Privacy, social media, and intellectual stagnation

Surveillance capitalism, as a growth industry premised on theft, makes a better case against capitalism than you'll ever hear from a dreadlocked buffoon on campus

Privacy is first and foremost the mutual recognition of personal boundaries. Privacy is only possible when an individual is capable of setting a boundary between what they voluntarily share with others and what they can keep personal to themselves. It can only exist if other people respect those boundaries.

Personal boundaries, after being ignored by others, are difficult and painstaking to reconstruct. A child who was victimized by an adult who did not respect their boundaries will spend their adulthood at the task of reinforcing a secure sense of themselves. For adults, already coarsened by life, they will feel miserable when their boundaries are trespassed, but their psyche can endure more than a child's. Not that enduring misery is a great way to live.

Surveillance is essential to the survival of a dictatorship. A society like North Korea or Harvard cannot enforce its dogmatism with the limited manpower of its halfwitted leader class and their mercenary hacks. The leader class is not equipped in any manner to keep everyone obedient, and it must crowdsource the day to day surveillance and punishment of its subjects. Ideas that threaten the dogma must be publicly denounced and the person who expressed them humiliated.

Social media is a surveillance technology. But pretty much any new bit of software you use for free, or pay for, has a surveillance component coded in. What happens when you are under constant surveillance, but not apparently on behalf of any state power? We're learning a form of militant majoritarianism fills the role of the authoritarian regime. It makes sense, militant majoritarianism has incidentally has been a guiding principle of human societies since the beginning.

But no human society until 2010 lived within the eye of the practically unlimited surveillance power of social media.

What was born in this transitional phase of technology is something just as morally bankrupt as a dictatorship, but is distributed and nebulous. The intangible bulk of social media has no central control, where would its center even be? The content itself is almost universally petty. Those characteristics make it seem trifling, free from any controlling logic, and insubstantial, but that is an illusion. If it were trifling or illogical, there wouldn't be a half a trillion dollar business that involves Sephora paying 12 year olds to peddle Sephora's crap to other 12 year olds.

In democratic societies, the abandonment of privacy and the spreading fungus of social media have created a new continent, which is being populated by self oppressing authoritarian subsocieties. Each society has their own perverse dogmas, each also claiming to be the majority view of the world at large, and each zealous to extinguish all competitor dogmas. It's sociologically pretty interesting. Smurf dictatorships without a singular dictator. One can wonder, how essential was Stalin to the functioning of Stalinism?

And it doesn't end there. An interesting shared trait between social media and Stalinism is the equal necessity of public performance. In Stalinism, a person risked their life by not publicly showing their commitment and obedience, usually in farcical or humiliating ways. The same necessity for public performance is a fundamental feature of surveillance capitalism. The individual performs for slightly different ambitions; self promotion, impostership, transparent narcissism. But it somehow still manages to be farcical and humiliating, even when it's voluntary. And those performances are increasingly necessary for an individual's participation in social media.

This need for public performances is an example of the crumbled boundary between the public and the private dimensions of who you are.

Experts in privacy like me have tried to tell you that tech companies created social media as a surveillance technology to study you, to understand what excites and angers you, and what bores you. People are often bored by things that are beneficial to them and excited by things that are dangerous to them. That information is valuable and effective in nudging pliable minds towards spending their money. But that level of surveillance requires ignoring any boundary between what you share intentionally and your private being. Your boundaries, are the single greatest barrier to the profitability of surveillance capitalism. So tech companies brazenly intrude into any detail of your life they can access.

I've heard people interpret the surveillance efforts of social media as flattering, "look at all the effort Facebook makes to know me better". That completely misunderstands how insignificant the effort expended by Facebook was to get to know you, and how insignificant any individual like you is to Facebook. Facebook users meet Facebook well more than halfway in getting to know your psychology. In reality, you do all the most difficult work. Facebook can passively observe what you put up voluntarily. It's your hard work, carefully curating your fabricated persona, choosing who and how to be. You show tech corporations what you desire, who you will embrace when advantageous, and who you will shun if they're a social liability. You're an open book that you spend hours a day refining in greater intimate detail, and your illusions about yourself are some of the most informative aspects of your persona and your mind.

The reality is, in the knowledge economy, you are something equal to livestock. While you are on social media, bloviating about Democrats, Republicans or Black Lives Matter of your own volition, you're providing a nanomole of human data product to tech companies. Those scraps of data are quite valuable once aggregated with the same product of all participating humans.           

Experts like myself all agree that this all started to go wrong when you gave up on your privacy, and instead willingly joined in on surveillance capitalism. It was an understandable impulse. Your mind was tempted by narcissistic opportunities and chances for improving your social position, which outweighed the little value most people place on maintaining their privacy. On the contrary, social media appears to offer chances to socially compete with a field that abounds with uncompetitive generic schlubs. So you'll and probably succeed with wealth and fame beyond the wildest dreams of the hopelessly gullible and generally unoriginal!

But it's a mirage of course. Although social media seem like platforms on which human creativity is expressed, social media is the attention delivery business. Some people are artistic or inventive. What starts in the minds of inventive human beings, who are starving for attention or compensation, flows down the funnel into the delivery system.

What you ultimately see on your phone is whatever seems most likely to sustain your diminishing capacity for attention, according to a profile created about you by an algorythm you have taught your biases and beliefs that motivate you the most. If you cared about personal boundaries, the algorythm might not only feed you what reinforces your biases.

The pursuit of opportunities for titillation, escape, and ego gratification have been with us since the beginning. The disaster of our times, and why people seem so wretched, is because technology has enabled such a mediocre and embarrassing means for this gratification.

Social competition and the abandonment of privacy is funneling human beings into multiplying parallel realities, with fewer and fewer individuals in each cut off world. Growing in an internet mediated facsimile of a society, you will flounder completely at coexisting in a warm blooded human society with other people who don't share your fetishes. After uncomfortable failures interacting with people who don't share your hatreds, you're attracted to the online facsimile of a society as a reliable source for human contact and approval.

This has shoved much of the world into a free fall of intellectual stagnation. You're measly knowledge of the world grows even more meager, as you cooperate with social media to train it to shelter you from anything that might expand your intellectual horizons. If you kept your private mental feebleness to yourself, it wouldn't be able to do that.

Social media provides no durable improvement to your personal life that isn't cancelled out by the massive toll it takes on your mind. Social media makes a person brittle, spastic, short sighted, philosophically deracinated, and dangerous to others. Privacy makes you sane, secure, interesting and original.

If a person was courageous about defending their privacy, and about their boundaries in general, they could reverse this tide for themselves at least. Why is courage a part of it? Because you have to willingly choose not to participate in surveillance capitalism, which means staying out of that social competition that appeals to your insatiable desire for popularity and your stunted libido.

The courage required to do this is so much less than you think.

People will say, I don't have the luxury of not using social media. The notion that avoiding social media is a luxury is an idea that I find fucking hilarious.