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title, date, draft, custom_css
| title | date | draft | custom_css | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Surveillance Capitalism is not the Whole Picture | 2026-05-14T18:01:27-07:00 | true |
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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.
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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
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{{< 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
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