In a Nutshell: The Surveillance-Complex Industry

“These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.”

― Edward Snowden, Former CIA analyst and whistleblower

Surveillance has become a key dimension of the contemporary world. Since 9/11 there has been a massive intensification and extension of surveillance that is based on the ideology that monitoring technologies, big data analysis and predictive algorithms can prevent terrorism. It has been justified with a typical postmodern dichotomy, between security and freedom: we need both, but we cannot have one without sacrificing the other at least in part, and the more we have of one, the less we have of the other (Bauman and Lyon, 2013). Thus, instead of an “iron cage” of Weberian memory, around each of us is built relentlessly a much more powerful “digital cage” (Jarvis, 2010). This, however, will never be able to stop terrorism because most terrorists are smart enough not to announce their intentions on the Internet. On the contrary, evidence has shown that social media surveillance not just targets terrorists, but has also been directed at protestors and civil society activists, while at the same time inducing the “chilling effect”, which describes a situation in which rights are threatened by the possible negative results of exercising these rights, a deterrent effect of self-restriction.

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the existence of the Prism system have shed new light on the extension and intensity of state institutions’ Internet and social media surveillance. Today, in light of the Datagate scandal and the dissemination of new systems of pervasive surveillance – Video-surveillance, Facial Recognition, Predictive Models, Emotion Detectors, Social Credit Systems, Brain Readers Applied to Workers, Lethal Autonomous Weapons etc. – we can say to live increasingly in a ‘society of control’ (Deleuze, 1992). In several countries – particularly in China – it emerged a massive “surveillance-industry complex” that risks to escape democratic control and accountability and threatens the free and open character of our societies (Hayes, 2012). The reference is indeed especially directed to the increasingly known Social Credit System Score.

The concept of the military-industrial complex stresses the existence of collaborations between private corporations and the state’s institutions of internal and external defence in the security realm. Sociologist Charles Wright Mills argued there is a power elite that connects economic, political and military power: “there is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions. […] there is an ever-increasing interlocking of economic, military, and political structures” (Mills, 1956). In fact, according to the Snowden’s leaked documents, the NSA in the PRISM programme obtained direct access to user data from seven mainstream online/ICT companies: Aol, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Paltalk, Skype, Yahoo! (Fuchs, 2015).

Despite the hopes that the Datagate scandal could have triggered a broader debate on human and digital rights, the effects have been very limited. Dataveillance is an invisible and complex practice so that most of the users argue that they don’t care because they have “nothing to hide”, a fallacious argument resulting from a narrow way of conceiving of privacy (Solove, 2007). Snowden brightly summarized the unsuitability of this widespread attitude: “arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say”. Instead, the attempts to rule the Internet in order to constrain it have steadily increased since the Datagate scandal. Social media is still facing an economic and political antagonism between “users’ interest in data protection and corporate tax accountability on the one side and corporations’ interest in user data’s transparency/commodification and corporate secrecy on the other side.” (Fuchs, 2015, p.83). Exactly the opposite of the cyberpunk philosophy who animated the first “wave” of the internet, namely ‘privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful’, and this is evident in the configuration of social media data-driven business model.

The currently capitalistic logic of accumulation produces “hyper-scale assemblages of objective and subjective data about individuals and their habitats for the purposes of knowing, controlling, and modifying behavior to produce new varieties of commodification, monetization, and control” (Zuboff, 2015). This new global architecture of data capture and analysis indeed produces rewards and punishments aimed at modifying and commoditizing behavior for profit. Many of the practices involved in such “surveillance capitalism” are challenging social norms associated with privacy and, thus, are contested as violations of rights and laws. As a consequence, big tech corporations learned to “obscure their operations, choosing to invade undefended individual and social territory until opposition is encountered, at which point they can use their substantial resources to defend at low cost what had already been taken” (p.85). In this way, surveillance assets are accumulated and attract significant surveillance capital while producing their own surprising new politics and social relations.

But why such surveillance capitalism emerged? There are a variety of reasons. Firstly, it was constructed at high velocity and designed to be undetectable. Structural asymmetries of knowledge and rights, in fact, made it impossible for people to learn about these practices. Nothing similar ever happened in the past, so there were few defensive barriers for protection. Leading tech companies have been over-estimated, in a way respected and treated as ‘emissaries of the future’. On the other hand, individuals quickly came to depend upon the new information and communication tools as necessary resources, requirements – at times even preconditions – for social participation. Finally, as Zuboff (2015) argues: “the rapid build-up of institutionalized facts (…) produced an overwhelming sense of inevitability.”

This totalizing system of control stands on users’ scarcest resource: attention. And to capture it, increasingly sophisticated persuasive design systems are put in place to control us without a truly social awareness and, thus, any serious and effective defense. It is a pervasive and perverse system that might be detrimental for individual’s well-being, social cohesion, and, ultimately, democracy. The only way to fight this unjust and dangerous system is with rebellion, denunciation and, of course, privacy. We must raise awareness and spread the tools that ultimately protect our identities and communications.

References:

Bauman, Z., & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid surveillance: A conversation. John Wiley & Sons.

Zuboff, S. (2015). Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), 75-89.

Fuchs, C., and Marisol, S. (2015). The political economy of capitalist and alternative social media. The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media.

Solove, D. J. (2007). I’ve got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy. San Diego L. Rev., 44, 745.

Assange, J. (2013). Internet è il nemico: conversazione con Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn e Jérémie Zimmermann. Feltrinelli Editore.