It has had many names, not always negative: collective intelligence, web 2.0, platform capitalism, surveillance, digital feudalism.
It is not a technology, nor an application, nor a phenomenon that only affects social networks, but the business model that Google and Facebook invented when the Internet bubble burst in March 2000, leaving thousands of square meters of empty servers , hundreds of unemployed programmers and a black hole where there used to be funding.
It was so successful that it has transformed the world we live in: from agriculture to education, from transportation to public administration, from economics to public communication or health.
The mechanics are simple: create services that attract users to observe their behavior and use it to train predictive artificial intelligence algorithms.
These algorithms process the information of each individual and correlate it with statistical, scientific, sociological and historical information to generate behavior models as a tool for mass control and manipulation.
"Whoever controls the present controls the past, and whoever controls the past will control the future," Orwell wrote in
1984
.
In the last 15 years, a dozen companies have recorded and processed the behavior patterns of billions of people around the world during every minute of their lives.
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Money watches over you.
A Faustian pact for the 21st century
Read an excerpt from 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'
The objective of these predictive algorithms is to know each other well enough to be able to manipulate and also replace us, including cognitive tasks such as writing articles or painting a
Rembrandt
.
Shoshana Zuboff's
voluminous essay
The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism offers illustrative examples of the transformation of human experience into material suitable for commercial exploitation, but it is not the only one.
Others studied its side effects before, which no less deliberate have been less devastating: addiction, polarization, discrimination and dehumanization.
Addiction.
Attention Merchants
, Tim Wu (Captain Swing, 2020)
The father of the concept "Net neutrality" Tim Wu reviews the history of the traffickers of "eyeballs", a phenomenon that begins with street vendors of growing hair screaming in the town square and progresses to the algorithms of Snapchat, with its incredible formulas of emotional loyalty for adolescents in search of meaning.
The remote control deserves special attention, the "ad killer" that ended up becoming the vehicle of the same operant conditioning that makes us unlock the mobile for no apparent reason and jump from icon to icon without knowing why.
More technical and terrifying, in
Addiction by Design
(Princeton University Press, 2012) Natasha Dow Schüll describes the mechanics of the slot machine game in Las Vegas, a cognitive hijacking that is now repeated on our screens in a web of mutual addiction.
Their algorithms are as hooked on us as we are on them.
Economy.
Platform Capitalism
, Nick Srnicek (Black Box, 2018)
In his short essay, Canadian academic Nick Srnicek offers a macroeconomic analysis of digital platforms: how they grow thanks to public money, define their business with the
dot-com
crisis
and consolidate it thanks to the 2008 crisis and its austerity policies.
Growth is obtained by centralizing and exploiting the management of other people's things (data, time, content, work, infrastructure), a model that they will call without embarrassment the “collaborative economy”.
But also, explains Srnicek, establishing a flexible economic architecture based on tax evasion, which does not require investing in hotels, newsrooms, factories or taxis, but it is enough to plant servers in depressed places where they take advantage of the model of labor exploitation. characteristic of globalization.
A network that he calls "capitalist interdependence" in the form of a matrioska, in which platforms as apparently different as Netflix, Uber or Apple host their operations on Amazon Web Services servers and "non-platform companies are forced to use platforms to continue their business ”.
Philosophy.
The New Dark Age
, James Bridle (Debate, 2020)
Halfway between MacLuhan's maxim that we design the tools, but then they design us, and the perspective of John Berger and his
Ways of Seeing
, the brilliant British artist and programmer James Bridle stumbled upon early fame by proposing the concept of "the new aesthetic" as a world interpreted through the literal eyes of artificial intelligence.
His first book, which bears the Lovecraftian title
The New Dark Age
, explores the way in which automatic, hermetic and artificial interpretation transforms our own way of seeing the world and darkens it, plunging us into that new dark age where we are not the ones. that we teach machines to think, but they are the ones that teach us, generating tools for control and manipulation, but also opening spaces of exquisite beauty, which reveal interconnections with the nature that we inhabit and that also inhabits us.
Documentary film.
The Facebook Dilemma
(PBS, 2018)
Don't be distracted by
The Dilemma of the Networks
, a documentary funded by Netflix where various workers, investors and programmers of the surveillance era sing a
collective
mea culpa
without leaving the industry that they seem to criticize so much.
The gem is
The Facebook Dilemma
, produced by the North American public television channel PBS and released in October 2018. With incredible interviews with industry executives, original archival material and a year of research, it remains the most robust documentary and revealing about how this new business model is transforming the world we live in, from the Russian intervention in the 2016 US presidential elections to the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar to the Rodrigo Duterte campaign in the Philippines.
