I thought I'd follow on from my recommendation of last week and dive a little deeper into one of the many forms and facets of Capitalism that has an enormous influence on the ethics of modern life.
Surveillance Capitalism is essentially the academic term for the modern big brother. Think of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft – all of the companies that collect and use our data to sell us things directly or to sell to other companies so that they can sell us things themselves.
These companies make up what Shoshana Zuboff first coined in her book 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism', and what they do is probably best defined by Zuboff herself:
[Surveillance Capitalists] "sell certainty to business customers who would like to know with certainty what we do. Targeted adverts, yes, but also businesses want to know whether to sell us a mortgage, insurance, what to charge us, do we drive safely? They want to know the maximum they can extract from us in an exchange. They want to know how we will behave in order to know how to best intervene in our behaviour.”
Zuboff and her colleagues, other journalists and academics, are utterly frightened of the impingements upon our privacy that Surveillance Capitalism is inducing and are attempting warn us of these. However, what frightens me is that I feel like these omens are falling upon deaf ears.
My impression is that most of the citizens of the world are actually not really concerned with the privacy of their data anymore. In the age of social media, it is even trendy to share everything about ourselves now. Or as Mark Zuckerberg put it, “privacy is no longer a social norm”.
What do you think are going to be the consequences of this? Is Facebook on the verge of its great downfall? Will Google and Amazon follow? Will regulations finally be imposed on the tech industry? Or is this just the way the world is heading?
There are lots of ways you can take your research on this one and many examples to extract from this topic, so pick one or two and grind them down to their bones.
