Surveillance Capitalism or Information Republic?

Bibliographic info

[1] Williams, A., & Raekstad, P. (2022). Surveillance Capitalism or Information Republic? Journal of Applied Philosophy, 39(3), 421-440.

Commentary

This paper takes surveillance capitalism a step further by expressing that it impacts user freedom, so they propose that the user does not have a choice but to subject to surveillance capitalism, thus giving up their data to corporations and becoming dominated by them. I think the article makes good points as there is no alternative to these services unless a user chooses not to use the internet, which becomes virtually impossible in this digital age. It has become clear that even accessing government information or student grades requires using a device that connects the internet to log into a platform using an account tied directly to a user. Even though some platforms do not use data for their business operations, it has become normalized through the largest tech companies that users must partially give up their freedom to participate in society, run by surveillance capitalism.

Excerpts & Key Quotes

Page 426:

Workers’ structural domination puts capitalists in a superior position of power, enabling them to determine the content of the labour contract free from workers’ control, thereby dominating them.

Comment:
There is a valid point to be made of this. If it were not for the way the economy is shaped, citizens could have more freedom to dictate how their data is used and how services could be provided to them. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a free lunch, so a search engine on the Internet or a social media platform must find a way to keep their servers alive. Since these were both provided for free at the start, instead of offering a paid subscription model where they may potentially lose customers, they took the liberty of utilizing user data because no entity told them that they couldn't. Thus, we end up in a situation where the capitalists make the rules, and the workers must oblige to be allowed to continue using the platforms.

Page 430:

The fact that most people are unaware of the uncontrolled power these private corporations exert over them is troubling to say the least.

Comment:
I agree with this statement. While new regulations like the GDPR have shone a new light on the powers that a larger entity may hold against a citizen, it is still largely unknown how much data is being collected by these private corporations. This is made opaque by lengthy terms and conditions as well as possible information overload from repeated cookie prompts on each website the user visits. This is also troubling because this power can go unnoticed unless the user is made explicitly aware of how and why they can use the internet freely.

Page 431:

When someone saw a Nike ad in the 1980s, they did not have to consider the possibility that the reason they saw that ad was because a corporation had been monitoring their activity for the past fortnight and packaged and sold the analysis of their behaviour for profit.

Comment:
This quote cleverly shows the juxtaposition between advertising in the past, largely physical, versus today, mainly digital. It is hard to imagine walking through a shopping centre and seeing a paper advertisement, thinking that you may be manipulated by the ad you are seeing, unless the marketing strategy is very good and you feel that you need the product or service being advertised. However, this digital age makes it that the ads you see may not be truly random and can be based on past activity or the activity of users that are similar to you.