From: Joseph Nuthalapati Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2019 19:19:55 +0000 (+0530) Subject: new: Surveillance Capitalism and the Climate Crisis X-Git-Url: http://njoseph.me/gitweb/blog.git/commitdiff_plain/f9dc82a9a5ae3acb28ce1de00608ecf5824763f3 new: Surveillance Capitalism and the Climate Crisis Signed-off-by: Joseph Nuthalapati --- diff --git a/content/posts/surveillance-capitalism-and-the-climate-crisis.md b/content/posts/surveillance-capitalism-and-the-climate-crisis.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..61890bc --- /dev/null +++ b/content/posts/surveillance-capitalism-and-the-climate-crisis.md @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +--- +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.