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'Surveillance capitalism has led us into a dystopia'

ARAL BALKAN, ACTIVIST (OPINION): Companies like Google and Facebook are factory farms for human beings. That’s how they make their money, they make their money by tracking everything that you do, by profiling you, and then monetising that by manipulating your behaviour with this intimate insight. We're not sleepwalking into some sort of dystopia. We're there. My name's Aral Balkan and I'm a cyborg rights activist. CAPTION: SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM HAS LED US INTO A DYSTOPIA. When you go onto Facebook Instant Messenger and you're messaging your friend you might think that you're in a room together and only you two can hear each other. That's not the case. Now for you, it might be you feel that you have nothing to hide, you don't care if Google has your data. You might start to care the next time you go to renew your insurance and your premium's double. And then when you ask them, "Why have my premiums doubled?" they say, "Well, your smart fridge told us what you're eating." Now that might be when you start to care, if you have a lot of privilege. For other people it's a life or death issue. People who do care might be, for example, people who are gay but live in a country in which it is illegal to be gay, and Facebook knows that they're gay based on their likes. Now this is a problem for them. Shoshana Zuboff from Harvard business school calls the system that we live under 'surveillance capitalism'. Surveillance capitalism is the feedback loop between surveillance and capitalism. Capitalism is about the accumulation of wealth. Now, what happens when that accumulated wealth and the people who have that wealth and power then invest that wealth in surveillance devices which allow them to gather information about all of us which in turn allows them to manipulate our behaviour which in turn makes them more money and reinforces this feedback loop. Well that's Surveillance Capitalism. We have to regulate the abuses of the surveillance capitalists, and we have to replace them with ethical alternatives. Why don’t we start thinking about funding those technologies from the commons for the common good? Unless we change how technology is funded today, we can't fix this problem, because this is not a technology problem. If we want a different society, if we want different ideologies amplified, then we need to fund them differently, we need to build them differently and then, we have a chance of a progressive future.