Surveillance Capitalism: Is Technology Controlling Our Ability for “Free Thinking”? -By Caleb Onah

Over the past few days, the twitter platform has been flooded with unverified twitter formerly verified accounts as many refused to pay the coveted $8 fee by twitter new owner Elon Musk. Saying he doesn’t seem to want to see celebrities lose their blue ticks and has restored verification badges for only few celebrity accounts. The move came after many celebrities protested and stopped the twitter blue subscription service.

In the book “The Age of Surveillance of Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff’s is a request to attention the way Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Amazon control our lives and way of thinking. According to Zuboff, these Internet giants provide systems that attempt to create a group of passive consumers in the face of a fragile shell of autonomy and self-determination. Manipulations of this scale bring more returns to their corporations than anything we’ve seen before. This is what I will say makes them capitalists. It is the purest type where profit determines decisions above all else.

According to her, they care just enough to make sure we’re serious in using their products and services! Otherwise, how will they maintain a user base large enough to house Black Lives Matter or EndSARS protesters? So the director aspect is their source of power and autonomy. They know data is the new gold, which means that the user is not the customer of a free service like twitter, but the raw material to extract more and more data.

The aim is to better predict our behaviour, so that these predictions about us can be integrated into products available to anyone willing to pay: credit bureaus, insurance companies, commercial companies, institutions, and the government; of how much, better than who and why of usage. The moral apathy and data collection at the heart of these companies, is successfully and necessarily concealed behind the façade that they are pioneers and innovators.

The global tech world leads us into an inevitable and unchecked new world. Capitalism’s age of surveillance is trying to break through this shell, and for that I understand its startling tone. Surveillance capitalists have succeeded by developing more accurate methods of predicting our behavior and will continue to do so if given the opportunity.

Think of Amazon predicting what you want to buy, Twitter where and what you must tweet within 140 characters, or Facebook selecting the news you have to listen, read the most. Maximum compatibility of Zuboff takes this idea to an extreme and travels back in time to Behaviorism, B.F. Skinner and to turn our attention to early thinkers like himself.

Furthermore, these tech giants believe that freedom itself is an illusion and imagine a dark ideal in which society is controlled by scientific means that make human behaviour predictable. It is increasingly used in science to resemble and predict the behaviour of animals such as laboratory mice and monkeys. This reminds us to resist the temptation to believe we can know “everything” in ourselves, even if the possibility of comprehensive knowledge is an error that has lured some of the world’s greatest thinkers like, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, Bertrand Russel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Jeremy Bentham Etc, into speculation, there are mysteries we can and will never know.

Individual human behaviour is precisely the fact that we cannot fully know, which is a shocking simplification; it but can make good predictions and amazingly accurate ones and there are ways to manipulate other people’s wills to make them more likely to act the way we want them to. But when it comes to that, I can’t say for sure what anyone else will do next, especially with the silicon mirror or artificial intelligence (AI) containing the data points.

There is a mere delusion that can hide this fact, and it is in the spectator capitalist tech giant’s like twitter, facebook, tiktok or google’s interest to maintain it. Because of the scale of work, algorithmic victories are often feared using a proportion of correct predictions that approaches 100%. But this irresistible force can abruptly lose its power when we stop thinking statistically with them and think only as one person: for ourselves alone. How many ads on the Internet can you remember as outrageously idiosyncratic, easily scrollable, or deliberately rejected?

Our Ability for Free Thinking Are Potentially Unpredictable

In light of the foregoing, the truth they want to stay away from and will never tell us is that even if they continue to collect our data in far more innovative ways, surveillance capitalists can never fully escape the fact that individuals are potentially unpredictable.

Ancient philosophers and theologians have always observed this truth and presented it to us in the form of the concept of free thinking that we can make decisions, even unexpected ones. Many people today like to say that “thinking freely” is a component rather than an intrinsic fact. But this delusion allows those who control us to exaggerate their power and undermine ours.

We are most inspired by people who do the unexpected; the stories we read every day are based on basic principles. Characters must change. The ancient spiritual wisdom of the great world religions is based on our ability to direct our will to good. The capitalists who want to control us have nothing to fear and will want to continue doing so.

Façades seem more normal when we allow ourselves to be certainly unwilling to take risks, think creatively, or take control of our lives and change them for the better and also to remind us that we can think and make our own decisions against theirs.