Surveillance Capitalism

Imagine a scenario where you walk in to your bank or go to the ATM and are told, with no notice, that your account is now closed.

Or your insurance company says no more protection for your house, or your business payment provider suddenly cuts you off?

You’d probably be pretty annoyed. Anyone would. And it’s likely you’d want to know why?

What if the ’why’ was because of your political beliefs, or who you were friends with or who you chose to donate money to.

Like me, you’d probably think a grave injustice was being done.

Yet this is now actually happening and it’s likely to get much worse.

We are living in the age of surveillance capitalism.

Almost everything you do is being watched, tracked and stored by big tech companies. They use that data themselves and also sell it to others.

Most people accept that as the price of convenience or for access to a particular platform. Until recently it was really only used to display advertisements which might appeal to you. A bit creepy but something you can easily ignore.

We’ve gone way beyond marketing now though.

This data is now being used to cancel you, if you like, see or do what the tech mafia don’t want you to.

Lefties have been loving the fact that Google, Apple and Amazon cancelled free speech platform Parler on the grounds it was used to plot the capitol hill riots. However, the FBI now claim it was facebook and twitter where the riots were planned.

I’ll bet you anything neither of them will be cancelled any time soon. That’s because big tech and big data are now political weapons of targeted destruction. The rules only apply to those they want them to.

But it’s not just big business. They are coming for you too.

Recently we’ve seen political figures and media shills calling for all Trump supporters to be targeted.

Have a look at this:

You might think That was a pretty clear call to arms and an incitement to violence by a semi-public figure.

If you did think that you’d be wrong because it is still up on twitter and they ( together with their tech mates) are judge and jury of what words actually mean and when they can be used against you.

Anyway, this surveillance capitalism that is making tech companies so wealthy and powerful is just starting to be weaponised ….or as they euphemistically put it ‘hold people accountable”

Let me give you an example of how they can do that.

I imagine most of you are familiar with the convenience of the Face ID signin feature on your phone.

Did you know it can now be used to identify who you are when you walk into a store or locate you in the street?

Imagine if you happened to attend a political speech or maybe a church service or any other event that the tech tyrants didn’t approve of, the next time you go shopping your tracking features might set off some alerts in the store.

Big data will know which businesses serve you and the digital dictators can target them unless they cancel your access.

You might think it will never get to that but we are seeing it already.

Last night we brought you the story of a conservative commentator who lost his insurance because he was a trump supporter.

People have lost their jobs for making small online donations to political campaigns. Businesses have been targeted for ruin simply because they choose certain advertising platforms.

There is much more but it has all been enabled because of technology.

If our government tried to use this form of surveillance and intimidation to shape the behaviour of their citizens there would be an outcry.

Many of us regularly condemn surveillance states like North Korea and China and yet the same thing is now happening in western countries.

The only difference is that it isn’t the government spying on our every move and building our social capital profiles. It is the technology companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Amazon.

We naively accepted it when it was used only for marketing purposes but now they are trying to use it as a means of coercive control.

I say these tech companies are now out of control .

Drunk on money, power and influence, they have their data harvesting algorithms around our collective throats.

Given how they are prepared to use that against us, it’s time we did something about it.