Companies like Google and Facebook
are factory farms for human beings.
That’s how they make their money,
they make their money by tracking
everything that you do,
by profiling you,
and then monetising that
by manipulating your behaviour
with this intimate insight.
We're not sleepwalking
into some sort of dystopia.
We're there.
My name's Aral Balkan
and I'm a cyborg rights activist.
When you go onto Facebook
Instant Messenger
and you're messaging your friend
you might think that you're
in a room together
and only you two can hear each other.
That's not the case.
Now for you, it might be you feel
that you have nothing to hide,
you don't care
if Google has your data.
You might start to care the next time
you go to renew your insurance
and your premium's double.
And then when you ask them,
"Why have my premiums doubled?"
they say, "Well, your smart fridge
told us what you're eating."
Now that might be when you start to
care, if you have a lot of privilege.
For other people
it's a life or death issue.
People who do care might be,
for example,
people who are gay
but live in a country
in which it is illegal to be gay,
and Facebook knows that they're gay
based on their likes.
Now this is a problem for them.
Shoshana Zuboff from
Harvard business school
calls the system that we live
under 'surveillance capitalism'.
Surveillance capitalism
is the feedback loop
between surveillance and capitalism.
Capitalism is about
the accumulation of wealth.
Now, what happens when
that accumulated wealth
and the people who
have that wealth and power
then invest that wealth
in surveillance devices
which allow them
to gather information about all of us
which in turn allows them
to manipulate our behaviour
which in turn makes them more money
and reinforces this feedback loop.
Well that's Surveillance Capitalism.
We have to regulate the abuses
of the surveillance capitalists,
and we have to replace them
with ethical alternatives.
Why don’t we start thinking about
funding those technologies
from the commons for the common good?
Unless we change how technology
is funded today,
we can't fix this problem,
because this is not
a technology problem.
If we want a different society, if we
want different ideologies amplified,
then we need to
fund them differently,
we need to build them differently
and then, we have a chance
of a progressive future.
