Surveillance Capitalism Undermines Free Will and Democracy

Surveillance capitalism undermines Free Will – and democracy
Technology is first changing and altering our lives in many ways. Every device we possess in one way or another tracks and reports our movements and activities. As soon we wake up, our activities remain monitored, right from our text messages to the condition of our commute to the content of our shopping basket to our daily online searches, including our choices for mates and dates. All these recorded data happen behind and remain a vital asset for companies who sell them for profit. With the onset of the internet and platforms such as Google and Facebook, companies realized that they were sitting on a new asset dubbed “behavioral surplus” and traded in emerging markets for profits. When Google first started, its goal was to organize human knowledge but has evolved, and today, on top of doing the searches, they are also being searched. Facebook started as a social platform but now collects and trades some of the most secret individual secrets. Shoshana Zuboff, in her book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” alleges that surveillance capitalists limit our freedom. Concurrently, Jia Tolentino, in her novel, “In Always be Optimizing,” illustrates the different ways women’s free will and mainstream feminism are being controlled by capitalism. Our free will through the lenses of Jia Tolentino and Shoshana Zuboff is limited by capitalism. The manipulative nature of surveillance capitalist has made us blind and deaf to the ways these companies adapt to exploit our personal data for their own ends and, in return, take away our free will and democracy.
There is exclusive evidence that the internet informs and distracts from our sense of self. Through surveillance capitalism, individual data is tracked and sold. Our activity on the web is monitored through what surveillance capitalist consider as behavioral surpluses, and feeds taken and tailored to the unique needs and interests cultivated on the internet. Our ability to negotiate terms has slowly declined because surveillance capitalism has tricked us into believing that some products are vital parts of our self-identity, and we must have them to be considered complete. Tolentino writes that, with the internet, “the ideal woman now has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or a husband.” She goes ahead to state that, for this ideal woman, “the boyfriend or husband is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an intersecting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached” (Tolentino 63). Her free will has been sabotaged and now sees the world through the lenses of unseen audiences. Her free will has been sabotaged by the internet and for her to stay relevant she has to act as a worthy object to her viewers. Every information she presents or accesses serves as a direct commentary on who they are. Women, shaped by social media, have optimized their bodies and identities to align with what their unseen audience want and what the internet expects of them. They (women) now look like Instagram and are constantly reproducing lessons of the marketplace and failure to which they lose relevance and audiences. “As to who decides, this division of learning has been decided by the declaration and incursion of the owners of private surveillance capitalist as another essential condition of accumulation, enabled by the reluctance of the state to assert democratic oversight in their secret realm” (Zuboff 328). Surveillance capitalist utilize declarations and incursions to sabotage free will, thanks to the silence and reluctance of the state to assert democratic oversight. In many instances, legislation of technology has been cited as a complex process and hardly possible, and companies behind these technologies have invested billions in lobbying against oversight. Most of these companies define human experiences and behaviors as free for the taking. Most of these companies have succeeded in taking data and manipulating their behaviors because of their invasion by declaration and weaponization of human frailty. In addition, most of these giants have also mastered the art of secrecy and have made it almost impossible for both consumers and governments to understand their capitalist surveillance tricks.
Ideally, the sad part about surveillance capitalism is that they also seek to manipulate us on top of mining our data and deeply mastering our intimidating lives. Their operations seek to impose things on every aspect of our lives, so they continually grow rich while consumers continue to be controlled. Zuboff notes that “in the future that the surveillance capitalist prepares for us, my will and yours threaten the flow of surveillance revenues. Its aim is not to destroy us but simply to author us and to profit from that authorship” (Zuboff 337). Companies have perfected the art of behavior modification. Marketers have al...