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)