Surveillance Capitalism: Data Tracking, Consumer Surveillance & Its Impact - Essay Sample

Introduction

Surveillance capitalism refers to the process of monitoring data captured by keeping track of peoples behaviors and movements both online and in their physical world. It is an economic mutation arising from the wide dissemination of the media prowess in various nations in the whole world. Consumer surveillance is majorly used in advertising and targeted marketing, and it is done through the combination of demographic data with information about an individual's online activities. Surveillance capitalism gets its invasive power majorly from the internet since this is where the formation of capital and the creation of wealth occurs.. It is reliant on individuals who are not their customers and any other staff who does not acknowledge the processes. Below is a brief history and background of surveillance capitalism, its implications on our daily lives like its effects on individuals and the families at large. Additionally, the various negative impacts associated with surveillance capitalism like privacy invasions, excessive consumption, and consumerism, a threat to democracy and the government, concentration of wealth and power as well as economic growth and sustainability have been discussed. Lastly, some of the benefits of surveillance capitalism like providing users with a variety of choices and enabling the firms to know the tastes and preferences of the consumers have also been discussed. However, despite the benefits associated with surveillance capitalism, the business model seems to have more harm than advantages on the individuals and the society at large.

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History and Background

At some point in the evolution and the development of the internet, someone saw the collection, storage, and monetization of individuals' data as an opportunity. Just like the invasive species which do not have natural predators, the financial prowess of the surveillance capitalism disfigured the networked sphere of the past vision of digital technology as an emancipatory and empowering force. The surveillance capitalism can neither be associated with the behemoth information sector nor with specific companies. It follows the tradition of the ancient capitalism by asserting that the individual human experience is a source of free materials which can be subordinated in the market dynamics and get reborn as the behavioral data. The variation spread from the Silicon Valley with high speed and moved to each economic sector, and this success resulted to the birth of the burgeoning surveillance which was based on economic order which has now extended across a varied and vast range of services and products.During the twentieth century, the titanic power competitions were between labor and capital. Still, as for the twenty-first century, surveillance capitalism is set against the whole societies and to every member of the community with firms like Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and Google pushing capitalism boundaries into new territories.

The contests for the revenues of surveillance capitalism have born down our automobiles, cities, homes, and bodies and challenges the democratic sovereignty and human autonomy in their struggle for profit and power. Today, everything done by each individual can easily be reduced to the data point and then get repurposed and sold for profit with the cameras, laptops, and cellphones acting as the tools of the trade, and this is changing our relationship with each other and with every other thing around us. As we think about the surveillance capitalism of the 19th and the 20th century, we can see that the power of capitalism was born to us as employees and workers in offices, factories, as well as in the economic roles and domains. However, there are some changes as at now in that today's titanic struggles of capitalism have cleared the remaining offices and factory walls. The economic field has been surpassed by these struggles and has flooded the human and society in general. For instance, think about a firm like the Facebook company and its ascendance of using the "like" clicks to monitor and control people's behaviors. A person's compulsion to clicking on a digital object is not derived from external and physical powers exerted on their bodies but rather from their manufactured consent. The person's participation is socially medicated in digital surveillance to produce data so that a system can be used to control their desires and emotions to "share" with other individuals.

Although this capitalism still holds capitalist laws like profit maximization, growth, productivity, and competitive production, these past dynamics tend to operate in a new logic contest of accumulation, which introduces specific sui generis laws of motion that were honed and discovered during the early years of the Google. According to Zuboff, even though it is not the only actor in surveillance capitalism, Google can be considered the pioneer of the surveillance capitalism in its thoughts and practices, trailblazers in experimentations, implementations, and in research and development. It was in 2003 when the firm filed a patent with the title "Generating User Information for Use in Targeted Advertising. It was after Google's establishment that the idea quickly spread to other firms like Facebook in the year 2008 and later to Microsoft.

Been the pioneer of surveillance capitalism, the Google firm started exceptional market operations into uncharted internet spaces. Its successes have been credited to its model of advertisement; however, discoveries leading to the growth of Google in both market and revenue capitalization are partially related to its advertising. The success of Google can be derived from its ability to give future predictions and especially the prediction of human behavior. From the very beginning, Google collected diverse information on individuals' search-related practices as by-products of the query activities. During that time, it ensured that the information and data logs were not safe nor methodically stored, but instead, we're being treated as waste.

Eventually, this company later understood that such information and data logs could be useful in continuous teaching and improvement of the search engines. However, there was a problem in that providing the users with efficient search results used all the values created by the users and especially when they ended up providing behavioral data inadvertently. It was a self-contained and complete process whereby the users were also their ends. The value created by every user in their experiences was reinvested like improved searches. The interaction left nothing, not even any surplus which Google could change into capital. In the year 2001, Google appeared remarkable; however, it was not yet capitalism but just like any other start-up internet which has eyeballs with no revenue.

The mounting investor pressure and dot.com bust in Google were brought in the year 2001. At this moment, the advertisers were the ones who chose the search terms and the search pages for the displays. Therefore, Google decided to try boosting the ad revenues through the application of the existing substantial analytical capabilities to the problems faced during the increment of ads relevant to the users. Such activities meant that Google was trying to repurpose the developing cache of the behavioral data which has been considered as useless.The information was to be used in matching the ads with the keywords and in the exploitation of subtleties that can only access the behavioral data, which was combined with the analytical capabilities. The shift in the use of the behavioral data was a significant turning point since the behavioral data, which were once ignored and discarded, could now be rediscovered as the behavioral surplus.

In this age, surveillance capitalism is repeating the "original sin" of capitalism concerning the primitive accumulation and Karl Marx's old image about capitalism, which argues that capitalism is like a vampire, which tries to feed on the labor with expected turns. Rather than claiming wealth or land(work), for the market dynamics just like what industrial capitalism did, the surveillance capitalism aims at audaciously laying claims to the private experiences for transcription to interchangeable commodities goods which are being rapidly cleared elevating the life of the market. Having been invented by Google and elaborated by the Face book, which is the online milieu of the leading adverts, surveillance capitalism represents a distinct logic of accumulation.

How Surveillance Capitalism Affects Our Everyday Lives

The internet economy has been dominated by surveillance capitalism for about two decades, and this has had a high cost to individuals and society at large. Humans are getting up to the innumerable various ways in which their lives, their subvert goals, and their relationships have been intruded on by the surveillance capitalism practices. Federal states around the globe are working on how to curb the worst abuses from the surveillance capitalist with the main aim of protecting the individuals and the society as a whole. Growing awareness among the consumers and the citizens have created more business opportunities for the competitors trying to reject the surveillance capitalism imperatives. Alternatively, the advocators of the human future should make articulations of the positive visions of the society and the world they wish to create. The coercive techniques employed by surveillance capitalism are in pursuit of the frictionless human experience, and the surveillance capitalist has been eliminating the friction to benefit themselves. Our everyday lives have been affected by surveillance capitalism in various ways;

How Individuals are Affected by Surveillance Capitalism

What humans have been experiencing in their private screen time encounters are the direct consequences of the surveillance capitalism business model. Some of these frequent encounters include; the control of quantity and quality of engagement, the exercise choice over the algorithmically served contents, modulation of mood, acting with intention, and maintaining the intention when they are on and off the screen. Individuals' objectives of using the technology are to fulfill their lives, and it is being subverted by the surveillance capitalism objective maximum generation of the user's data for rendering, extraction, and sale. The increased forceful coercion and been in more slippery grounds has proved that our struggle and failure to have control over the screens is not out of will. Concerning this, the major challenge here is not the screen but instead the surveillance capitalism, which is the existing business model which is driving engagement intending to generate the data for extraction, render, and selling.

Effects on the Young People

The most susceptible group to be affected by these coercive processes of the surveillance capitalism are the children since their brains are yet to reach their total capacity of been goal-oriented and having self-regulation. Every nine hours spend daily by the children on the screen tend to crowd their time for the ideal world experiences necessary for proper and healthy development; connection and quiet, boredom and imagination, discovery, and exploration. Most of the surveillance capitalists tend to make the assertions that today's children have different developments as compared to the other children of the past. They argue that this technology will completely change the interaction of children with the real world since the harms associated with it are not that novel. These capitalists dismiss their critics as technophobes or Luddites and are sharply trying to limit their children from excessive use of these technologies as much as they can. The harms inflicted by the surveillance capitalism on the young people ar...