new: Surveillance Capitalism and the Climate Crisis

[blog.git] / content / posts / surveillance-capitalism-and-the-climate-crisis.md

---
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.