Surveillance Capitalism Undermines Free Will and Democracy

Surveillance capitalism undermines Free Will – and democracy
Technology is first changing and altering our lives in many ways. Every device we possess in one way or another tracks and reports our movements and activities. As soon we wake up, our activities remain monitored, right from our text messages to the condition of our commute to the content of our shopping basket to our daily online searches, including our choices for mates and dates. All these recorded data happen behind and remain a vital asset for companies who sell them for profit. With the onset of the internet and platforms such as Google and Facebook, companies realized that they were sitting on a new asset dubbed “behavioral surplus” and traded in emerging markets for profits. When Google first started, its goal was to organize human knowledge but has evolved, and today, on top of doing the searches, they are also being searched. Facebook started as a social platform but now collects and trades some of the most secret individual secrets. Shoshana Zuboff, in her book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” alleges that surveillance capitalists limit our freedom. Concurrently, Jia Tolentino, in her novel, “In Always be Optimizing,” illustrates the different ways women’s free will and mainstream feminism are being controlled by capitalism. Our free will through the lenses of Jia Tolentino and Shoshana Zuboff is limited by capitalism. The manipulative nature of surveillance capitalist has made us blind and deaf to the ways these companies adapt to exploit our personal data for their own ends and, in return, take away our free will and democracy.
There is exclusive evidence that the internet informs and distracts from our sense of self. Through surveillance capitalism, individual data is tracked and sold. Our activity on the web is monitored through what surveillance capitalist consider as behavioral surpluses, and feeds taken and tailored to the unique needs and interests cultivated on the internet. Our ability to negotiate terms has slowly declined because surveillance capitalism has tricked us into believing that some products are vital parts of our self-identity, and we must have them to be considered complete. Tolentino writes that, with the internet, “the ideal woman now has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or a husband.” She goes ahead to state that, for this ideal woman, “the boyfriend or husband is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an intersecting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached” (Tolentino 63). Her free will has been sabotaged and now sees the world through the lenses of unseen audiences. Her free will has been sabotaged by the internet and for her to stay relevant she has to act as a worthy object to her viewers. Every information she presents or accesses serves as a direct commentary on who they are. Women, shaped by social media, have optimized their bodies and identities to align with what their unseen audience want and what the internet expects of them. They (women) now look like Instagram and are constantly reproducing lessons of the marketplace and failure to which they lose rel...