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+---
+title: "Surveillance Capitalism is not the Whole Picture"
+date: 2026-05-14T18:01:27-07:00
+draft: true
+custom_css:
+- style.scss
+---
+
+{{< halfpage >}}
+
+## Surveillance Capitalism is not the Whole Picture
+
+A couple of years ago, man walked into a university teaching lab.
+
+"Do you guys have any deuterium water?", he said.
+
+"Huh?", responded the lab manager, off guard. She had never seen the man before;
+he wasn't part of the chemistry lab.
+
+"You know, heavy water."
+
+"We don't have that." It was an unusual request.
+
+"Do you know where I can get some?", he continued, "What's a good chemical
+company? How do I go about ordering heavy water from them?"
+
+The lab manager was uncomfortable. What could this man possibly have to do
+with heavy water? He seemed determined to acquire some. After some back and
+forth, the man left empty-handed.
+
+That day, another man arrived and made the same request: he wanted heavy water.
+Again, the lab manager refused him. For the rest of the day, she had
+a knot in her stomach. Having failed once, in order to remain under the radar,
+had some shadowy cabal switched representatives, and tried again to attain
+their goal?
+
+Uneasy still the lab manager had dinner, opening YouTube on her phone to pass
+the time. On the front page, a video was waiting for her: "the ice cube
+is too heavy!". When frozen, you see, heavy water sinks instead of floating.
+
+There was no plot. The students, having both seen this video, had independently
+decided to replicate the trick.
+
+To me, this coincidence is more intriguing than some human conspiracy.
+
+---
+
+{{< /halfpage >}}
+{{< halfpage >}}
+
+> Roland too became conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him.
+> Discovered it so. ...so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it.
+>
+> -- Thomas Pynchon, *Gravity's Rainbow*
+
+Today, we live amidst an invisible ocean. It's not "real" in the strict sense;
+its tides don't pull us out to sea or push us towards the shore; no
+warm undercurrents alternate with cool water as we bob in the waves.
+Standing on a hiking trail and looking out at the path ahead, the world
+might look exactly as it had forty years ago. However, the ocean is
+there, mediated by electromagnetism instead of fluid. Looking up at the sky,
+nowadays we are reminded of this by the numerous hurtling dots, delivering
+the internet to practically every corner of the planet.
+
+Reminded are we of its existence, too, when we hear it speak. During
+the heavy water incident, the voice of the visitors was no longer _just_
+their own, their actions not _entirely_ their will. Is an idea truly
+one's own if it was redundantly planted in the minds of all who, during
+the latest wave of recommendations, happened to be on YouTube?
+
+---
+
+> If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers
+> who built it . . . never knew there were any further steps to be taken.
+> Their design was "finalized", and they could forget it.
+>
+> -- Thomas Pynchon, *Gravity's Rainbow*
+
+I've recently read _The Age of Surveillance Capitalism_ by Shoshana Zuboff.
+In it, Zuboff powerfully reframes the actions of tech giants like Google
+from the perspective of _behavioral surplus_: information gathered from
+human action that can be used to build
+
+{{< /halfpage >}}
+
+{{< halfpage >}}
+ a model of people, predict what they
+do and what might sway them. Viewed through this lens, many actions taken
+by Google and Meta fall into place. Traffic patterns, written sentiment,
+satellite data, always-on facial recognition in smart glasses, are all
+sources of data to be integrated and applied. The economic value
+of being able to understand and manipulate people is immense; immense too
+is the magnitude of influence this grants to governments. The result is
+a centralized, opaque and ever-expanding surveillance-industrial complex.
+
+I've also recently finished _Gravity's Rainbow_ by Thomas Pynchon. Among
+the numerous subjects and themes of the book is an intricate and densely
+connected network of markets, influences, and hidden agendas that overlays
+the political conflicts of World War 2. The Rocket was given life not by
+any one country, but by a international amalgamation of individuals,
+organizations, businesses, and subsidiaries. There were economic misdeeds;
+dealers replaced cocaine with powdered milk, Phoebus intentionally limited
+the lifetimes of lightbulbs, Lazlo Jamf experimented on infant Slothrop
+with a mystery Imipolex G. All of this, though, the whole system, took
+on the life of its own: it was the Rocket-state, and it acted in
+ways that were inscrutable, mysterious, and yet behind which, in moments
+of panic or paranoia, one could begin to see intent.
+
+The Rocket-state, as Pynchon described it, may or may not have existed.
+It certainly does not exist today. However, beyond Zuboff's cycle of
+dispossession, beyond the powerful surveillance state exposed by Snowden,
+today lies the Attention-state. It is the entity stirring occasionally under
+the surface of the internet's ocean.
+
+post-truth allows room / degrees of freedom for odd behavior
+
+{{< /halfpage >}}
diff --git a/content/writing/pynchon/style.scss b/content/writing/pynchon/style.scss
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+<div class="halfpage">
+    {{ .Inner | markdownify }}
+</div>