This post is on rabble.ca
Update, April 18 – Since posting this, I found some good blog posts on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Barbara Fisher’s post, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: A Mixed Review on the Inside Higher Ed site, nicely explains how businesses aren’t just using the predictions about our behaviour that they buy from surveillance capitalists to help them better target their ads:
“That Fitbit your employer paid for? It feeds information to insurers that can use to change your behaviour and reduce costs – or charge you more if you don’t comply. Google drove into our neighbourhoods with camera-equipped cars to capture images of our communities and create detailed maps that will be useful for routing their self-driving cars and even planning entire cities where everything will be connected and everyone’s life experience moment by moment can be rendered as data.”
2 replies on “COVID-19 could mean we lose and surveillance capitalists win — again”
The ‘best’ conspiracy theory I read today is that COVID was invented by the Chinese collaborating with Bill Gates, so that we all need to be vaccined, and with the vaccination we’ll each have a micro-chip implanted so we can from then on be subject to complete surveillance and control …
And the irony is that people are posting these comments on Facebook and places like Gmail where they’re REALLY under surveillance but have little understanding of just how much.