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