I think a lot of people misunderstand the harm of corporate surveillance. I wanna talk about it. Here’s the thing: it’s bad, but for reasons that have nothing to do with privacy.

So Alexa’s in your home listening to your conversations. You talk about feeling unwell with your partner. Hop on Facebook and are getting ads for NyQuil or whatever. Spooky, for sure. But not harmful. Actually probably helpful in the moment.

When people talk about the value of privacy, they typically cite one of two arguments: (1) privacy is a right and we should protect rights (2) some Orwellian worry about authoritarianism. Neither are very good.

For the first one, it’s important to think about how deeply it’s tied to individualistic liberalism. It imagines a contracting individual who makes decisions about what to give away and what to keep secret.

And the kind of surveillance we should be worried about is the same kind we consent to in terms and services agreement. So it doesn’t really raise a worry for liberal conceptions of privacy.

Privacy is also bad. You can imagine a socially just, big data powered socialist state. The government uses all our ‘private’ data to plan a really efficient and really fair economy. It would be dope. No sense in holding onto political rights that interfere with this.

Okay the Orwell thing. First of all, animal farm. Bad book. Pigs can’t talk.

Second, I don’t really think it’s likely. Amazon isn’t gonna give the NSA the Alexa data for free and the government doesn’t care about arresting you because you were joking about su*cide bombing in your house.

A lot of people want to draw analogies between trump and the nazis. They aren’t helpful. After 4 years, it’s obvious that trump doesn’t have a plan for amassing power. He only wants to own the libs. He’s too stupid to be Hitler and doesn’t have the staff.

He’s also weakening the state bureaucracy with every chance he gets. He literally doesn’t care about governing. The nazis, remember, nationalized nearly every industry once they seized power. Nazis were state > capital. Trump is capital > state.

So we need an argument about why it’s bad for private companies to amass data about us. And political rights developed to protect us from the state arent helpful here.

Okay so why is corporate surveillance bad? It’s not what amazon does with my individual data. It’s what they can do when they train predictive algorithms on millions of people’s online behavior. They get powerful psychological and social modeling but don’t have to share.

Social scientists are trying to keep up. But really amazon, google, apple, etc know more about human behavior than all psychology departments in the us combined.

And they sell those predictive models to policing, advertising, HR, and political consultancy firms. Which make our lives measurably worse.

Take an extremely banal example. Netflix discovered that people are more likely to start of a show if it only has a 2-3 seasons. So they just cancel most of their shows once they get going. Good and bad shows alike get the axe. Aesthetic injustice lmao.

So what is to be done about all this? We need democratic control over information. People should get to decide on what their information gets used for.

Do we want sweet smart cities where subway is always on time and the traffic lights turn green based on machine learning that minimizes traffic and pollution? Yeah obviously. But there’s no money in that.

So it’s not surveillance. It’s the unequitable distribution of our information into the hands of for-profit platforms.

Okay this has been thoughts on privacy with Dan. Stay woke