Re: <nettime> John Naughton on Shoshana Zuboff: 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism

[James Wallbank <james@lowtech.org>]

Hi Carlo,

I'd suggest that your response doesn't acknowledge the fluidity and 
adaptability of capitalism, which is just one framework to manifest a 
desire to gain advantage and control. If you ban targeted advertising, 
that doesn't mean that advertisers will go back to "regular" advertising.

It means that advertising will morph into a different and almost 
unidentifiable practice. In fact, it already is. We see that advertisers 
mobilise social media "influencers", and we may sense (I certainly do) 
that supposedly "public service broadcasting" has been subverted. 
Imagine a circumstance in which the people who were advertisers are 
invisibly infiltrating every part of life, with techniques that may be 
impossible to distinguish from other cultural activity.

An advertiser can intervene at any part of the communication process. 
For example:

* If they're blocked from putting product placements into films, they 
can write films themselves.
* If they can't get media channels to feature their planted messages, 
they can produce their own channels.
* New foods, new fashions, new music, new rumours, new words, all can be 
engineered to render recipients (who become participants) more 
suggestible and more aligned with a particular way of thinking.

Some global producers are now so pervasive that they don't really need 
to advertise ANY SPECIFIC PRODUCT. The message "Got a problem? Buy 
something!" is enough to be to their advantage.

The key resistant mechanisms are education and critical thinking. In 
other words, for each individual to get smarter, to be more able to 
evaluate influences, and to gain greater agency over their own life. Of 
course, the mechanism of education itself is under information-attack - 
education is replaced by training, information replaced by 
disinformation, history is replaced with propaganda, truth is replaced 
by faith.

Resisting the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism on an individual 
level is completely feasible. There are numerous tactics to generate 
digital disinformation that disguises an individual's tracks. However, 
these may be pointless - not only do they expend energy, they also don't 
intervene at the contextual scale.

I have to say, I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. Unless a critical mass 
of individuals do manage to get smarter, we may be living in an age in 
which the very notion of individual, autonomous human consciousness is 
coming to an end. Each of us may be increasingly absorbed into a 
collective cultural/media matrix in which independent thought is simply 
not a thing. Welcome to the hive.

I shouldn't worry that much, though - because (fortunately) sea-level 
rise, energy crisis, ultra-nationalist revolution, soil degradation, 
pandemic, accident, fire, flood and famine will obliterate the 
group-mind and save independent thinking... at the cost of a few hundred 
million lives.

Happy days!

James
=====

On 25/01/2019 20:14, carlo von lynX wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 09:00:33PM +0100, Patrice Riemens wrote:
> > Well, as I understood Shoshana Z, the pb is that you cannot, in the
> > current dispensation, legislate something that would destroy the
> > very basis on which today's version of capitalism is based. Making
> > data gathering illegal is not a tweak, it's system(ic) change.
> That's an interesting "fatalistic" perspective. Let's discuss it.
> I don't see a reason why it should be so difficult to go back to
> where we were 15 years ago:
>
> - Booking targeted advertising becomes illegal/impossible, so you
>    go back to do regular advertising.
> - Since the whole industry does the same, your competitors have
>    no advantage over you.
> - If your business model was profoundly unethical, you go out of
>    business. That is intentional.
>
> Transition within months, mostly painless.
> That's my estimate, and I'm usually good at these kind of estimates.
> Just like a predicted that GDPR would not achieve anything substantial.
>
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