every step you take ... every move you make ...
thinking about her ((our capitalist panopticon))
Dear friend—
I am thinking about surveillance capitalism again after an interview I listened to from one of my favorite podcasts, Tech Won't Save Us, with data journalist Shoshana Wodinsky.
About a year ago, I read Shoshana Zuboff's book coining the term (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism), and besides being one of the most humongous nonfiction books I've ever read in my life, it opened up some things for me.
Zuboff takes a kind of Marxist approach to the the internet. She traces capitalism’s history growing through the exploitation and extraction of different resources over the centuries. Metals and crops. Land. Labor, paid and unpaid. Financial markets and imaginaries. Zuboff proposes that internet-enabled capitalism adds to this tradition, turning user data into a new frontier to exploit.
You may have heard the phrase, "If you're getting something for free, chances are, you are the product." Many free internet services sell the data we provide to them (clicks, friends, location) to advertising companies.
But Zuboff takes it a beat further. We are not the product, she argues—rather, our data are the raw materials for the product. Advertisers funnel that data into algorithms that can promise their customers (businesses trying to sell their wares) that, say, X amount of eyes on an ad will turn into Y amount of purchases, because they can target folks mathematically more likely to click “Add to Cart.”
By amassing this data, ad companies like Google and Meta (Facebook) can claim to algorithmic fortune-telling. But as they do this, Zuboff argues, they also shape behavior itself, threatening everything from democracy to free will.
Do I really need or want that shirt, or did Instagram show me an ad for that shirt so many times because it predicted I would like it based on the rest of my internet behavior, and that's why I feel the desire to buy the shirt?
In such an environment, it benefits internet companies to collect as much data about us as possible, which they use for various purposes with varying levels of scariness.
The Tech Won't Save Us interview followed the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade and yeeting the federal right to an abortion. Wodinsky talks with host Paris Marx about how the breadth and depth of the data our tech captures is much larger than most of us imagine.
I knew Google keeps my search history, Facebook tracks my clicks, eBay watches anything I put in my cart… but I knew less about how grocery stores have trackers that monitor how long our devices stay in which aisles; that our phone saves data on what public transit lines we use and when; that our devices can link with each other (for example, our Bluetooth headphones are linked with our phones, so companies know that when either of them moves, we move).
Not only is all this data collected—it’s all connected, too. It’s gathered into a single profile of us, and then bought and sold by brokers. Ad companies might not know our full name, our social security number, our exact address—but they know that the person who calls a 412 number eight times a week and the person who bought lemons at Giant Eagle on Tuesday are the same person.
.
As Zuboff and Wodinsky write, companies track and collate our data for one big reason—so they can serve us targeted ads. A shared experience for many: you mention a song, a movie, an item in regular conversation and suddenly you see ads for that item in your Instagram or your Google search.
I love and despair over that TikTok meme with captions like "When your husband leaves the room 22 days before Christmas" and the person in the video whispers toward a phone, "Nintendo Switch! Games! Games for Gamers! Consoles! Nintendo Switch Games!"
Targeted ads are lucrative. The more that ad companies can claim they'll show ads to people who will actually buy the product, the more they can sell ads, and the more money the companies that buy those ads can make, too.
I think most if not everyone who is Plugged In at the moment knows that we make a tradeoff for a free service. That's why we see ads after every five posts or whatever on Instagram. We read news from our local news outlet without a subscription because their web pages are papered with adverts.
But as Wodinsky writes, targeted ads are seeping from digital spaces an into the physical world. Companies with brick-and-mortar stores and in-person services are creating "media companies" so they can show their customers ads in the meatspace.
For instance: ast year, after a long time being away from my suburban hometown without a car, I went to my family's local Giant gas station. To my surprise, there was a shiny new screen next to the pump. And after I swiped my debit card and selected my fuel grade and inserted the fuel nozzle into the fuel hole, the screen began playing an ad.
.
This sorry state of affairs comes with a few individual recommendations. Wodinsky says we could pay with cash only, especially purchases we don't want people to know about, and leave our phone home when going to sensitive locations, like abortion clinics or protests. (Wodinsky has written guides to doing both while minimizing your digital footprint).
But she also makes clear that short of pulling a Walden, it's impossible to hide ourselves completely from the advertising-fueled panopticon.
This has larger implications, besides corporations making money. It also has implications on security and the fourth amendment and our growing police state. For example: as of now, police can easily get our data from ad companies and data brokers, no warrant required. Amazon has even shared footage from their "Smart Doorbells" with police departments—warrant, what warrant?
In a post-Roe world, it's not just about deleting your period-tracking apps, which became the talk of the town on Twitter post-Dobbs decision. Stores, our devices, companies, data brokers—and, therefore, the police—can see if we go to CVS for a pregnancy test or buy Plan B or walk past or into an abortion clinic.
In the Tech Won’t Save Us episode, Wodinsky recounts how a pregnancy crisis center used targeted ads for their "services" to folks sitting in Planned Parenthood waiting rooms. They even sent ads for weeks after. (For those unfamiliar, crisis centers are places set up to look like counseling or care for pregnant people when really their #1 goal is to convince people to carry to term.)
When someone took them to court for it, they argued, essentially, that the entire internet functions off this model, and if the court were to make a decision on targeted ads, it would throw the entire internet's business model into question.
This business model is so ubiquitous that even small outfits, like Mom and Pop shops and local newspapers, have to use it to get by.
Something that stuck with me from the pod: the reason that local news websites are so chock-full of ads is not only because of this model, but because of the rise of ad blockers. Such sites must overload their pages with ads to get the most bang for their buck from the schmuck who doesn't have ad block. As host Marx says, this makes one person's internet experience a little better, while making it much worse for those who can't pay.
Or, alternatively, Wodinsky points out, you don't pay for an ad blocker and you get one for free and that ad blocker is free because it sells your browsing data to brokers.
All this to say, the internet's economic model is fucked up and so entrenched that it's impossible to extricate yourself from it, or to remove something bad without also removing something vital to someone who, chances are, needs it. It is like playing Operation, only instead of a tiny hole with metal sides, it's a bramble patch that will set everyone on fire if you touch a bramble.
Despite the current, seemingly hopelessness of our situation, I don't think the progression of this internet is inevitable. Apple's simple feature, allowing us to ask Apps Not To Track Us when we download them, is already taking a massive hit to advertising giants like Google and Meta and Amazon. (The feature doesn’t block everything and Apple is of course its own cesspool of issues [she writes on her Macbook]).
I guess I don't really have any neat conclusion or takeaway, especially when so many of the problems would be best solved with new legislation and regulation, and there’s scant amount of stuff in the works (Maybe we should start with police no longer having unfettered access to Ring doorbell tapes? Maybe those tapes shouldn’t be allowed on the cloud in the first place?). We can delete Facebook, but chances are, we can't delete our credit cards or change our phone number every week.
However, I will say that for a few days in October, I used my flip phone instead of my smart phone because I felt I needed a bit of a break. Beyond other sleep- and attention-related benefits, it was nice to feel a bit inscrutable, just a toe off the grid.
Touching grass every once in a while won’t bring systems change. But that doesn't mean it won't feel good to do it.
Thanks for reading, I'll catch you soon,
—mia xx