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Face It — You Want To Be Seen
We may fear digital surveillance, but tech platforms count on our desire to be noticed online
Two weeks ago, the Economist’s Asian technology correspondent, Hal Hodson, started a Twitter thread. He was worried. “Something really massive is happening, and I feel like society is barely grasping the tendrils of the implications,” he wrote. “Technology is eroding one of the great levees of human society — the ability to move around the physical world anonymously.”
Hodson, like the rest of us, has reason to be concerned. Technology companies are deep into an ongoing shift from collecting endless data about what we do online to collecting endless data about what we’re doing offline too. The so-called “internet of things” is expanding, and the scope of what’s knowable about users — what we do, where we go, who we know, or what we look like — is widening quickly. That expansion is creating some unnerving scenarios.
There are products that scan students’ electronic communications, and others that track their movements, doorbell cameras that watch the streets, facial recognition replacing tickets at airports, programs to track employees, cameras that capture you at the mall and others at concerts, and apps that are surreptitiously recording your every location. The list goes on.
We can easily imagine the grander implications of it all, an end-state scenario. It’s so easily imaginable that living within an all-seeing, all-knowing infrastructure is the subject of some of our most celebrated fiction. And, if we still can’t quite wrap our heads around it, China offers a current, real-world example. In other words, we can see clearly into the future, and yet despite some efforts to retain our invisibility, by and large, we continue barreling onward.
Why?
It’s important to remember that the tech giants who own and control the platforms and tools that we depend on to mediate our lives didn’t just monetize human behavior — they helped shape it. They did so in myriad ways: by adding a layer of unpredictability into our everyday lives via systems of communication designed to confuse us; by introducing a new perspective on commodification–of our homes, cars, and other possessions; and even changing the way…
