“The companies insisted on their right to use facial-recognition systems to identify a stranger on the street without first obtaining the individual’s consent. As one lobbyist in the talks told the press, ‘Everyone has the right to take photographs in public… if someone wants to apply facial recognition, should they really need to get consent in advance?’”

Alongside reading the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, I've been blitzing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series (currently on book 5). I like to have a fun read going at the same time as something more serious.

And it's been a fun read. Genuine laugh-out-loud moments and captivating plot point moments. It's one of those series I find myself sneaking in reading almost every free moment I have. So, kudos to Matt Dinniman.

However, I have also found the world building and larger story very motivating. It's the story of resistance and pushing back against a machine and system that only wants to break you. There was one part in the second book that I found myself reflecting on.

“If it used to be okay, but it’s not okay anymore, then maybe you should do something about it. Don’t compare your circumstances with how they were yesterday. Look at how they were years ago. We’re supposed to be making the world… the universe… a better place for our children. If it’s not better, if you’re dealing with cruelty, with neglect, then you should do something about it.” (emphasis mine)

Reading an interesting section in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff) on Google's cycle of dispossession, which is essentially how they normalize taking away our choices of privacy in every space they enter. It focuses on Google Street View and how it began with a celebration of public space while simultaneously making the argument that we have a different expectation of privacy when we use them.

This is a tricky bit of work they're doing here; essentially trying to equate the eyes on the street notion of public life with the use of surveillance tech. But these are very different things, especially in the hands of a company like Google. Jacobs' eyes on the street is about establishing a shared sense of ownership for public space. When a place is used by people, it creates a sort of social safety net in which strangers are tied together by an unspoken common goal. They are the eyes of the collective stranger—the community—whose gaze is not salacious but watchful.

The use of surveillance tech in the public realm is something that has bothered me for a while. It's driven not by a shared responsibility of protecting the common good but the individual desire to protect private interests. One builds communal trust, the other tears it down.

Google's attempt to claim access to the public realm is similarly compelled by their private interests. These eyes on the street are not watchful, nor are they communal. They are the exploitative gaze of a company who harvests our behaviours for their own benefit, indifferent to what makes a shared space good.

"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.