Living in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 12 Jun 2019
Published: 9 June 2019
12 June 2019
3pm-5pm
ASB Room 916
It is now widely accepted that we live in an age of ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019). Four leading scholars in the field of digital communications and society will discuss the challenges posed to society and democracy by this sprawling type of capitalism.
Papers
iData: Politics of Personalisation on our Mobile Devices
Jennifer Pybus, King’s College London
Shoshanna Zuboff (2019) has recently argued that surveillance capitalism facilitates a logic that is unilaterally claiming the private human experience as raw material for product development and market exchange and transforming this into new forms of value. From this perspective, technological objects that are centred around data extraction are often aimed at making sense of our personal data and carry with them an inherent promise: behavioural prediction—to know you better than yourself—predicated on an unprecedented level of data granulation or personalisation. This new logic of accumulation is the starting point for this talk. A logic that is arguably predicated on the subsumption of sociality into multivalent data points via the rise of ‘adtech’ or ‘martech’: umbrella terms for different technologies and third parties which are enabling the intensification of personalised analytics and other such tools to micro-target consumers. With this focus, I will draw on my existing AHRC research project: “Zones of Data Translation,” and discuss how we can better understand the technological objects that enable the capture of our personal data via the applications we download on our mobile devices. To make this argument, I will consider the following: 1) What are the material building blocks for datafication on our mobile devices? Or put another way, what are the technical components that allow our personal data to flow from the applications that we use? 2) How can we understand and map these adtech ecosystems made up of trackers and third parties? And 3) Can augmenting our capacity to better understand these technological objects on our mobile devices, facilitate a more agentic and engaged citizen who is able to find a different way to evaluate her applications?
Dr Jennifer Pybus is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society in Digital Humanities at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the diverse ways in which our digital lives are being datafied, turned into social big data that fuels our increasingly personalised, data intensive economy. More specifically, she is interested in questions around youth and privacy which relate to how third-party ecosystems found on social media platforms, are transforming the advertising industry via the rise of data analytics and algorithmic processes. Her current research looks at the politics of datafication and everyday life, specifically in relation to those critical points of tension that lie at the intersections between digital culture, data and emerging advertising and marketing practices.
Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Organising Against Predictive Policing in Los Angeles
Morgan Currie, University of Edinburgh
Currently our ability to control our own data representations is on decline, due both to surveillance capitalism and an increase in surveillance technologies used by the police state. This talk looks at data activists who are responding to the rise of mass data gathering by law enforcement, and in particular, to the use of data for what law scholar Andrew Ferguson calls ‘actuarial justice’ - the logic behind predictive policing. This talk focuses on the work of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a diverse collective of anti-surveillance activists in Los Angeles, and in particular, on the Coalition’s recently published report, Before the Bullet Hits the Body - a withering critique of predictive policing that exposes the sociotechnical dimensions of predictive algorithms and the biases found in police data.
Dr Morgan Currie is Lecturer in Data and Society in the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She engages with the relationship between data and power and asks how data infrastructures condition the possibilities for democratic governance, civic behaviour, and political struggle. Her research explores how civil society can use data as a tool to shape and contest political issues and also how new information technologies might open – or foreclose –democratic decision-making within government institutions.
The Rise of Platform Empires: Sociality as Mass Deception
Zoetanya Sujon, London College of Communication, UAL
The Cambridge Analytica ‘scandal’ revealed the collection of mass amounts of data not only from willing Facebook participants, but also from their non-consenting Facebook friends. In this paper, I argue that mass, secret data collection from willing and unwilling users (and non-users) is not a scandal, rather it is an industry standard driving the working business model for social media and digital platforms. The Cambridge Analytica case provides deep insight into this business model and into Facebook’s role in the rise of platform empires shaping social interaction, global economics, and not only surveillance capitalism but also data colonialism (Zuboff 2019; Couldry & Meijas 2019). While GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) and BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, TenCent) make up these platform empires, Facebook has led the way in presenting social connection as its primary aim, rather than the increasingly sophisticated collection of personal data in exchange for highly profitable targeted advertising. This mass deception is hugely significant because: it has historic precedents in the culture industries (e.g. Adorno & Horkheimer 1944; Smythe 1981); it presents digital sociality as an experience of connection and visibility while also transforming sociality into a process for invisibly producing data; and it obscures the protection of privacy-as-a-right through a complex language of copyrights and data ownership. It is this kind of deceptive sociality which promotes the rise of platform empires (and platform imperialism), eroding social privacy and transforming ordinary people into data subjects.
Dr Zoetanya Sujon is a Senior Lecturer and Acting Programme Director for Communications and Media at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (UAL). Zoetanya is a passionate educator and her research interests broadly address the relationship between “new” technologies and digital culture. Currently, these interests are based around four themes: social technologies and platform politics; the intersections between privacy and sharing culture; innovation and virtual technologies; and the impact of digital media on changing skill sets and digital literacies. Zoetanya has published her work in a number of top media journals and is currently writing her first book, The Social Media Age (Sage). Prior to joining UAL, Zoetanya was a Senior Lecturer at Regent’s University London, and completed her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Zoetanya lives in London, actively tweets @jetsumgerl, and can occasionally be found blogging at https://sujonz.wordpress.com/.
Health and Healthcare in a System of Surveillance Capitalism
Sally Wyatt, Maastricht University
Digital technologies have long been promising to revolutionise healthcare in all sorts of ways. These range from enabling people to become better informed about their health problems and possible treatments given all of the information freely available online, to more recent promises of how access to data through (self-) monitoring devices will promote health and well-being. These claims are often not well founded empirically. Moreover, the promises often mask corporate or other institutional needs to reduce costs or to sell devices or to exercise control over individuals. This presentation will examine some of more recent developments around the quantified and biopolitical self and how they contribute to surveillance capitalism.
Sally Wyatt is Professor of Digital Cultures at Maastricht University. She has many decades of teaching and research experience about digital technologies, including topics such as digital divides, open research data, digital humanities and how people find and create health information online. In 2016, together with Anna Harris and Susan Kelly she published CyberGenetics. Health Genetics and New Media (Routledge). This was awarded the Foundation for Sociology of Health and Illness book prize in 2017. In September 2019, Maastricht University will launch a new BA Digital Society, of which Wyatt is the programme director. Personal website – https://sallywyatt.nl
First published: 9 June 2019