The Surveillance Capitalism Giant

While we’re all focusing on getting out of the pandemic right now, we ignore one of the biggest threats to mankind. One not violating our physiological security, but our mental and emotional kind.

Surveillance capitalism, or as I would like to simplify it, Digital Break & Enter, is simply a billionaire and his allies trying to sell your data to his other billionaire pals as a part of monetary transaction that transcends all ethics, shoving them down the gutter. And the catch here is that you allowed them to do so. We grant permission and give access to all our information to several websites everyday and by default, become database for them.

When we enter a website, we become liable to trade our information with them in exchange of the information/ knowledge/ service we get from the website. This is just the business model of the Internet. Our information becomes what is called, ‘a mine’ for techies. Whether it is a natural resource ‘mine’ or the possessive pronoun, it depends on the company’s perspective. Data Mining is a full-fledged profession now. There are people whose daily job is to track activities, find patterns in their routine and then sell the data to other companies which is later used to advertise products and market services to them. It is the height of personal advertising but not in a good sense.

This might not sound like such a big deal, does it? I mean what if they sell our information. What’s the worst that can happen, right? We’ll just be spooked by advertisements and pop-ups, what else? Nothing else. But then you give them the right to mould you, seize your freedom, guide your thought, control your ideas and eventually, become a meagre dummy. These new concepts are exactly against what internet was meant to be. It was designed in order to liberate minds and make a space for people to gather stacks of information from, not become information for someone.

It is a very common saying these days while pointing towards the Surveillance giant that, ‘If you can’t see the product, you are the product.’ The concept has been very well explained in Documentaries and Podcasts all around, but then again, the overload of information and the options to choose what we want to consume has led us behaving like monkeys with attention spans shorter than those of Goldfishes.

This gives power to a handful of people to control, modify, and change what we want to think. Capitalism, which was supposed to be a fair game for skilled and talented players has become what it was meant to destroy. This has the power to breach your personal space, treat you like a puppet, mould your preferences and even swing Presidential elections of a country (remember Cambridge Analytica?).

Being honest, there is no practical solution to this. Experts may claim reducing your digital footprint maybe the solution to this. But recommending this to the race who cannot reduce their Carbon footprint, knowing very well we’ll die if we don’t, is outright over-optimistic. It is almost impossible to stay off the grid in this world. There is almost no job that can be done without the interference of digitalisation. So blatantly saying that we can beat this billion-dollar conglomerates by simply not creating a G-mail account is naïve.

We’re on their mercy, quite literally. Information trade is not an option for them, it is what they get their revenue from. That is how they became billionaires. If they want, they can sell our information to anyone and everyone. All we can do is just hope that they don’t…