content/posts/surveillance-capitalism-and-the-climate-crisis.md

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