{"id":921,"date":"2020-05-13T20:44:58","date_gmt":"2020-05-13T20:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/?p=921"},"modified":"2020-05-13T20:44:58","modified_gmt":"2020-05-13T20:44:58","slug":"you-are-now-remotely-controlled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/?p=921","title":{"rendered":"You Are Now Remotely Controlled"},"content":{"rendered":"

By GlobalResearchSyndicate<\/a><\/p>\n

\"remotely_controlled.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Even Ford, the birthplace of the 20th-century mass production economy, is on the trail of the surveillance dividend, proposing to meet the challenge of slumping car sales by reimagining Ford vehicles as a \u201ctransportation operating system<\/a>.\u201d As one analyst put it<\/a>, Ford \u201ccould make a fortune monetizing data. They won\u2019t need engineers, factories or dealers to do it. It\u2019s almost pure profit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Surveillance capitalism\u2019s economic imperatives were refined in the competition to sell certainty. Early on it was clear that machine intelligence must feed on volumes of data, compelling economies of scale in data extraction. Eventually it was understood that volume is necessary but not sufficient. The best algorithms also require varieties of data \u2014 economies of scope. This realization helped drive the \u201cmobile revolution\u201d sending users into the real world armed with cameras, computers, gyroscopes and microphones packed inside their smart new phones. In the competition for scope, surveillance capitalists want your home<\/a> and what you say and do within its walls. They want your car<\/a>, your medical conditions<\/a>, and the shows<\/a> you stream; your location<\/a> as well as all the streets and buildings in your path and all the behavior of all the people in your city<\/a>. They want your voice<\/a> and what you eat<\/a> and what you buy<\/a>; your children\u2019s play<\/a> time and their schooling<\/a>; your brain waves<\/a> and your bloodstream<\/a>. Nothing is exempt<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unequal knowledge about us produces unequal power over us, and so epistemic inequality widens to include the distance between what we can do and what can be done to us. Data scientists describe this as the shift from monitoring to actuation, in which a critical mass of knowledge about a machine system enables the remote control of that system. Now people have become targets for remote control, as surveillance capitalists discovered that the most predictive data come from intervening in behavior to tune, herd and modify action in the direction of commercial objectives. This third imperative, \u201ceconomies of action,\u201d has become an arena of intense experimentation. \u201cWe are learning how to write the music,\u201d one scientist said, \u201cand then we let the music make them dance.\u201d<\/p>\n

This new power \u201cto make them dance\u201d does not employ soldiers to threaten terror and murder. It arrives carrying a cappuccino, not a gun. It is a new \u201cinstrumentarian\u201d power that works its will through the medium of ubiquitous digital instrumentation to manipulate subliminal cues, psychologically target communications, impose default choice architectures, trigger social comparison dynamics and levy rewards and punishments \u2014 all of it aimed at remotely tuning, herding and modifying human behavior in the direction of profitable outcomes and always engineered to preserve users\u2019 ignorance.<\/p>\n

We saw predictive knowledge morphing into instrumentarian power in Facebook\u2019s contagion experiments published in 2012<\/a> and 2014<\/a>, when it planted subliminal cues and manipulated social comparisons on its pages, first to influence users to vote in midterm elections and later to make people feel sadder or happier. Facebook researchers celebrated the success of these experiments noting two key findings: that it was possible to manipulate online cues to influence real world behavior and feelings, and that this could be accomplished while successfully bypassing users\u2019 awareness.<\/p>\n

In 2016, the Google-incubated augmented reality game, Pok\u00e9mon Go, tested economies of action on the streets. Game players did not know that they were pawns in the real game of behavior modification for profit, as the rewards and punishments of hunting imaginary creatures were used to herd people to the McDonald\u2019s, Starbucks and local pizza joints that were paying the company for \u201cfootfall\u201d<\/a>, in exactly the same way that online advertisers pay for \u201cclick through\u201d to their websites.<\/p>\n

In 2017, a leaked Facebook document<\/a> acquired by The Australian exposed the corporation\u2019s interest in applying \u201cpsychological insights\u201d from \u201cinternal Facebook data\u201d to modify user behavior. The targets were 6.4 million young Australians and New Zealanders. \u201cBy monitoring posts, pictures, interactions and internet activity in real time,\u201d the executives wrote, \u201cFacebook can work out when young people feel \u2018stressed,\u2019 \u2018defeated,\u2019 \u2018overwhelmed,\u2019 \u2018anxious,\u2019 \u2018nervous,\u2019 \u2018stupid,\u2019 \u2018silly,\u2019 \u2018useless\u2019 and a \u2018failure.\u2019\u201d This depth of information, they explained, allows Facebook to pinpoint the time frame during which a young person needs a \u201cconfidence boost\u201d and is most vulnerable to a specific configuration of subliminal cues and triggers. The data are then used to match each emotional phase with appropriate ad messaging for the maximum probability of guaranteed sales.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By GlobalResearchSyndicate Even Ford, the birthplace of the 20th-century mass production economy, is on the trail of the surveillance dividend, proposing to meet the challenge of slumping car sales by reimagining Ford vehicles as a \u201ctransportation operating system.\u201d As one analyst put it, Ford \u201ccould make a fortune monetizing data. They won\u2019t need engineers, factories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=921"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":923,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921\/revisions\/923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pbmv.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}