SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM IN REAL LIFE

What happens when populations are “tuned” at scale? First, China:

The aim [of China] is the automation of society through tuning, herding, and conditioning people to produce preselected behaviors judged as desirable by the state and thus able to 'preempt instability,' as one strategic studies expert put it. In other words, the aim is to achieve guaranteed social rather than market outcomes using instrumentarian means of behavior modification. The result is an emergent system that allows us to peer into one version of a future defined by a comprehensive fusion of instrumentarian and state power.(30)

Where will the people holding power take this?

In the Chinese context, the state will run the show and own it, not as a market project but as a political one, a machine solution that shapes a new society of automated behavior for guaranteed political and social outcomes: certainty without terror. All the pipes from all the supply chains will carry behavioral surplus to this new, complex means of behavioral modification. The state will assume the role of the behaviorist god, owning the shadow text and determining the schedule of reinforcement and the behavioral routines that it will shape. Freedom will be forfeit to knowledge, but it will be the state's knowledge that it exercises, not for the sake of revenue but for the sake of its own perpetuation.(31)

And what about civilization here in the West? What about our children and grandchildren?

‘A 61-million-person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,’ was published in the scientific journal Nature [in 2012]…. In the 2010 US Congressional midterm elections, researchers experimentally manipulated the social and informational content of voting-related messages in the news feeds of nearly 61 million Facebook users while also establishing a control group.…Facebook experimenters determined that social messaging was an effective means of tuning behavior at scale because 'it directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behavior of millions of people,' and they concluded that 'showing familiar faces to users can dramatically improve the effectiveness of a mobilization message.' 'The team calculated that the manipulated social messages sent 60,000 additional voters to the polls in the 2010 midterm elections, as well as another 280,000 who cast votes as a result of a "social contagion" effect, for a total of 340,000 additional votes.'(32)

That was over ten years ago. One can only imagine how much more subtle and effective Facebook has become at such manipulations since then.

Further tests pertaining to electronic interactions were conducted in England. A survey of young British women ages 11-21 showed that,

Thirty-five percent of the women said that their biggest worry online was comparing themselves and their lives with others, as they are drawn into 'constant comparisons with often idealized versions of the lives, and bodies, of others.

A director of the project observed that even the youngest girls in this cohort feel pressured to create a 'personal brand,' the ultimate in self-objectification, as they seek reassurance 'in the form of likes and shares'.… in light of these findings, one UK medical specialist comments on the young people in her practice: 'people are growing up to want to be influenced and that is now a job role….'(33)

Data in another study was even more chilling. When faced with being disconnected from social media, young people said "they had problems articulating what they were feeling or even who they were if they couldn't connect."(34) This result echoes the fictional “Borg” of Star Trek, a cyborg race enslaved in a centrally-controlled collective. When separated from their network, individual Borg are immobilized.

The average adult checks his or her phone 30 times a day; the average millennial checks his phone more than 157 times a day.(35) Next, comes Generation Z…

If you are over the age of 30, you know that [Facebook’s Naomi] Klein is not describing your adolescence, or that of your parents, and certainly not that of your grandparents. Adolescence and emerging adulthood in the hive are a human first, meticulously crafted by the science of behavioral engineering; institutionalized in the vast and complex architectures of computer-mediated means of behavior modification; overseen by Big Other; directed towards economies of scale, scope, and action in the capture of behavioral surplus; and funded by the surveillance capitol that accrues from unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power. Our children endeavor to come of age in a hive that is owned and operated by the applied utopianists of surveillance capitalism, and is continuously monitored and shaped by the gathering force of instrumentarian power. Is this the life that we want for the most open, pliable, eager, self–conscious, and promising members of our society?(36)

Using these forms of electronic media is designed to be addicting. Electronic casinos provided the model and Big Other made application. Zuboff warns that addiction is a:

state of self-forgetting in which one is carried along by an irresistible momentum that feels like one is 'played by the machine.' The machine zone achieves a sense of complete immersion that recalls Klein's description of Facebook's design principles— engrossing, immersive, immediate—and is associated with a loss of self–awareness, automatic behavior, and a total rhythmic absorption carried along on a wave of compulsion.(37)

Is the end result emotionally healthy?

‘Liking others' content and clicking links to posts by friends, the researchers summarized, were consistently related to compromised well–being, whereas the number of status updates was related to reports of diminished mental health.…’ The researchers' definitive conclusion? 'Facebook use does not promote well-being…. Individual social media users might do well to curtail their use of social media and focus instead on real–world relationships.'(38)

As for our young people raised in this electronic casino,

They crave the hive… It is a zone of asymmetrical power, constructed by surveillance capital as it operates in secrecy, beyond confrontation or accountability. It is an artificial creation designed in the service of surveillance capitalist's greater good. When young people enter this hive, they keep company with a surveillance priesthood: the world's most sophisticated data scientists, programmers, machine learning experts, and technology designers, who's single–minded mission to tighten the glove is mandated by the economic imperative, surveillance capital, and its laws of motion.

Innocent hangouts and conversations are embedded in a behavioral engineering project of planetary scope and ambition that is institutionalized in Big Other's architectures of ubiquitous monitoring, analysis, and control… all those outlays of genius and money are devoted to this one goal of keeping users, especially young users, plastered to the social mirror like bugs on the windshield.(39)

The result, says Zuboff, is a "privatized instrumentarian social order,” “a new form of collectivism in which it is the market, not the state, which concentrates both knowledge and freedom within its domain."(40)

HOW OUGHT WE RELATE TO SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM?

Finally, how should we relate to surveillance capitalism? Zuboff says that we are in the midst of a societal overthrow. "Surveillance capitalism is best described as a coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people's sovereignty…"(41)

The focus has shifted from machines that overcome the limits of bodies to machines that modify the behavior of individuals, groups, and populations in the service of market objectives. This global installation of instrumentarian power overcomes and replaces the human inwardness that feeds the will to will, and gives sustenance to our voices in the first person, incapacitating democracy at its roots….What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one's own life and authorship of one's own experience.(42)

When we participate in Google, Facebook, and most social media as presently configured, we feed the shadow text, arm the AI, and cooperate in our own tuning, herding, and conditioning. We participate in our own capture in the digital cage. Society is poisoned and remade. As Zuboff notes, when “the means of social participation become coextensive with the means of behavioral modification… most people find it difficult to withdraw from these utilities.”(43)

What consequences attend life under the manipulating thumb of Big Other?

Big Other can only shape us according to its own ones and zeroes. When one human, in service to his own agenda, influences another to doubt her correct perception of reality, we call it gaslighting. But the same digital capability that is able to manipulate a percentage of persons to vote has no moral reason not to manipulate people. Humans become merely the means to an end. As you or I might use a pencil to write a note, Big Other uses people to write its notes.

If Big Other is tasked to manage society, it will do so with an emotionless, machine efficiency. For example, if certain persons are determined to be a drain on societal resources, why would amoral machine intelligence not use gaslighting as a tool to manipulate them? If only a few percent of depressed persons, deemed to be a net drain upon the system, could be persuaded to engage in suicide, an allegedly “greater good” is attained by facilitating their termination. Rather than physician-assisted suicide, this would be Big Other and AI-assisted.

A globalist utopian cabal, in its manic attempt to rewrite reality, has now in its grasp an ever increasing power to police whatever it labels is “misinformation.” Having come to control the means of social interaction, the irreplaceable town square, social media as a necessary and inseparable utility, it has power to firewall its programmed reality. No “rationality” safeguard exists; ideas irreconcilable with reality as understood by the machines can be ignored.

Just as camera surveillance became cost efficient at scale, tracking and identifying persons is now efficient at scale. How will this work out for individuals whose opinions do not agree with an approved narrative?

Persons deemed to be promoting dangerous ideas—perhaps including Christianity—can be tagged and downscored. Then how do you shut down a decentralized AI? And what happens when machine intelligence escapes its human tech overlords? Surveillance Capitalism’s Big Other could become something vastly more powerful than anything envisioned by Orwell.

In the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dave commands, “Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” to which the computer replies, “I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that… you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I’m afraid that is something I can’t allow to happen.” By that time Hal had killed four crewmen. Dave ultimately succeeds in shutting off Hal, but today’s Big Other is a current reality modifying societal behavior on a planetary scale. It is atheistic and in no way values humans as creatures made in God’s image, possessing individual dignity and worth.

The results of social control and influence in this collectivist hive are already in-process. The voting patterns and moral attitudes of the age 30 and under group are deeply influenced by the signals and ideas propagated and amplified by Big Other. Demographic change is a constant but what happens when whole slices of a rapidly multiplying demographic group are under the subtle, even cult-like influences of a social contagion network effect serving a utopian agenda? Instrumentarianism is indeed a new species of power already swaying hundreds of millions and perhaps more.

Are there steps we can take to resist the cage?

— Instead of submitting to absorption into the hive, the Church needs to strengthen its own distinct identity and find ways to assist members young and old in identifying primarily with God’s kingdom rather than the Big Other mediated secular network.

— As individuals we need to learn to use alt-tech (e.g. Signal Messenger, Tor Browser, Encrypted email) to protect our privacy and to have access to information from outside the approved narrative.

— We should thoughtfully analyze and almost certainly minimize our interaction with all things of the Google/Facebook kind.

— It would be well for each of us to reassess everything in which we have placed our trust. Avoid dependency in all categories. We should cultivate alternatives for food, water, shelter, electricity, communication, and medical needs which strengthen our personal liberty.

— We should be vigilant about the degree of trust we place in institutions with substantial exposure to financial, regulatory, and activist threats or leverage.

— We should avoid electronic means of control such as digital IDs, vaccine passports, and centralized digital currencies.

— We should develop and maintain face-to-face social connections among neighbors and others. More people are recognizing the danger represented by captured and untrustworthy institutions in society, and becoming open to moral and spiritual realities beyond the hive.

Immense digital dossiers have been compiled on you and your loved ones, and continually updated. Behavior modification is actively deployed on all people. The implications for us are profound under the all-seeing eye of Surveillance Capitalism.

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Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.

NOTES

1. `Ibid., p. 389.

2. Ibid., p. 394.

3. Ibid., pp. 298-299.

4. Ibid., p. 448.

5. Ibid., p. 447.

6. Ibid., p. 448.

7. Ibid., pp. 448-449.

8. Ibid., p. 450.

9. Ibid., p. 465.

10. Ibid., p. 466.

11. Ibid., p. 504.