What is 'Surveillance Capitalism'?

I remember being in a meeting in Downtown Washington DC in late summer of 2013 when I first fully recognized what the expansion of the post-9/11 surveillance state really meant. Sure, as a budding political writer with a broadly libertarian disposition I had argued against The Patriot Act and its unprecedented powers from the very beginning. Sure we knew about the secret detention centers around the world where it appeared enemies of the USA were “disappeared” to. We knew about Abu Ghraib. But it wasn’t until this meeting, high in a K Street (or maybe it was L, I forget) office building as we sat around a collection of fold out tables with name tents in front of us that I really really realized how far we had gone down a road that this country was never supposed to have gone down.

Half of the meeting was being done via conference call and suddenly in the middle of the meeting, when we were discussing this or that, there was a disruption in the call, some feedback or something.

It was no big deal. Someone probably pressed the wrong button, and it wasn’t like we were discussing national security matters or something, but the guy chairing the meeting smiled and looked at us. “Sure hope that’s not the NSA.” (Or something to that effect.)

In the months just before Snowden had blown the whistle.

We all chuckled a little bit and then got back to our conversation. No one really thought much of it. And the NSA likely had no interest in us anyway.

But that the convener of the meeting said what he said, and the fact that all of us around the table kind of looked at one another as we chuckled meant that there was something new going on in the United States. It was a sort of tacit acknowledgement that the Fourth Amendment had been tossed aside and that one of the most important protections citizens had against an intrusive government was essentially no more.

On my drive home through the traffic of the Washington suburbs I reflected on what we had lost.

Fast forward a decade. We now generally accept (not that it is OK and we do still have a Fourth Amendment, when are you going to address this Supreme Court?) that we are spied upon at least to some degree by our own government. We have also come to accept (not that it is OK) that corporations that deal with data share our data with other corporations and with governments alike. People have been conditioned to accept this.

So when we hear that TikTok has gathered information on user’s positions on gun control and abortion and then sent that data back to China to be housed on Chinese servers we shrug. So what if the parent company (which is tied to the CCP) can access this information? This news barely generates a headline.