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Commit | Line | Data |
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f9dc82a9 JN |
1 | --- |
2 | title: "Surveillance Capitalism and the Climate Crisis" | |
3 | date: 2019-10-08T15:40:09+05:30 | |
4 | lastmod: 2019-10-08T15:40:09+05:30 | |
5 | tags : [ "surveillance-capitalism", "climate-crisis", "technology-ethics"] | |
6 | categories : [ "ethics", "surveillance" ] | |
7 | layout: post | |
8 | type: "post" | |
9 | highlight: false | |
10 | --- | |
11 | ||
f9dc82a9 JN |
12 | When the climate crisis is the biggest problem of our time, you might wonder if |
13 | something like surveillance capitalism is worth bothering about. What if I told | |
14 | you that they are related? | |
15 | ||
16 | Surveillance Capitalism created an attention economy where your attention is | |
17 | sold to the highest bidder. The most important problems of our time are masked | |
18 | behind the endless personalized advertising, media addiction and attention grabbing | |
19 | techniques of surveillance capitalism. | |
20 | ||
21 | Centralized social media helps centralize censorship on a global scale. A | |
22 | certain social media corporation that did nothing to prevent the Rohingya | |
23 | crisis (a genocide in Bangladesh) for several years has immediately sprung into | |
24 | action to censor the Extinction Rebellion movement which has a presence on their | |
25 | platform. | |
26 | ||
27 | AI-driven newsfeeds optimize for a politician's whataboutisms over news of | |
28 | climate change activism, because user engagement is the metric that social | |
29 | media is being optimized for. The loudest voices are heard all over but their | |
30 | algorithms don't show your posts to your own friends - not something we're used | |
31 | to in the real world. | |
32 | ||
33 | Surveillance has a chilling effect on activism itself. Let's say you went to a | |
34 | Climate Strike protest. An IMSI catcher placed at the site of the protest | |
35 | finds your mobile phone and informs the police that you attended this protest. | |
36 | If you are careful enough to leave your phone at home or switch it off, several | |
37 | video cameras with real-time facial recognition will match your face against | |
38 | national databases to identify you. If your goverment is not rich enough for | |
39 | this, helpful social media companies will tag you in photos (which have | |
40 | geolocation enabled by default on most smartphones) and sell that data to | |
41 | goverments or whoever is buying. | |
42 | ||
43 | The business-as-usual operations of Surveillance Capitalism are themselves | |
44 | responsible for a lot of Greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impact of | |
45 | cloud computing, most of which is used for big data and machine learning is the | |
46 | equivalent to the entire aviation industry combined (from a 2014 Greenpeace | |
47 | report). That's only on their side. We have to keep buying more powerful | |
48 | smartphones every year so that surveillance capitalist apps can listen to our | |
49 | private conversations, run the neural nets on our own devices to extract ad | |
50 | words out of them. The questionable ethics behind the manufacture of smartphones | |
51 | deserves a post of its own. | |
52 | ||
53 | The worst problem caused by Surveillance Capitalism yet is the availability of | |
54 | Behavior Manipulation as a Service. Mercenary Surveillance Capitalist firms like | |
55 | Cambridge Analytica can deploy their weapons of mass manipulation to get anybody | |
56 | who is paying elected to power. We end up with people who don't know the | |
57 | difference between climate and weather ruling entire nations, denying climate | |
58 | change and imprisoning climate refugees en masse. | |
59 | ||
60 | Fascism is making a comeback in developing countries as young people grow up with | |
61 | content recommended by black box recommendation algorithms which bubble up | |
62 | conspiracy theories, hate speech and propaganda, because engagement drives | |
63 | ad-revenue no matter what the content is. Rain forests with animals and tribal | |
64 | people inside them get burnt alive and nations with starving populations make | |
65 | war preparations. | |
66 | ||
67 | Surveillance Capitalism not only hinders the efforts of climate change activists | |
68 | but also has a direct effect in increasing carbon emissions both in its | |
69 | operations and also in helping climate change deniers come to power through mass | |
70 | manipulation. We need ethical, freedom-respecting software and hardware now more | |
71 | than ever not only to keep our mind, society and environment healthy, but also | |
72 | to minimize the impacts of the sixth mass extinction event on planet Earth. |