If a church or a government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in form that would be abhorrent in any other form. […] using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are.
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget
The purpose of R. Stuart MacKey’s experiments with telemetry (10.1) went beyond simply tracking animals in their natural habitat. According to Shoshana Zuboff, MacKay argued that a reverse process of tele-stimulation would “not only monitor behavior but also reveal how it could be modified and optimized, providing what he regarded as ‘a remote dialogue between subject and the experimenter’.”1. Here it is important to emphasize that MacKay’s typically instrumental attitude towards his subjects of study has given way to a monologue centered on manipulation and control: a dialogue between two parties requires awareness on part of both that they are voluntarily participating in a exchange.
MacKay’s ideas reached their potential not in biology or the natural sciences but in surveillance capitalism’s vision of a fully connected world that has been sold under the name of the Internet of Things (IoT). The constant search for new sources of data created a huge market for home automation that has extended to an assortment of smart products, such as cars, watches, fitness devices, beds, refrigerators, ovens, thermostats, vacuum cleaners, light bulbs, toothbrushes, etc., that collect all kinds of information, with which these companies make predictions about human behavior, thus generating new opportunities for business and social control. Uncertainty, once a natural variable, is becoming a thing of the past.
El lema de esta nueva forma de “economía de acción” (que se centra en una actitud activa hacía la construcción y control de la demanda) es «haz que bailen» y se basa en crear contextos mediante los datos recopilados (la música) para conducir a los sujetos a comportamientos específicos (el baile). Solo miren esta conversación que Zuboff tuvo con un científico de datos en jefe de una empresa de Silicon Valley:
The goal of everything we do is change people’s actual behavior at scale. We want to figure out the construction of changing a person’s behavior, and then we want to change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions. When People use our app, we can capture their behaviors and identify good and bad [ones]. The we develop “treatments” or “data pellets” that select good behaviors. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are.2
We are being tracked and hunted like animals in a vast virtual paradeisos we inadvertently roam, a hunting park in which we are not only dehumanized and prepared for our condition as spectators and media slaves (5.8), but are also treated as mere raw material, like a forest, a mine or a river to be exploited for the benefit of the technocratic elites (10.6). A paradeisos designed to penetrate our homes, our inner life, to hunt us in our daily life and in our social interactions. The trick to this new type of manipulation—as in the case of the fauna of the Galapagos Islands—is that it remains outside the threshold of human consciousness, that its technological substrate is discreet and unobtrusive.
The trail of information we leave on the internet has become a new type of manipulation of the bios that reduces us to a new form of digital zoē in which we become a simple data point. The statement in the movie They Live (9.18) “we are like a natural resource to them”—which at the time referred to Reaganite neoliberalism—is more relevant than ever, especially now that capitalism has found what is possibly its last frontier: human interiority and experience.
Leave a Reply