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 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.