WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY News Journal Update - (en) Italy, FDCA, il Cantiere #23: The digital continent: obsessions and devices of surveillance - Marilina Veca (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

We receive a contribution on surveillance capitalism and digital social
control from our collaborator Marilina Veca, journalist and writer. We
propose it to our comrades and readers with the intent and hope of
opening a debate on the new ways in which the ruling class "2.0"
exercises its power.[and] ---- "Homo sapiens - provided he does not
destroy himself with the sound of smart bombs and humanitarian wars or
by continuing to pollute his habitat to continue producing more weapons
and junk goods - will sooner or later find a way out of the dead end in
into which the capitalist mode of production, not without his approval,
put him?" (1).

The current situation seems to be the time of masterless slaves
subjected to generalized surveillance in which everyone turns themselves
in as voluntary data producers and where the hidden and occult masters
are the Lords of Big Data . In short, technological implementation
produces the involvement of citizens in their own surveillance. And the
involvement of citizens in their own surveillance is expressed in all
the activities that on the internet - in particular on the so-called
social networks - stimulate and invite the production of data.

The more data in any form a person generates with their activities
online and on the web , the greater their personal contribution will be
to producing forms of surveillance on themselves and others.

Each new piece of data produced, each click , increases the intensity
and extension of control. Today power is exercised in analysing,
inducing and predicting the behavior of people who continuously and
voluntarily provide the tools of their own control (everyone
continuously "posts" on social media a series of data and information
that determine their present and future behaviour, from (having animals
at home, the sports practiced, the use of free time, the favorite books,
the most listened to music, the furnishings of the house, the habits,
the loves, and so on).

Activating the smartphone and connected apps and sensors, consulting
messages, sending and receiving emails - including photos, work and play
activities, various sharing, frequenting, etc. - the purchase of train
and plane tickets, the study of weather forecasts, public transport
timetables, WhatsApp groups , reference social networks, electronic
games to pass the time, the most loved videos on You Tube , the use of
the navigator, Google maps and locators, use of the credit card and
prepaid cards, use of the badge, purchases on Amazon, requesting
information from search engines, monitoring via devices and information
on personal health and that of others, on vaccines, epidemics,
pandemics, the closed-circuit cameras of subways, banks, companies, road
gates, the sensors that everywhere track the digital devices we use and
wear, etc.

We continuously generate data, continuously and voluntarily: we produce
data that will serve for the permanent control and prediction of future
behavior, data that will remain recorded in the servers of service
providers for an indefinite time and will remain available for every
possible use and for continuous and predictive surveillance of our
behaviors. Once upon a time, to control a man it was enough to cage,
limit and possibly repress his activity: now, on the contrary, everyone
is stimulated to do, say, declare, expose themselves, provide
information, continuously and on everything. It is from everyone's DOING
that control is generated, a new control that is not comparable to any
other form of surveillance previously practiced.

The Internet network, as Renato Curcio has repeatedly underlined, is not
neutral at all, just as no other technological apparatus is neutral: we
are increasingly incentivized to increase our "active subjection"
through the use of all possible devices that have "hybridized" our
lives. To give a banal example, the continuous expression of "I like"/"I
don't like", the obsession with "likes " , the obsessive counting of the
number of followers who follow and approve one of our posts, can appear
like a game , as something unimportant, fun, a way to participate, to
express solidarity or closeness or, on the contrary, disapproval:
ultimately the best way to be " social ". Instead, expressing ourselves
with " likes " constitutes an enormous production of data and productive
predictions for digital platforms and makes each of us an in/voluntary
promoter of surveillance. No longer supervise and punish but induce the
production of data? Renato Curcio, in his studies on the cybernetic
society, cited Dominique Cardon, the scholar who, "observing this device
that assigns scores and rankings starting from measurements, a device
that we now find everywhere in the digital continent", brought his
attention precisely to the functions that these attributions perform not
only for capturing customers but even more so in putting them to work
for the reproduction of the devices themselves and for the production of
their future. His answer is very interesting. He writes: "Measurements
also serve to fabricate the future." By producing the behavior of the
ranked, the algorithms that regulate the rankings "manufacture our
reality, organize it and orient it".

In conclusion - conclusion just to say, because this topic has such
enormous implications that it is impossible to write about it in a few
lines - we are faced with new forms and articulations of power, a
hierarchy of remote powers. I would like to conclude on a note of hope
by quoting Curcio again: "However, this is also, or could be, a great
opportunity to creatively redesign the economic, cultural, ethical and
political horizon of a renewed coexistence worthy of being called
"social", decolonized and post-capitalist; an opportunity to imagine
concrete ways out of the digital atomization that humiliates us.
Perhaps, after all, it is not Homo sapiens who has reached the end of
his journey" (2).

(1) Renato Curcio, Artificial society , Sensibili alle Foglie, Rome, 2017.

(2) Ibid.

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