Take the red pill
I am not really sure if we really appreciate the true brilliance of the The Wachowsky brothers' The Matrix. Its prescience was uncanny. In 1999, they dreamed up a world in which humans were harvested for their energy, for the benefit of machines. A sentient, all-encompassing machine--originally created by humans-- developed a sense of self-interest and built an illusory world available solely to the sensory perceptions of their captive slaves, who were entertained by such illusion and kept in apocalyptic-looking pods --hooked-up to devices that fed the machine with energy.
"Reality" was simply too shiny. Too engaging. Too real to look away from. You needed to take the red pill to wake up.
At the time --and up until very recently-- my idea of it all was that The Matrix was just a very sophisticated criticism of Capitalism. A "call to arms" of sorts to all nine-to-fivers who despised their monotonous jobs, felt utterly empty and purposeless, and desperately needed to unshackle themselves from their ball and chain to fulfill the true calling of their lives. A very romantic idea. And cool. And heroic.
But then Big Tech evolved. And with it, Capitalism morphed, too. It was (and has been) a sort of self-reinforcing mechanism. Capitalism allowed (and pushed) Big Tech to spawn, but then Big Tech drove change as well. Even if it did it fast and broke things. And it revolutionized everything. And despite the altruistic, idealistic beginnings of some (Brin and Page originally despised the ad model at Google, for example) the ruthless impatience of VC money nudged them (and others) to come up with monetizable models.
The result was the recreation of the plot of The Matrix to a chilling degree. The development of predictive technology (machine intelligence) that became quasi-sentient (Big Tech's algorithms) was fed by human behavior online. The bait for us was, and continues to be, the illusion of shiny objects of convenience (maps, the app-ification of consumption) and engagement, (streaming, social media) that kidnap our conscious self. Our perception of the world is whatever the surveillance capitalist serves up for our consumption. And it is too shiny. Too real. So engaging we simply can't look away. Our zombified selves looking at our smartphones in rapt while unwittingly feeding our online behavior to Facebook Google Netflix and Twitter are just a less dramatized version of the captive slaves depicted in apocalyptic pods in The Matrix.
And the reward for Big Tech has been astronomical levels of profits.
The way to achieve this was literally the discovery of a completely new kind of asset: the monetization our online behavior. Shoshana Zuboff's behavioral surplus. An asset so new and inconspicuous, we didn't even know we owned it until someone else started stealing it from us. An asset so precious and valuable its unbridled and unregulated exploitation minted five of the ten richest men alive. A gold rush of proportions so monumental that every respectable corporation (with the honorable exception of Apple) are currently scrambling to capture it for their benefit. Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger. Those who don't will be crushed, they warn each other. Government, with the typical lag that characterizes a group of senile officials who are clueless about what's happening around them, is starting (for the wrong reasons) to pressure Big Tech. My hope is that they eventually target the root of the problem (the unethical harvesting of our online behavior without our proper consent) and not the symptom (the monopolistic power this harvesting allows) but my expectations are low.
In the movie, a bigger-than-life hero (literally dubbed "the one") took the red pill, broke the spell of the illusory reality he lived in, led a revolution and conquered the machines. As usual, reality is much less romantic, cool, or heroic. We don't have a Neo. Government officials at the highest levels can't even decipher how Facebook makes money. They are chasing Big Tech with regulations created in the 1800's, and the concept of behavioral surplus does not even exist in the law, never mind as a human right.
Against this backdrop, all we're left to do is "wake up" ourselves. Take the red pill and unplug from our smartphones. Cuz our Neo is nowhere to be found.
"Reality" was simply too shiny. Too engaging. Too real to look away from. You needed to take the red pill to wake up.
At the time --and up until very recently-- my idea of it all was that The Matrix was just a very sophisticated criticism of Capitalism. A "call to arms" of sorts to all nine-to-fivers who despised their monotonous jobs, felt utterly empty and purposeless, and desperately needed to unshackle themselves from their ball and chain to fulfill the true calling of their lives. A very romantic idea. And cool. And heroic.
But then Big Tech evolved. And with it, Capitalism morphed, too. It was (and has been) a sort of self-reinforcing mechanism. Capitalism allowed (and pushed) Big Tech to spawn, but then Big Tech drove change as well. Even if it did it fast and broke things. And it revolutionized everything. And despite the altruistic, idealistic beginnings of some (Brin and Page originally despised the ad model at Google, for example) the ruthless impatience of VC money nudged them (and others) to come up with monetizable models.
The result was the recreation of the plot of The Matrix to a chilling degree. The development of predictive technology (machine intelligence) that became quasi-sentient (Big Tech's algorithms) was fed by human behavior online. The bait for us was, and continues to be, the illusion of shiny objects of convenience (maps, the app-ification of consumption) and engagement, (streaming, social media) that kidnap our conscious self. Our perception of the world is whatever the surveillance capitalist serves up for our consumption. And it is too shiny. Too real. So engaging we simply can't look away. Our zombified selves looking at our smartphones in rapt while unwittingly feeding our online behavior to Facebook Google Netflix and Twitter are just a less dramatized version of the captive slaves depicted in apocalyptic pods in The Matrix.
And the reward for Big Tech has been astronomical levels of profits.
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| Bezos, Gates, Zuck, Page, and Brin. HALF of the top ten richest men on earth are Surveilance Capitalists (as of 10/26/19, via Bloomberg) |
The way to achieve this was literally the discovery of a completely new kind of asset: the monetization our online behavior. Shoshana Zuboff's behavioral surplus. An asset so new and inconspicuous, we didn't even know we owned it until someone else started stealing it from us. An asset so precious and valuable its unbridled and unregulated exploitation minted five of the ten richest men alive. A gold rush of proportions so monumental that every respectable corporation (with the honorable exception of Apple) are currently scrambling to capture it for their benefit. Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger. Those who don't will be crushed, they warn each other. Government, with the typical lag that characterizes a group of senile officials who are clueless about what's happening around them, is starting (for the wrong reasons) to pressure Big Tech. My hope is that they eventually target the root of the problem (the unethical harvesting of our online behavior without our proper consent) and not the symptom (the monopolistic power this harvesting allows) but my expectations are low.
In the movie, a bigger-than-life hero (literally dubbed "the one") took the red pill, broke the spell of the illusory reality he lived in, led a revolution and conquered the machines. As usual, reality is much less romantic, cool, or heroic. We don't have a Neo. Government officials at the highest levels can't even decipher how Facebook makes money. They are chasing Big Tech with regulations created in the 1800's, and the concept of behavioral surplus does not even exist in the law, never mind as a human right.
Against this backdrop, all we're left to do is "wake up" ourselves. Take the red pill and unplug from our smartphones. Cuz our Neo is nowhere to be found.
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