Capitalism is watching. The system that many believe is the pathway to freedom is quickly becoming the fast-track to servitude. Choice isn’t a choice if it’s been chosen for you. Based on your previous choices. It’s the choice illusion. Every decision you make is tracked, commodified and used for predictive analysis. This rewrites your consumer data and creates your own personalised algorithms. So marketing strategy is no longer a broad brush. It’s not girls on a beach having fun because they are wearing tampons, and it’s called Carefree and you want to be carefree. It’s individualised. It reaches into your deepest fears. Your lack of self-love. It offers you some product solutions. It’s just for you. And don’t we love being individuals?
Your data is harvested in the giant behavioural fish farm of performance surveys and purchase history. Siri listens to you. In a way you’ve never been listened to before. AI might feel confidential, but your secrets are not safe. You aren’t reading the tech, the tech is reading you, and as it does it shows you what it wants you to see. It corrals you into alleyways of belief and misinformation, then curates and manipulates you. Capitalism is going through your bin, working out how to extract even more from you. It’s not Big Brother, but big Zuckerberg who is watching.
Recently it was revealed that Facebook has been targeting young girls who delete selfies, with ads around self-image. That means a 16-year-old girl who takes some early morning workout selfies, but decides she doesn’t like how she looks and deletes the images, is then shown a series of advertisements which may be around cosmetic procedures like lip filler, or botox or some other appearance-altering industry. How does Zuckerberg have access to the deleted photo files of young girls? What evil algorithm gives opportunistic billionaires greedy hands on our daughters? Does this smell like freedom to you? I’d say it smelt a lot more like coercive control. Gaslighting. Data rape.
It’s part of capitalism’s free market capture of human behaviour and its ability to target and monetise our most vulnerable selves. ‘Surveillance capitalism’ as penned by Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff is an economic model where corporations claim human experience as a free resource for data extraction and behavioural analysis. It leads to the commodification of personal data to predict future behaviour. Future behaviour is where the money is. This data is then used to create prediction products sold into behavioural futures markets for use in targeted advertising. Does that give you the ick? It should.
It’s parasitic economics. Surely our data belongs to us? An online purchase, a comment on Facebook, a like, a share, a random Google search shouldn’t profile us for being targeted with paid advertising. It feels non-consensual. It feels like an invasion of privacy. It feels wrong. But we’re up to our necks in it. Most of us have digital footprints as heavy as mud on carpet. Long posts on Facebook about our birthdays or a holiday or our values or something we love, a late-night insomniac browse of webpages or Instagram, and we’re profiled.
And yes, when it’s only a few tech companies who dominate the landscape, we’re farmed. Like Tasmanian salmon. Does it influence our purchase behaviour? Yes. How we vote? Absolutely. It already has. Facebook was always too good to be true. It was never about sharing photos and building friendships. It was a data farm. Data rape.
Maybe it’s time we left.
You first.
Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox column has appeared in The Echo for almost 23 years. The personal and the political often meet here; she’s also been the Greens federal candidate since before the last two federal elections. The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
