"Care for the needy requires the expenditure of wealth: when all share alike, disbursing their possessions among themselves, they each receive a small portion for their individual needs. Thus, those who love their neighbour as themselves possess nothing more than their neighbour...

For the more you abound in wealth, the more you lack in love."

— St Basil, reflecting on Mat 19

“In contrast, Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users… Instead of deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations, Google chose to reinvent its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behaviour by any means available in the competition for market advantage. In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends.” (Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism)

Zuboff spends a lot of time in the first few chapters of the book looking at Google as the pioneers of surveillance capitalism. One of the more interesting parts is the way the founders of Google initially rejected advertising. They were focused on building the best search technology. The behavioural data was only used to make their Search better, an exchange that users were willing to make. However, the dot-com financial crisis put a lot of pressure on them from their investors to figure out how to become profitable—and fast—so they pivoted and discovered how valuable that behavioural data was when being used in ways not for the benefit of the users. In four years they went from making no profit to $3.2 billion. By 2017 they were one of the top two companies in he world.

Again, Zuboff's point here is that the use of the technology in this way was not inevitable. It was result of deliberate choices made by specific people at specific times.

Started reading Shoshana Zuboff's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, this week. It's a topic I've been interested in for a while and saw this recommended recently.

Surveillance capitalism is essentially the way companies mine our data in order to predict, guide, and exploit our behaviours for profit. As Zuboff notes, it is practice that is so commonplace now we barely even think about it. It's also a practice that has increasingly become normalized in our offline spaces as well (the way we track our health and exercise data as an example).

Zuboff's early argument—and one I agree with—is that we effectively have no choice in this. It is everywhere and a part of everything. Its design is to feel both normal and invisible, so as not to draw our attention. And we willingly surrender to it in exchange for various conveniences and securities. As Zuboff puts it, "its normalization leaves us singing in our chains."

One key point that Zuboff makes that I want to highlight here is that much of these exploitative practices hide behind the argument of inevitability. The creators and enablers of them want us to believe that they are the inevitable outcome of the technology, this is just the price we pay for modern society. However, these practices are far from inevitable, and are instead "meticulously calculated and lavishly funded."

Resisting them begins with resisting the claim of inevitability. And understanding that we have the power to design a better way.

"Surveillance capitalism runs contrary to the early digital dream... Instead, it strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being ‘connected’ is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge. Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labour, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labour, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.” (Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)

"Perhaps the church is not so much the crumbling edifice we see but more a tent for the wandering people of God." (Soelle, Against the Wind)

I was reading a chapter this morning on Soelle's understanding of the church; and why she still feels apart of it. She references a conversation she had with Daniel Berrigan, who called the church a fairly inefficient umbrella. Despite getting a bit wet sometimes, 'it's there and I wouldn't want to do without it.'

She describes the necessary tension of holding the tendencies of the historical church towards both oppression and liberation, describing this as the tension between the church from above and the church from below. What's striking is despite the outright hate and dismissiveness that she personally received from the church throughout her career, she still sees a place within that tent:

“Now I feel much less alone in the church than I did some years ago… This momentum and its orientation carry me along, oriented toward reconciliation. My hope is for an end to the war between rich and poor that has shed and still sheds more blood than we can measure, and to the war between all of us and the earth who bears us. In this process I feel at home and borne by Christian tradition.”

As someone who has struggled to feel at home in the church for quite some time, I feel encouraged by this reminder that the church is not one thing and cannot be claimed by any one group. Yes, there can be hate and bigotry and selfishness but there is also love and kindness and self-sacrifice. The church holds both a history of oppression and liberation.

I am grateful for people like Soelle—and Berrigan—who spent their lives fighting for the latter even when the church itself turned against them.