Summarised by Centrist
Dr Robert W. Malone discusses the concept of surveillance capitalism: an economic system where companies like Google and Facebook exploit personal data to predict and influence human behaviour for economic and political gain.
This is different from the traditional economic model where producing goods and services is the primary goal.
According to Malone, key features include secretive data collection (known as “one way mirror operations), power through user manipulation, and trading behavioural data.
Originating in the early internet era, it gained traction with the support of government agencies.
The consequences include loss of autonomy, threats to democracy, and increased economic inequality.
Author Shoshana Zuboff notes:
“We saw these same methods being used by Cambridge Analytica with those revelations a year ago with only a tiny difference. All they did was take these same every day routine methods of surveillance capitalism, pivot them just a couple of degrees toward political outcomes rather than commercial outcomes, showing that they could use our data to intervene and influence our behavior, our real world behavior, and our real world thinking and feeling in order to change political outcomes.”
