The big brother(s) is always watching you!

Yes, you rightly guessed from the title. It is one of the most influential literary works of the past century, George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” where the British journalist warned us about the most dystopian world under a totalitarian state. 

It is hard to talk about surveillance, propaganda, and post-truth without referring to Orwell’s work. The phrases like ‘Orwellian State’ or ‘Surveillance Society’ have become synonymous with any state-sponsored all-knowing oppressive force. However, in the last two decades, with the advent of the internet and so-called ‘smart’ technologies, the state of surveillance in our everyday lives has become less pertinent to what Orwell thought of as a “Surveillance State.” 

 

Although the surveillance society that had been predicted had finally arrived, it did so in the cool duds of high-tech efficiency rather than the heavy boots of ruthless despotism. It presented itself through a million screens of smartphones and mobile gadgets, far from the technocratic gaze of Big Brother’s sole scary telescreen. 

 

The characters in “1984” lived in a constantly nagging quandary of how, why, and when they were being surveilled. On the contrary, this new age of surveillance is fuelled by our actions online - every click, every photo we share, and sometimes you even don’t have to do anything but carry your smartphone wherever you go, which you do out of your convenience or need. This modern form of surveillance poses no material harm and apparently any negative connotation we care about at first glance. 

 

In this regard, Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Scholar, introduced the idea of “Surveillance Capitalism.” It is a feedback loop between surveillance and Capitalism.

In simple words, Capitalism is the accumulation of wealth, and when this wealth is invested in surveillance devices, which allows capitalists to monitor our activities and which in turn allows them to manipulate and regulate our behavior, which in turn makes them more money. This whole system has been happening for the last two decades, and the surveillance capitalists operate without any legal or regulatory purview. Even more disturbing is that even the CCTVs all around us, which is essentially the public sector, are also manufactured and serviced by this surveillance capitalism.

 

You know, Surveillance Capitalists love our faces. The human face contains over two dozen muscles, which can be analyzed to monitor our facial expressions and emotions. So, every time you unlock your phone with your face, it is not just the phone unlocks; it unlocks your mood to the AI. This a kind of “thought policing” Orwell thought of, not to drag you to the prison (or maybe) like in “1984”, but to deliver you content and targeted advertising.

 

Now coming to the people who don’t care if Google knows everything about them because they think, “I have nothing to hide.” But the reality is that IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE, YOU ARE NOTHING. Because everything that makes you, “you”, the source of your identity, the source of your autonomy in your urge to self-determination, these are resources that you grow with, and these are intended to be private. 

 

Apart from all this, you will care when next year, you will find out your health insurance premium has doubled because they know what fast foods you are ordering in Swiggy, and they know that you are not active enough through your smartwatch. That will surely hurt, and that will make you realize the importance of privacy.

 

Surveillance capitalism exerts oligopolistic power over virtually all digital information and communication spaces. Yet there is more to consider than just concentrating economic power and its remedies in economic regulation and antitrust law. There is, however, more to consider for those who approach analysis only through the prism of concentrated economic power and its remedies in economic regulation and antitrust law. When economic activities that generate revenue are based on the commodification of humans, the traditional economic playing field is muddled. Economic power concentration leads to collateral concentrations of governance and social power. The institutional growth of surveillance capitalism weaves these three axes of power into an ever-powerful force that begins with economic operations and then contends with democracy for governance and social control. In the economic realm, oligopoly gives way to oligarchy in the societal sphere.

 

If data is the new oil, you are the mighty mines and surveillance is the excavation process. So, next time you pick up your phone, know one thing, you are not using social media; social media is using you; you are not searching on google; google is searching and making a profile of you. And it’s not just about you, it’s about us all, it’s about how we envision our future, our society.