Tetra - Surveillance Capitalism by Zuboff, Shoshana

By giving access to our personal informations and sharing our statuts in real time, we contribute in the building of the information era, a space where privacy and choice might become a thing of the past. The logic of surveillance influenced human behavior on unseen levels, creating a new cast of citizen submerged by automaticity, but also gave the opportunity for new business models to emerge. 

By accessing and accumulating the continuous flow of information of the population, Google and its analyst made themselves necessities in a world driven by productive efficiency. As the meaning of reality is switching to ‘reality mining’, continuous monitoring and monetization of behavior, how can we shed light on their mechanism and arm ourselves to keep up with this growing invisible network?

V.A.P.C - Week 14 - Resistance

Shoshana Zuboff’s article warns readers of the dangers regarding surveillance and how companies exploit it. Corporations such as Google obtain data from people via search engines, government databases, sensors and surveillance cameras, among many other methods. Said data is then sold to advertisers and other interested parties without the users’ consent. Worse yet, the information obtained is enough to craft a profile of an individual. Oftentimes the reason why so much information is collected is because the average person is oblivious to the consequences of sharing personal data. It is feared that should this type of scrutiny linger and grow, then it might become powerful enough to be ingrained within society and control the behavior of every single person in touch with technology. It would be to the point where people would give up their own privacy just to obtain the right to drive a car or to be provided with shelter. Despite these fears and concerns, is resisting this type of information gathering feasible? The tools and services available by using Google are useful to the point where most would be unwilling to give up their accounts due to the ease of accessibility that is provided. In addition, despite protests against data-stealing corporations, the latter are adamant to continue their activities; this is likely due to the fines and troubles related to the companies’ actions being negligible. However, despite these cynical odds, if news of these injustices continue to spread, then there might be hope for significant and positive changes regarding privacy.

Week 13 - BIG OTHER - 2ESDAYS

In our discussion, we noted that this article is very well-written on addressing the problem of privacy and surveillance in modern society. Our personal information is totally transparent to the people who are hidden at the back of the screens and monitoring us, However, we know nothing about them and we do not even know what they are doing with our data. In some situations, people don’t really know what are they giving consent to (Permission agreement is way too long). We also found that under the influence of information capitalism, there seems to be no trust on people, for example, we have to provide so many documents and goes through credit check processes to rent an apartment. Finally, we discussed that the data extraction processes happen almost every moment in our daily life and it’s inevitable. People can’t do anything to change this situation but at least each individual should be aware that “deception-induced ignorance is no social contract, and freedom from uncertainty is no freedom."

Week 13 - Big Brother - Ars-onist

Is giving up privacy an “incontournable” to have access to resources in modern society? As stated by Varian, the general public tend to converge to give up the fight against the invasion of privacy to get specific returns like mortgage, medical, legal or digital assistant advices. (p. 380) By doing such, we must question the long term impacts of our decisions. As seen in oppressive regimes today, the results can be devastating. Perhaps, we should start at the level of education about our human rights namely, the one to privacy. The author underlines important impacts of Web Giants to whom we give more personal data in our lives to illustrate potential consequences. Is giving up our privacy a necessity in our life, or is it just a social tendency to standardize a past luxury? The society we’re building around surveillance capitalism is strikingly similar to a digital Panopticon; most astonishing however, is the fact that we’re joining it willingly.

Surveillance Capitalism Zuboff S.H.A.M.E

The interesting thing about Zuboff’s analysis is the focus on capitalism being the driving force of the issues she details, rather than the more common nebulous descriptions that assign agency to search engines or technologies. She also highlights how surveillance capitalism is not a fault of the system but rather has become necessary for its growth. We need to recognize this shift and adapt to it, both by becoming aware of how our data is used, and by questioning the systems that enable it. Its ubiquity does not make it by default harmless, acceptable or impossible to change.

It’s worth asking, just as we ask “do we need to be surveilled like this?”, the follow-up question, “do we need capitalism, if these are the conditions it creates?”

S.H.A.M.E.

We discussed the implications of privacy when people our being watched. The text introduces the notions of public surveillance. Societies sometimes benefits from mass surveillance, but people loose their right to privacy. How does mass surveillance affects people's behaviour? Do people have a right to privacy?

We discussed about cyborgs and how the next evolutionary step for humans is to improve our senses. For example, if you attached a vibration motor that vibrates when you face north, it may increase your spacial awareness. Can improving our other senses impact our evolution?  How can technology merge with our biological selves to improve our lives.

Week 12 : Confused Coffee Beans - Foucault and Haraway

In “Panopticism”, Michel Foucault refers to Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, an idea of power with visibility using architecture. This process would maximise the power over the population to increase productivity, economy and education. Foucault describes what he calls discipline and relates two images of this theory: the discipline blockade, an enclosed space, and discipline mechanism, a machine to operate power for efficiently. As he mentions, this technique is already being used with the capitalist regime, where everything is control with the power of money. Indeed, Foucault argues that a more developed society could lead for better control and observation over the population, which is true. Just take the example of the television around 1975, only sophisticated community could afford them and due to their popularity, the government or else, could easily distributed any kind of message or information and the society was not even aware that they could be fooled through media.

In the “Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway discusses the concept of gender brought by cyborgization. Throughout its evolution, the human race has blurred the distinction between the human, the animal and the machine. She demonstrates that nowadays machines have made unclear the border between artificial and natural elements and that it has cause confusion with the concept of physicality. She explains that societal dualisms are becoming a big problem with machine, and for sure it is, since their are not as comprehensive as humans are. There are many distinctions that the machine can learn, but its processing of the information is based on a specific pattern and barely from its own judgement. Therefore, as Haraway argues, this will cause many social controversies, especially in a Western patriarchal raised community with groups such as the feminism. In bref, what Haraway wants is a world without gender, where cyborgs would all be equally judge and where they could create their own identity.

Dana Ryashy, Sol Paul, Xavier Champoux, Rose-Marie Dion