Bloom - Monitored: business and surveillance in a time of big data

Monitored

Business and Surveillance
in a Time of Big Data

Peter Bloom

First published 2019 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright Peter Bloom 2019

The right of Peter Bloom to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 3863 7 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 3862 0 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0392 4 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0394 8 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0393 1 EPUB eBook

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America

This is dedicated to everyone in the DPO thank you for letting me be your temporary Big Brother and for the opportunity to change the world together.

In 2017 Netflix released the hi-tech thriller The Circle with a star-studded cast including Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, and John Boyega. Beneath its standard plot lies a chilling vision of a coming dystopian tomorrow. It presents nothing less than the rise of a new virulent form of tyranny where big data and social media can track anyone, anywhere, at any time. This frightening scenario may sound far-fetched but it in fact mirrors real-life developments. As reported in the Guardian, former Facebook president Sean Parker warned that its platform literally changes your relationship with society, with each other God only knows what its doing to our childrens brains. And while The Circle had a predictable Hollywood happy ending, our own future is far less assured.

Rapidly emerging is the growing threat of totalitarianism 4.0, one that is rising alongside the present hi-tech revolutions of Industry 4.0 fuelled by advances in big data, artificial intelligence, and digital communications. Rather than the ominous visage of Big Brother in 1984, this new attempt at total control will come in the form of wearable technology, depersonalised algorithms, and digitalised audit trails. Everyone will be fully analysed and accounted for. Their every action monitored, their every preference known, their entire life calculated and made predictable. Yet this also raises a key question who is behind this updated totalitarianism? Perhaps it is more accurate to ask who or what is benefitting from this totally monitored society? And just as importantly who and what is not being monitored and why?

The key to answering these questions is to critically explore and reconsider our common understandings of the term accounting itself. Accounting is conventionally associated with financial accounting, a fact that is not surprising given that finance has largely driven the twenty-first-century economy. However, it also refers to the collection and analysis of information about people specifically the use of techniques to account for our beliefs and actions. Thus just as financial tools can be used to quantify and interpret the profits of a business, so to can social accounting techniques be employed to map the behaviour of people through the accumulation of their personal and shared data.

It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to better understand how the proliferation of these new accounting techniques particularly linked to big data, social media, and artificial intelligence are transforming the ways people are socially controlled and how, in turn, the present status quo is being reinforced. On the one hand, new technology has made it easier to track all aspects of our existence from work to home and everything in-between. On the other hand, political and economic elites appear to conduct their business in secret, with little public oversight or knowledge. Further, the actual movement of capital and the spread of its power seems to happen in relative darkness, hidden by esoteric financial modelling and complicated accounting strategies whose primary purpose is evasion rather than detection. Significantly, in the present period financial and social accounting have increasingly merged as the ability to collect and analyse peoples data is aimed at and judged according to the same fiscal values of maximising their economic value. The overriding purpose of this book is thus to demonstrate how these accounting techniques are making the majority of people in the world more accounted for and ultimately accountable, while rendering elites and the capitalist system they profit from dramatically less so.

One of the most interesting and worrying features of the modern world is the ease in which personal information is obtained and exchanged. Everything from your favourite type of music to your present need for a new hammer to even your New Years resolutions are digitally monitored and increasingly exploited by corporations and governments. Our thoughts and our actions are becoming progressively archived, as data from our past are being used to openly and not so openly shape our present and future choices. More precisely, the question is: to what extent has being made more accounted for also made us and society generally more politically and ethically accountable?

One thing is abundantly clear: it is certainly simpler to follow and judge the lives of others. It is now possible to monitor almost everything we do, from what time we wake up in the morning, to how many steps we take throughout the day, to the types of movies we binge watch at night, to the number of times we check our emails at work, to the amount of time we spend working from home.

And this information is not merely personal it is increasingly shared for the entire world to see and analyse for their own voyeuristic and profitable purposes. Who hasnt looked up an old friend or partner on Facebook? Who hasnt Google searched themselves or those they know to discover in seconds a previously unknown accomplishment or possibly even hidden salacious secrets? And information that is private is seemingly easily uncovered by those with the technological know-how and criminal desire to do so.

At the turn of the new millennium it would appear that everyone and everywhere is, for better or for worse, more visible. This form of total personal and collective exposure has given birth to a new type of citizen. While conventional ideals of free speech, civic engagement, and social responsibility certainly have not disappeared (at least in principle), they are being enhanced and to some extent replaced by updated forms of digital morality for guiding individual and social behaviour. In particular, people are expected to properly manage their information so that they do not use it in ways that are destructive either to themselves or others. This could mean something as obvious as not posting offensive views on your social media account, or something as fundamental as regularly monitoring your heart rate. However, there is also a dark side to this digitalised citizenship. It is increasingly used to pressure people into being more productive, efficient and marketable thus progressively making them more fiscally accounted for in their everyday actions and habits.