Surveillance Capitalism

profitgenerator (68)in #privacy • 9 years ago

I hear this term being used quite commonly now, especially in left circles. Just always blaming Capitalism for all of our problems, it's always Capitalism.

Leftist Disinformation

Well let me debunk this, and let me explain to you what is really going on from my understanding. This "Surveillance Capitalism" concept is totally ridiculous.

Ok first of all the term was probably coined by some leftist newspapers, or perhaps by Shoshana Zuboff according to Wikipedia. It's kind of a mockery on Capitalism, and leftist academics really love to blame Capitalism for all problems in society.

It says right there that it spawned out of this "Neo-Liberal" period, and what is Neo-Liberalism exactly? Well it would be a sort of libertarian economy according to Wikipedia with: privatization, fiscal austerity,deregulation,free trade.

Well that is a good disinformation right there. If Neo-Liberalism would mean what Wikipedia defines it, then we are actually looking at the opposite thing today. Because we are looking at socialization of everything by the government:

In west Europe taxes are > 80%
You have massive social security ponzi schemes
You have a welfare state
You have Marxism in the media and academia
You have ever increasing government spending and debt
And you certainly don't have free trade, everything is regulated, license or permit based, and technically everything is illegal unless it's legalized first thanks to authoritarian civil law doctrines

So it's really a shameless lie to call this Neo-Liberalism, whatever that means, because all definitions are bastardized at this point.

It's much more accurate to call this Neo-Marxism, let's see what are the tenets of Marxism again:

Abolition of private property
Progressive big income tax
Centralization of credit and banks through the State (central banking)
Government education
Government healthcare

Yep you have all of these in the current Neo-Marxist society, and remember these because we will come back to these.

True Capitalism

Now let's define what is Capitalism in reality. Capitalism, fundamentally is based on individualism. It's individual sovereignty, meaning that you and your property are inalienable, and you may enter into voluntary relationship with others but the basic unit of society is the individual, and that is how all other structures emerge.

Well your privacy, your private data is your private property. What you do and say that is meant to be private is your private property. If it's business oriented private data, then that is a trade secret.

In Capitalism, privacy is an inalienable right, a negative right, and anyone who violates your privacy is a thief, literally, because they are stealing something private from you.

You can already see this, to how great lengths rich people go to obfuscate and hide their private lives or private financial information. They all do offshore schemes, you hardly see rich people post pictures with their gold bars on social media, and they almost never disclose any financial information. Nobody is just going to tell you their net worth or the structure of their portfolio, these are always kept very secret.

So a true Capitalist tends to keep secrets, and has a very good reason to do so: competitors, thieves, extortionists,gangsters are all trying to hurt him, so not revealing certain information is beneficial for one's security.

Hedonist Neo-Marxism

But this is not what we have now. We don't have "Surveillance Capitalism", what we have is hedonist Neo-Marxism, where nobody cares about anything, everyone is irresponsible, they are nihilists, they only want to party and fuck all day long.

That is what modern society is all about: partying and fucking. So when you use your phone and all these online services that gather data about you. You just don't care.

Or if basically anyone can hack into your webcam and watch you, you just don't care do you?

Or when they turn on your microphone to listen to you 24/7, you don’t care either, you have nothing to hide, so why bother?

And this is just the surface, there are tools even worse than these. But you just don’t care, and are ignorant about everything, because you are a nihilist and don’t care about anything around you.

You think you are just a dummy floating through the river of time. You are probably a determinist who thinks that fate has already planned everything for you and you have no control over your life.

In short, you are a slave. You have a slave mindset. You are not a Capitalist, if you were, then you would not put up with this stuff.

You are a Hedonist Neo-Marxist, who has been indoctrinated since kindergarten in this Marxist cult to obey authority and never question it.

So how can you be an individualist who understands the concept of private property if you have been indoctrinated all your life to be a slave?

Why are your blaming Capitalism for the things you are doing that are the 180* opposite of Capitalism. You are falsely associating your Marxist beliefs with Capitalism and you don’t even believe in private property.

Certainly you don’t believe in your own right to privacy and private property. So you get exactly what you deserve. If you don’t believe that your own data is private, then it won’t be. Corporations, Governments and everyone else will spy on you, simply because you consent to it, and you don’t even realize that you consent to it.

But once you realize how enslaved you really are and it’s this ultra-collectivist Neo-Marxist mindset is what is enslaving you, then you can slowly change your own life and start to free yourself from oppression.

Conclusion

What we have today is extreme Collectivism, where everyone is denied their property:

You don’t have property over your data
You don’t have property over your body (war on drugs, abortion, etc..)
You don’t have property over your items (civil asset forfeiture, criminal asset forfeiture,etc…)
You don’t have property over your money (bank bail-ins, confiscation, public debt, taxation, etc..)

The opposite of this is individual freedom, where you would work to reclaim your ownership over your lost property.

Sources:
https://pixabay.com