Sustainable Ecology
Shane Partridge Pear Tree Twitter
Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Two related events in the past five years have made us depressingly aware that when we use the internet, almost everything we do – our digital trail of crumbs showing where we have been, what we have read, what we clicked on, who we’ve contacted, even what we’ve written or said – is being recorded, stored, aggregated, analysed and made available for access to hidden parties.
First came the 2013 disclosure by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden of wide-ranging mass internet and communications systems surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency (NSA), including Prism, a project that tapped directly into servers at major internet and technology companies (which may or may not have been complicit).
And then there was the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which millions of Facebook users discovered their personal information had been shared with a company aiming to fine-tune rogue social media techniques for influencing voters, perhaps swaying the Brexit vote and the 2016 US presidential election.
In two important and deeply personal books, Harvard Business School emeritus professor Shoshana Zuboff and Russian-born American journalist Yasha Levine reveal that such surveillance, by the corporate world and the state, is not a dirty exception but the rule; not a malfunction or mistake, but the norm. These surveillers are intrinsically and historically linked.
Even “data”, as a term, erases the fact that it comprises the very essence of us – our likes and dislikes, our physical and emotional attributes, our social connections, our physical environment, the patterns of our daily lives. It is us, packaged and sold on for further exploitation.
“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data”, which then is utilised to produce “surveillance revenue”.
Surveillance Capitalism (Behavioural Data) and Climate Change
As the planet continues to warm, evolutionary changes are expected in other species as well — including Homo sapiens. Climate change will alter the internal workings of our bodies in subtle but significant ways and will likely cause a noticeable shift in our appearance.
Behavioural Data could be the prerequisite Shift in Genetic Science, altering the adaptability of Humans to exist in a World of Radical Climate Chaos.