ideas and notions. Regardless of their present personal predicament.
That is an immensely naive statement. I'll take a very small stab at why. It's not advertisements people pay for. It's the behavior manipulation. Calls to action and being able to change the way people act.
It's slightly easier to post stuff on something like lithub (or Facebook, Medium, etc.), but then how much does one really care about this if the excuse is that doing something about it is a minor inconvenience?
People want their cake and to eat it to. They want don't just want to get read. They wanna get paid for it. Too bad the marginal value of any particular writer is about the same as it costs for hosting them. Zero. So we all get barraged with endless crap because fools still think writing essays online is a serious career path.
(The serious career path here is making middle brow YouTube video essays. Still questionable, but at least you might get paid.)
Your comment makes me think of Ostrom's Nobel-winning work on governing [natural] commonses[1]. The framework she developed over 40 years makes a case that public goods problems are often misunderstood, and often created by government. Gov does this under the guise of ostensibly attempting to support management of the shared resource, but is likely just trying to render the landscape into a format legible to gov itself. It abstracts away the power and ability to both monitor & enforce, among other things.
Her framework says collective stewardship of common-pool resources is possible under ~8 clear guiding properties: (we need to read creatively to think how this generalizes to digital commonses like the internet and data trusts)
1A. User Boundaries: Clear and locally understood boundaries between legitimate users and nonusers are present.
1B. Resource Boundaries: Clear boundaries that separate a specific common-pool resource from a larger social-ecological system are present.
2A. Congruence with Local Conditions: Appropriation and provision rules are congruent with local social and environmental conditions.
2B. Appropriation and Provision: Appropriation rules are congruent with provision rules; the distribution of costs is proportional to the distribution of benefits.
3. Collective Choice Arrangements: Most individuals affected by a resource regime are authorized to participate in making and modifying its rules.
4A. Monitoring Users: Individuals who are accountable to or are the users monitor the appropriation and provision levels of the users.
4B. Monitoring the Resource: Individuals who are accountable to or are the users monitor the condition of the resource.
5. Graduated Sanctions: Sanctions for rule violations start very low but become stronger if a user repeatedly violates a rule.
6. Conflict Resolution Mechanisms: Rapid, low cost, local arenas exist for resolving conflicts among users or with officials.
7. Minimal Recognition of Rights: The rights of local users to make their own rules are recognized by the government.
8. Nested Enterprises: When a common-pool resource is closely connected to a larger social-ecological system, governance activities are organized in multiple nested layers.
[1]: http://web.pdx.edu/~nwallace/EHP/OstromPolyGov.pdf
(anyhow, hopefully this seems interesting, but pls disregard if not :) )
There are a couple of prerequisites to add to that:
First, Local social and environmental conditions can be articulated in an internally consistent and coherent manner.
Local stakeholders largely agree on the captured articulaton as correct.
s/internet/www/
The internet is a medium. Interconnected ASNs. Cables, switches, routers, etc. It's hardware.
Whereas the above statement -- which sounds very much like a media-ready soundbite from another author, Shoshana Zuboff -- presumes that a medium is synonymous with whatever it is used for, e.g., a www filled with "content" created as bait in order to lure consumers whereupon "content providers" can then surveil, collect data, process and commercialise it.
If the internet, the medium over which our bits travel, is funded by collection, analysis and trade of data, then why are we paying ISPs? Who is paying the costs of sending all this data to those who will analyze and commercialise it. Consumers are funding those transfer costs.
Users pay for the Internet. Advertising pays for the Web.
https://thenib.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/mister-gotcha-...
That's the problem that is so poignantly illustrated by this post - you can't not participate, or you lose. That's what makes it so insidious and why we shouldn't just dismiss good arguments out of hand for this reason.
Sure you can unless you shoot yourself in the foot and try to run an online ad business without ads or tracking....
Our businesses website has exactly zero trackers and zero external calls, yet we live just fine. If I really want to see some stats I can just look at it via the webserver logs. This is just people being lazy and/or greedy.
It's almost as if you don't have much of a choice to participate.
Sort of like smoking: people used to do it because it was cool, even after the enormous health problems were well-understood. And it didn't stop being cool until enough people started to treat it like a gross and dirty habit.
I think it’s one of the only ways to change society but it should be done with a light touch. With smoking I think people thought “it’s gross” not that you are a gross and morally repugnant person. So demonizing the act and not the person is important.
Granted if people are not using social media the mobs will be smaller, but even if everyone is in communities the size of HN, it’s still possible to form “mob sentiment”
"Social-media-using" should be treated like an adjective that modifies the individual, not a noun that defines them.
It's a shame that nuance seems like the first thing to go out the window when we use social media sites like this, but maybe someday we'll be able to do better.
Start by shaming government officials and organizations, any official government channels, even schools and school boards, that require tools provided by surveillance capitalists. If a ToS and privacy policy to a third party is required, then your right to freedom of association is infringed upon.
If governments make official releases only to walled gardens, then those who choose not to associate are cut-off from important information in the political process.
Giving up your equal rights unless you give in to surveillance capitalism is a threat to democracy.
Start there.
We will find another way to fund the internet. I have no doubt about that.
Obviously there are good reasons to have advertising, but we’re so far afield at this point, big changes are required.
Regulate it into the ground, and watch societies that don’t also do so, turn into slave nations.
Word of mouth is good because it encourages businesses to provide the best service & value as that will directly affect whether they get referrals or not.
Phone book is also good because although it's similar to advertising, it's advertising that benefits both sides. The customer is in the market for a service and looks at ads from businesses that are looking for customers, unlike now where ads are pushed at you even when you don't actually need anything and distract you from whatever task you were doing.
There's no reason we can't have a modern version of the "phone book" where businesses can publish ads for a nominal fee (to pay for a background check to ensure they're legitimate) and prospective customers can then search through it.
Same here and now. Even if we did restrict advertising through laws, it would be a race to see who could advertise “legally” first, and thus suddenly capture everyone’s attention.
This would still resolve all of the issues caused by the current model of advertising, so I think it's worth it. Sure, it may make business more difficult, but so do the various safety regulations we already have; being in business is not a right and if your business can't be sustained without heavy advertising (which has negative externalities) then maybe it shouldn't exist?
- Buy the largest storefront in the most visible area, even if all you have is one product
- Create a shell company that creates directories, position it as “the best directory for <your industry>”, charge bleeding-high prices then give yourself adspace for pennies
- Good old fashion bribery: pay the lawmakers 10mil to put in a clause so that you’re allowed to advertise “in the header of your own site”, then buy a bunch of industry sites
Keep in mind that any solution has to understand that at the top of the heap there are companies making millions of dollars per month, and who are willing to spend whatever it takes to keep the revenue high
The important thing is to encourage mutual engagement and trust between sites and their users. Sites don’t currently need to do this because personal information stripping by the advertisers substitutes for it very well. Take that away and the relationship between authors and audience get pushed to the front, where they should be.
I think "ban advertising" is a naive solution to an extremely complex problem. Personally I'm okay with advertising if it isn't intrusive. What I'm not okay with is manipulation, which is hard to pin down where you draw the line in the sand. And specifically the problem ads in this space are often impossible to differentiate between ads and naturally arising memes.
Still, I think banning advertising is a bad idea, even if I personally would be happy if I never saw a bit of advertising again in my life. It can perform a valuable function, especially if there's an underdog that is trying to offer a competing widget, say one that is more sustainable and also cheaper. Without advertising, I could see a large incumbent making it nearly impossible for this underdog to make a dent, which would harm customers of that product category.
In that case the advertising isn't "hey, I'm going to use psychology to convince you to buy this thing you don't have and don't really need" (the thing I object to), but "hey, I know you already buy this thing, but I'd like you to consider buying my version of it, which is objectively and factually better than the thing you're already buying". I think that is valuable information to get into the hands of potential customers.
But I just don't see a way of legislating away the psychological-manipulation types of ads while keeping the genuinely informative and useful kind, at least not without purveyors of the former finding loopholes to pretend that they're pushing the latter.
Where we draw the line could be where people make a business out of advertising. Those businesses would be illegal.
You should fear both. Big Anything will eventually abuse their position of power after leadership changes hands enough times. And who is going to help you tame Big Government when they hold all the keys?
I see a lot of rhetoric around "free markets" and "not interfering with enterprise" -- usually pushed by corporations themselves. People need to reject that thinking and understand that the corporations don't have their best interests at heart when they say these things.
The reason enterprises don't want the government to interfere is that often the government is used maliciously to deal with competing enterprises. It's still the government doing it though, whether a corporation influences the politicians or not. And if this is on the table then corporations will fight over getting politicians on their side rather than improving their product. After all, if you can outlaw your competition then that's a better investment than marginally outperforming your competitors with a slightly better product.
On one side you have an article that is supposed to inform us to defend our rights.
But when you try to read it, you are blocked by one of the worst cookie content popup that I have ever seen.
The only easily accessible option is "accept all".
You have just a small discreet link to "see partners".
If you click on it, then you have a list of hundreds shaddy ads/spy services.
You can't disable them all, you would have to uncheck them all individually manually.
And there is the shittiest thing:
For each one you will see 2 check boxes. "Legitimate interest" (on by default) and "consent".
Naively you would think that "legitimate interest" means that it is just the strict minimum for the service to be technically working.
But no, if you go to see the details they both do the same thing, ie recording server side a custom profile for you based on what you see and do. The only difference is that with "consent" they additionally keep things in your cookies...
You might be blocking everything.
If I had unchecked all of them it would have taken me longer to do that than to read the article.
That should be the default for everyone. :/
You can also see which cookies / tracking domains were blocked there are over 20 tracking cookies on that page...
It's funny and sad; when PoI first came out this was considered fiction. Then Snowden happened and proved it reality.
And still not much has changed 7 years later.
His premise that as soon as a system knows us better than we know our selves (e.g. facebook) then we can diverge all choices (what to eat, who to marry, what to watch) to the machine and then it's a new kind of dystopia were no decision needs to be taken by a human who is comparatively uninformed. Now, as he points out, if the system has glitches a-la Matrix and Neo comes along, we basically keep being the "heroes" of our story, but what happens if the system _really works_ for us... What if a computer can match mine and another one's happiness with a % of success that it's impossible for me to match, what happens then?
I believe that these ideas are in his book “21 lessons for the 21st century”.
It might make you happy to be in control and to be able to choose yourself. AIs and their benefits are largely result oriented, but there's also process orientation, where the way or trajectory to a result is equally if not more important than the result. That's the kryptonite for computer systems.
I met my wife from an algorithmic match in an app. My resume was surfaced to my employer from a similar tool. My company makes money from the surveillance data economy which makes the originators of those funds (companies who want their ads to be seen by high probability product purchasers) happy.
So yeah, throw me in the Matrix / Borg Cube.
since any system has to start with a set of assumptions and expectations, and based on feedback loops for what works and what doesnt, always optimizing for what "works", wouldnt such a system more and more narrow itself down to a limited scope of outcomes and possibilities that basically we stop being peoole and turn more and more into basically narcisistic psycophants?
wouldnt it basically be the end of evolution and society?
EU seems to care a bit more. Mostly because Google and FB aren’t European.
How do we get a sane government that works for the people? Because voting just doesn’t cut it when there is little accountability for those who are elected.
Author says "… they know you are reading them. …". Yes, the article is published in a way that tells them so.
I’m a former software engineer now homeless in SF, and man do I feel like a Truman with these things sometimes.
God willing, I’ll document the formations I’ve seen and see if I can cross referene a CCPA request with my info at times/locations that I happened to catch interesting dashcam footage or made a mention of it.
You know what privacy means under surveillance capitalism? The ability to erase.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t covering up murder it’s more along the line of trimming the visitor list to hide infidelity.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
We set as either public practice or into law that people own their personal data, which is not a hard stretch. Think about that for a moment. What does it mean to own something in a capitalist system... think... think hard... YOU CAN SELL IT! Actually license in this case, but you get the point. If you're in the back of the class or still on the short bus, what I'm saying is this: a company can collect and sell YOUR data... for a fee. You get a percentage (or flat rate if that's your jam) of whatever they make, in perpetuity. Let's even classify your data as copyrighted content, just like books and other media. You do "create" your own data. After your death, your estate (children, etc.) get that fee as well for... I think it's 75 years after death, or is it 50... I don't remember how long book copyrights are. Exact number doesn't matter, but you get the point of where I'm going.
But nay you say! Nay I say in return. Companies do this already. As a fond and active capitalist, I've made it a habit to get paid to learn new skills to great success. I've even held in shits so I can make sure I get paid to shit (only a few times and strictly so I can truthfully make this comment, again, you get the point). Anyways, companies do this by licensing their own data out to other companies. Now, since companies get taxed/treated as "people" (USA), there is ZERO reason actual people can't do this. Oh wait, I know why. "People" are better educated in the sex lives of celebrities, memes and what's the latest pop culture, superhero show/movie.
The tools to solve this issue are built into capitalism and basic western governance in the last 100 years. Hell, it's also a decent way to redistribute wealth in a very fair method that's hard to argue in a capitalist society. No one is "overburdened" by letting someone else coast on someone else's work. Everyone thus has a "product" to sell in a mass format just like book publishers or movie streaming services.
But hey, I'm the asshole that likes real world solutions that are based on centuries old established working principles instead of unicorn fantasies that have never worked, like communism.
You claim the reason people are not selling their data is because they are too obsessed with culture or something. In reality there is an imbalance of negotiation power. A company can sell their data because they understand the game and have leverage over other companies. They can say "buy our data, it's valuable and there's only one of us". A citizen cannot do that.
Besides your data is already in circulation and they don't necessarily need it to be tied to you in order for it to be a generally useful human data point. How do you 'tax' that which has been stripped of your ownership and distributed far and wide?
Nevertheless I don't think you're going to get this put into law. Legislation is an unstable and unfair method of change that is biased towards people who can afford to partake in it.
whats the solution then?
What exactly it should look like, I don't know. We have a great many ideas on how to do, informed with historical experience though, and it's very high time for some radical social experimentation, from market socialism to decentralized planning and much more, and many have promising preliminary results. We have to set up experiments of these ideas of increasing scales and eventually completely change how we organize our society.
This perspective (and there are many like it), firstly, tries to tie the problem to capitalism as if it's the engine that corrupts, and, secondly, tries to equate whats going on to surveillance since we presumably can all agree that surveillance is bad.
If you are to make an ass out of yourself or expose something private about yourself in public, its not surveillance if people form opinions about you or gather that information (the lifelock guy and his SSN come to mind - no one would argue his personal information was hacked). I think part of this stems from a bad mental model of what being on the internet is: if Facebook/Twitter/other social media are the new town halls or pubic fora, it's difficult to consider you can be in public from the privacy of your own home.
It is also not some unavoidable aspect of capitalism for your data to be used for potentially nefarious purposes. Consumers are just poorly informed of the transaction that is taking place. To label it "surveillance capitalism" implies that removing the profit motive would mean no one would ever "spy" on you or collect your data. Even a cursory overview of the 20th century or modern China shows how dishonest that implication is.
For a quick perspective on the economics of your data, Google reported $160B in revenue on 1B active monthly users in 2019. If google charged each user $13/month for access to all it's services, it would make the same amount of money. This is on par with a Netflix or Spotify subscription.
Should companies be forced to offer some sort of paid tier where your data is not collected? Perhaps. Should consumers be made aware of what they are giving up when they use a certain "free" service? Sure. There are many problems with our current system and our current understanding of things, but one problem that we do not have is being subjugating to the predations of a "late-stage" "surveillance" capitalist machine.
We can blame consumers for being unaware, or not active enough in defending their rights, or not careful enough in guarding their privacy and their mental models, but I am under the impression that it is more productive to work towards or at the very least orient ourselves towards a society where you do not have to be paranoid at every step instead of one that prioritizes simply assigning blame on an individual level and abandoning the idea of addressing structural problems.
In a sense, arguing over what is real capitalism or not in a defensive posture doesn't really address the issue. Pointing out that a subscription model would be the same in terms of revenue misses the point that Google is growing too big to remain a positive force in people's lives. In both cases we start from flawed premises.
What might be more productive is if this article equated what is going on to deceptive or fraudulent business practice. This is a concept most people can agree is bad and would want to do something about regardless of whether its from private businesses under capitalism or by the state under either capitalism or communism.
Let me be clear here that I am in no way arguing for some sort of libertarian dream of unfettered capitalism - some of my policy prescriptions included forcing companies to offer a paid tier. But the author casts the collection and selling of data as something that is inevitably going to lead to harm in society. Does the author or anyone here believe that something like Google Search would be a quality product if run by the government? Or that it would be more trustworthy? Take the 2 American political poles' bugaboos - voter suppression and voter fraud - what would a state run search engine that supposedly didn't collect data on its users have to return for those queries?
I think I largely agree with your sentiment although there is another aspect I disagree with: that Google is too big to remain a positive force in society. Unless I am reading that wrong, it implies that there is some level that once something reaches it, it has to be bad for us. You could make this same argument about governments. The US government is larger than Google with more power, if it can no longer be a positive force in our lives, must it be scaled back? If at it's current size, it cannot come together and regulate Google from engaging in "surveillance capitalism" and we must make it smaller, what are we to do?
capitalism is, at a very basic definition, the utilization of capital to generate more capital
data is just one form of capital
separating "data economy" with "capitalsm" doesnt really work in my opinion...
I haven't heard of "Surveillance Communism" as a developed distinct concept.
I guess if "capitalist mode of production absolutely good and communist mode of production absolutely bad" is taken as a given then the parent comment would be "facetious" as in dismissive of the article being discussed.
Surveillance communism used analog phone wiretaps and human agents, thus limiting the damage.
NOTE: I meant a Soviet-style "communism", and not the current label that's widely applied to anything, and certainly not a Chinese-style regime. Think USSR and DDR.
However, I fell into a trap: every time someone uses the loaded words like "capitalism" and "communism", it's safe to assume you are being manipulated, since the phenomenon needs to be clarified: is it an economic model, a model of government, or anything else.
I doubt China limits it's surveillance to wiretaps and human agents.
And whether or not you think China is not an implementation of communism, both their government and its subjects would largely disagree.
let's see 0 + 0...carry the 1....um I've arrived at 0.
Is quality healthcare tied to the economic engine of its country? How is universal health care in North Korea? Pretty good?
You're conflating separate issues and presenting them as indictments of capitalism. That is either deliberately disingenuous or horribly ignorant. Either way, I suggest you pick up a book other than A People's History of the United States.
UPDATE: Small addendum since you are confused as to what capitalism is. Your 14 year old nephew does own capital: their labor. Their ability, depending on labor laws in their state, allow them to offer that labor in whichever market or not. An option that would be deprived of them in a system that follows the prescriptions of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."
Their labour is a factor of production but it is _not_ capital. Here is an introduction to the factors of production: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Factors_of_production . (Notice that both in classical/liberal economics and marxist economics labour is distinct from capital)
> Their ability, depending on labor laws in their state, allow them to offer that labor in whichever market or not.
That is a commodity and _not_ capital and is normally discussed as the commodification of labour: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Commodity (Addendum: there are many examples of regulated commodities like those containing tabacco and alcoholic beverages)
> An option that would be deprived of them in a system that follows the prescriptions of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs."
How so? They would still be able to labour (according to their ability) and would receive what they need (food, housing, medical treatment, education, entretainment, etc.) according to their need.
Even in a capitalist mode of production you cannot "choose" to labour in a particular employment. The employer would gauge ability and the most effective number of employees; Lets assume that hypothetical nephew doesn't know how to cook and wants to work as a chef in a gourmet restaurant or isn't a nuclear engineer/scientist and wants to work as a nuclear plant operator like a fellow named Simpson.
From unit 1.2:
> HUMAN CAPITAL[Many textbooks discuss “labor” instead of ‘human capital.” We use “human capital” because it involves much more than physical attributes and helps students focus on the reason why they are in school.]
Student's earliest exposure to formal economic education begins with definitions that deceive people into believing they are capitalists when they are in fact selling their labor power for wages.
[1] - https://www.ccee.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/OTHER_PDFS...
BTW, the 9 point outline in that PDF is actually a good framework for understanding and learning to navigate a capitalist, market economy, so I wouldn't say it exactly makes your point.
Edit: Ah, ok, the indoctrination portion of the program comes a little later on in the file, lol. :P. Consider the last part of my last sentence withdrawn.
Now, back to the question I posed to you: did, or did not capitalist nations participate in wars of imperialism for the sake of economic expansion, which then resulted in people dying?
PS: I know damn well what capitalism is. It's private ownership of the means of production, along with a market based economy and enforcement of private property rights.
If you understood what capitalism was, or even basic economics, you would know that labor is one of the factors of production which is completely separate from capital. You also grossly mischaracterize how labor works in a socialist framework, again showing that you've never cracked a book other than maybe Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom.
Moreover, you have no literal idea what a capitalist is, either, so I'll tell you: a capitalist is one who generates his or her living solely or mostly off of capital. Capital is defined as "means of production," including land, tools, and other things besides labor and raw materials that allow for this thing we call "production" to happen.
And, I know you have this strange notion of the word "voluntary," whereby because I choose not to starve or freeze on the street, I have to live indoors, and, because I can't afford to buy my own home, I have to rent, yet you consider it "voluntary" that I have to agree to a coercive contractual agreement in order to have an extremely basic standard of living. This is laughable, and capitalism deserves all the jeers it gets for redefining common sense terms like this.
So, anyway, let's not continue to deflect, and return to. the main point: do you want to answer the question or not? Did capitalist nations participate in wars of imperialism for the sake of economic expansion, resulting in the death of even one human? One is greater than 0, after all, so, if you can acknowledge that, then we can begin a more thorough accounting of the deaths of capitalism.
The Bengal Famine killed over 10 million people[3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Food_ex...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#Causes_...
[3] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2014/7/17/1314447/-Capitali...
> According to The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx, "Marx used many terms to refer to a post-capitalist society—positive humanism, socialism, Communism, realm of free individuality, free association of producers, etc. He used these terms completely interchangeably. The notion that "socialism" and "Communism" are distinct historical stages is alien to his work and only entered the lexicon of Marxism after his death".[36]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism#Communism,_revolution_...
Within that framework, it sounds like surveillance capitalism is infinitely worse than surveillance communism, because the framework of surveillance capitalism exists only to exploit and commodify people, in order to sell them things. Or worse, commoditize them in order to sell "them," i.e. their data, to others whom the subjects of said surveillance never consented to share with.
OTOH, the hypothetical framework of surveillance communism would at least be intended to benefit society as a whole. I don't know if there's any contemporary thought on the matter, but Marx probably couldn't have conceived of the type of mass surveillance we have today, which means he probably wouldn't have understood the question straight away.
What country? Did you assume everyone visiting and commenting on this website live on one country?
I never assumed everyone, I am replying to pmiller2. And yes, I am assuming pmiller2 and I both live in the United States. There is a pretty good chance I am correct about that.
How fun are you at parties?
The relevance of the assumption is that I made the statement "the education in this country has failed us" - us being you and I. So the relevance is that we both live in the same country regardless of our race, gender identity, or sexuality. I am not how you managed to pull all of those things in.
If it is "tiring" to attempt to argue with me, it's because I don't fall for your pathetic rhetorical attempts to inflame, and you don't seem to be able to read what I said without making a straw man out of it. Name calling does not constitute argumentation. Do better, please, if you can.
BTW, I am a English native speaker. I truly wish I could get a refund on my English language instruction, and instead have had the luxury of being born somewhere civilized.
Yes Survailance Capitalism is a nightmare and a real thing but such fake stars should be weeded out. It is just a shame how low can some people go.
My "spelling" has nothing to do with meaning, but as a nice childish (and highly comparable to your statement) test, we can try your spelling in in my language. Or should we rather try one of other 5 languages (excluding english) that I am able to communicate in? Be my guest.
Highly doubtful.
She's sitting on a perch in Oxford. This is an establishment voice who is, no doubt, merely one voice in a (predicted) rising crescdendo of support for our "friends" at Central Banks (aka the Banksters) and their about to be unveiled (like it or not) Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
https://hbr.org/2018/11/what-if-banks-were-the-main-protecto...
Not "self" promoting. She is (ultimatly) promoting CBDC Digital Identity.