new: Surveillance Capitalism and the Climate Crisis

Signed-off-by: Joseph Nuthalapati <njoseph@riseup.net>

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+title: "Surveillance Capitalism and the Climate Crisis"
+date: 2019-10-08T15:40:09+05:30
+lastmod: 2019-10-08T15:40:09+05:30
+tags : [ "surveillance-capitalism", "climate-crisis", "technology-ethics"]
+categories : [ "ethics", "surveillance" ]
+layout: post
+type:  "post"
+highlight: false
+---
+
+# Surveillance Capitalism and the Climate Crisis
+
+When the climate crisis is the biggest problem of our time, you might wonder if
+something like surveillance capitalism is worth bothering about. What if I told
+you that they are related?
+
+Surveillance Capitalism created an attention economy where your attention is
+sold to the highest bidder. The most important problems of our time are masked
+behind the endless personalized advertising, media addiction and attention grabbing
+techniques of surveillance capitalism.
+
+Centralized social media helps centralize censorship on a global scale. A
+certain social media corporation that did nothing to prevent the Rohingya
+crisis (a genocide in Bangladesh) for several years has immediately sprung into
+action to censor the Extinction Rebellion movement which has a presence on their
+platform.
+
+AI-driven newsfeeds optimize for a politician's whataboutisms over news of
+climate change activism, because user engagement is the metric that social
+media is being optimized for. The loudest voices are heard all over but their
+algorithms don't show your posts to your own friends - not something we're used
+to in the real world.
+
+Surveillance has a chilling effect on activism itself. Let's say you went to a
+Climate Strike protest. An IMSI catcher placed at the site of the protest
+finds your mobile phone and informs the police that you attended this protest.
+If you are careful enough to leave your phone at home or switch it off, several
+video cameras with real-time facial recognition will match your face against
+national databases to identify you. If your goverment is not rich enough for
+this, helpful social media companies will tag you in photos (which have
+geolocation enabled by default on most smartphones) and sell that data to
+goverments or whoever is buying.
+
+The business-as-usual operations of Surveillance Capitalism are themselves
+responsible for a lot of Greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impact of
+cloud computing, most of which is used for big data and machine learning is the
+equivalent to the entire aviation industry combined (from a 2014 Greenpeace
+report). That's only on their side. We have to keep buying more powerful
+smartphones every year so that surveillance capitalist apps can listen to our
+private conversations, run the neural nets on our own devices to extract ad
+words out of them. The questionable ethics behind the manufacture of smartphones
+deserves a post of its own.
+
+The worst problem caused by Surveillance Capitalism yet is the availability of
+Behavior Manipulation as a Service. Mercenary Surveillance Capitalist firms like
+Cambridge Analytica can deploy their weapons of mass manipulation to get anybody
+who is paying elected to power. We end up with people who don't know the
+difference between climate and weather ruling entire nations, denying climate
+change and imprisoning climate refugees en masse.
+
+Fascism is making a comeback in developing countries as young people grow up with
+content recommended by black box recommendation algorithms which bubble up
+conspiracy theories, hate speech and propaganda, because engagement drives
+ad-revenue no matter what the content is. Rain forests with animals and tribal
+people inside them get burnt alive and nations with starving populations make
+war preparations.
+
+Surveillance Capitalism not only hinders the efforts of climate change activists
+but also has a direct effect in increasing carbon emissions both in its
+operations and also in helping climate change deniers come to power through mass
+manipulation. We need ethical, freedom-respecting software and hardware now more
+than ever not only to keep our mind, society and environment healthy, but also
+to minimize the impacts of the sixth mass extinction event on planet Earth.