Our ignorance
Regarding our "ignorance" of how the modern internet works, Shoshana Zuboff wrote in 2020 that surveillance capitalists "know things that we cannot know" yet must "conceal their intentions and practices." And: "It is impossible to understand something that has been crafted in secrecy and designed as fundamentally illegible. These systems are intended to ensnare us, preying on our vulnerabilities bred by an asymmetrical division of learning and amplified by our scarcity of time, resources, and support."
Strict behaviorists, like Meyer and Skinner in the 20th century, believed that human freedom was an illusion. There was no free will. For them, regarding "the uncomfortable facts of human ignorance," Zuboff says: "I think of Dickens's Scrooge when he first encounters the doleful, chain-dragging ghost of his deceased partner Jacob Marley and denies the apparition, saying, 'You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.' So it is with freedom: an undigested bit of fear, a crumb of denial that, once metabolized, will dispel the apparition and deliver us to reality. The environment determines behavior, and our ignorance of precisely how it does so is the void that we fill with the fantasy of freedom.'"
The market aspires to "fabricate predictions, which become more valuable as they approach certainty," Zuboff says. Surveillance capitalists need massive, complete data sets, and so they've "hijacked the division of learning in society. They command knowledge from the decisive pinnacle of the social order, where they nourish and protect the shadow text: the urtext of certainty. This is the market net in which we are snared."
Conspiracy theories
In 2023, Naomi Klein explained that many of today's conspiracy theorists (generally on the right wing) are personally motivated by trying to make sense of a profoundly confusing world. Using environmental destruction as an example, Klein says:
"That ecofascist thought would surge in our particular historical moment is, sadly, predictable. We live in a time when having two jobs is no guarantee of affording a home and many of our governments consider bulldozing homeless encampments to be a viable policy solution. Meanwhile, every day brings us closer to a future of climate breakdown that, if it is not slowed and reversed, will surely lead to the culling of large parts of our and other species, hitting the most vulnerable first and worst. The process is already well underway. Being alive in a knife-edge moment like this, being forced to be complicit in it, while our so-called leaders fail so miserably to act, unavoidably generates all kinds of morbid symptoms. Inevitably, people reach for narratives to make sense of this reality."
There's a common narrative in which some nameless "they" are trying to control us through vaccines, 5G, and so on. "Snide" comments from those who are left-leaning tend to be "sublimated into ironic humor, like 'Wait until they hear about cell phones.'" Klein reminds us: Cell phones are exactly what the conspiracy theorists are trying to figure out. She explains:
"They know all about cell phones. They just don’t know what to do about cell phones (or smart speakers or search histories or shadow banning or email and social media metadata...). And neither, it seems, does anyone else, including those in power, who are patently unwilling to rein in what the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism.” And [Naomi] Wolf, with her 'Five Freedoms' campaign and her calls for anti-vax civil disobedience, is giving her followers something to do. She is telling them that it’s not too late to get their privacy, and their freedoms, back."
Transphobia
In my view, this is also where a lot of transphobia comes from. Certain modern forces are taking advantage of the general population and, to use Zuboff's phrase, they are indeed "crafted in secrecy and designed as fundamentally illegible" — in response to which, some people, rather than trying to understand surveillance capitalism which pragmatically can't be understood, shift blame to transgender people as if we (trans people) were mascots and puppetmasters for some inscrutable self-interest and for incomprehensibility itself.
The books
Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.
Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
Image of elf ornament from Wikimedia Commons. Taken by Jelene Morris. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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