Don't wait for the government to fix surveillance capitalism | Hacker News Reader

Don't wait for the government to fix surveillance capitalism

consult.sauvik.me

50 pointssdas718 comments

I feel like we should call it "manipulation capital" instead of surveillance capital. People are generally right when they say they're not super interesting, and so don't care that much about the surveillance if it means they get products for free.

Most people don't realize that they're also being manipulated by this data - there's a team of robot psychologists watching your every move and trying to change your behavior. Maybe to sell you products, maybe to change how you vote, maybe to change what drugs you take.

"Most people don't realize that they're also being manipulated by this data"

What would you say to such people?

I was trying to explain that to my friend with no success. "They cannot manipulate me that much. I do not care. I turn it off and decide by myself "- I heard in responce.

Depends on the person. To a technical friend, I'd just say, "this data is being used to effectively run a PID controller over your behavior".

To a less technical friend, I'd probably start with pointing out that modern advertising is trying to make Inception work in real life, and ask them to look at their recent non-essential purchases, and consider how did they come to desire the things they bought in the first place.

>to look at their recent non-essential purchases, and consider ...

I think this part is problematic. Some people can't do it. Even when they do they do not see or fail to admit connection and manipulation because they would feel stupid for failure to see. If they could "consider" they probably do not need me explaining ...

Still looking for any ideas that could work though. If someone have them please share.

For me, the extent of it only became clear after I (finally) started using uBlock origin (instead of only anti-tracking like Ghostery). Suddenly the in-store ads during grocery shopping actually felt like the manipulation attempts that they are (and not just like more of the usual).

I don't know if "give FF + uBO a try for a couple of months" works as advice to make people come around (I mean, "no more ads" should be pretty convincing in itself?)... But if it works, it may be a good first step to encouraging more privacy-oriented behavior?

"Manipulation capital" is marketing. Personally, I think unbridled marketing is a serious problem. You might have a hard time convincing everyone else that something that existed before they were born is a problem worth fixing, though.

There's a major difference between personally targeted advertising tracking you across your entire life, and broadly targeted things like billboards and TV ads though.

I think unbridled marketing is a serious problem

That's why serious countries have truth-in-advertising laws, laws against cold-calling private citizens, and laws against targeting specific demographics. But these laws affect marketing output, because up to web 2.0, individual target profiling was impossible.

So this is not something that existed since before they were born. A) marketing output never was unbridled, and B) marketing input never was this wide and detailed in scope.

Also don't wait for the government to fix the link, which is broken.

https://consult.sauvik.me/posts/surveillance-capitalism-gras...

I went and found a working one.

edit: wait, it kinda looks the same to me. I went to sauvik.me directly and then to the consult blog link and then found this post a few down.

Working for me for now.

I've tried grabbing copies at Wayback Machine and Archive.is, though those seem iffy as well.

:-/

Google text-only cache seems to work

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QUjj_N4...

Wow I never knew Google did this. Is this basically like Google's version of Archive.org?

Kind of, but there's only one archived version (the current one) and it's not consistently available for all pages. You can use cache:<URL> as a search query to get the cached page as it was received at crawl time. Or click the little arrow next to search results for the cache link.

How did a broken link get to the front page?

By breaking after it got there, I'd guess. It did load for me after a long pause.

Because people upvote without ever clicking on the link.

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