Many Nigerians oppose the Protection from Internet Falsehood and Manipulation Bill 2019. They fear the bill is in effect a form of censorship, designed to paralyse dissent and discourage criticism of government. But Nigeria actually needs an internet bill or something like that. Citizens need protection from the practices of powerful internet/digital/online/social media companies who rule cyberspace.
Last week, a friend said her thoughts were translated into an online advert. I was confused. Asked to explain further, she said she was thinking of buying something specific, and a day or so later she saw photos of that item every time she went online, adverts of it everywhere. I did not believe her. She explained that she never searched for that item with a search engine. Then she thought deeply about it. She later recalled speaking on the phone, using a free phone call app, she mentioned the item during a phone conversation. That was the only time she articulated her desire to purchase that item. Now she sees it advertised almost every page she opens online.
This is “surveillance capitalism”, the latest version of capitalism described by Shoshana Zuboff, Professor of Business Administration (Emerita) at Harvard University. She articulated her concerns about surveillance capitalism in an award-winning paper 2015 paper titled “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilisation.” Online commerce really began in the 1990s, new business models that looked at the internet as the future of business flourished. Companies sought online presence and added “dot.com” to their business names online. But, the “dot.com” bubble didn’t last, it burst.
Fast forward to the 2010s, giant internet-based companies are now not only profitable but are among the wealthiest in the world: in the top 10 most capitalised. These companies attract the best graduates from all over the world and have futuristic offices that set the standard of how the work place should look like. All this would be fine, if not for the surveillance business model of some of these giant internet companies.
In summary, surveillance capitalism is commerce that uses human life as raw material for profit. Scary. Everyday experience: shopping habits, travel, emails, phone calls, online chats and comments are surveyed and harvested as data, used as input for commerce. Defence of this business model may argue that the user whose data is harvest also gets to use the apps and sites for free (social media sites, search engines etc.) But the problem is that this give-and-take is done without the user’s consent. It is all about “big data”, advances in computer power allows the extraction and processing of very large amounts of data, that can produce insights, used for presentation, prediction or prescription of information.
Big data is good, it is the rock of the fourth industrial revolution. But the danger is in the clandestine nature of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff explores the proposition that “big data is above all the foundational component in a deeply intentional and highly consequential new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. This new form of information capitalism aims to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to produce revenue and market control.” In her paper, Zuboff states that nearly half of the world’s seven billion people have a wide range of their daily activities “computer-mediated”. She states that “As a result of pervasive computer mediation, nearly every aspect of the world is rendered in a new symbolic dimension as events, objects, processes, and people become visible, knowable, and shareable in a new way. The world is reborn as data and the electronic text is universal in scale and scope.” The inspiration for Zuboff’s work appears to be two “extraordinary documents” written by the Chief Economist of a major internet firm. In these documents, two articles written in prestigious economics and business journals, the Chief Economist’s theme is the universality of computer-mediated transactions: “The computer creates a record of the transaction…[and] these computer-mediated transactions have enabled significant improvements in the way transactions are carried out and will continue to impact the economy for the foreseeable future.” According to him, four new “uses” from computer-mediated transaction include “data extraction and analysis” “new contractual forms due to better monitoring” “personalisation and customisation” and “continuous experiments”.
For Zuboff, the implication of all this is that these internet-controlling companies’ new revenues depend on data assets extracted through automated online operations, found at every click of the user’s mouse. In the world implied by the Chief Economist’s assumptions, Zuboff believes that “habitats inside and outside the human body are saturated with data and produce radically distributed opportunities for observation, interpretation, communication, influence, prediction, and ultimately modification of the totality of action. Unlike centralised power of mass society, there is no escape from Big Other.”
UYIOSA OMOREGIE
Uyiosa Omoregie is fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants
uyiosaomoregie@yahoo.co.uk, @UyiosaOM (Twitter)
