April 15, 2025

Surveillance Capitalism, AI & Big Brother Rising

Crrow777
”There is a database that can be queried to determine what day, time and place you will die. It can also identify the cause, and what group of people to categorize you with.”

We now exist in a world where data is many times more valuable than money. With the onset of artificial intelligence, this truth is multiplied many times over. The capitalism we once knew is a thing of the past, and has been replaced with data devouring “Surveillance Capitalism”. From the phone in your pocket, to automatic license plate readers and cameras everywhere, your movements are not your own anymore… nor are your activities, purchases or thoughts. In 1984 Big Brother was fiction. In 2025 Big Brother on automated steroids is a reality. In 2025, you are the product, and you have been for quite some time.

The very act of “living” has been monetized, in the modern era. The data from everything you do is collected, largely without your knowledge. This collection of personal information occurs in a so-called “legal gray area” that has gone almost completely unregulated. Surveillance Capitalism works under the premise that your activities are not private, particularly online activities. Furthermore, under this assumption, the data you generate can be “harvested” without your knowledge, permission, or compensation, and then monetized, and/or used to train AI.

The practice of secretly harvesting data (called incursion) began by identifying how to turn human behavior into profit. When did this begin you ask? In 1999 Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems told reporters “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.” No one believed him at the time, but this statement proves that the secret “incursion” of big corporations into your private life was well established before the turn of the century. At that time the idea that your behavior and activity online could be monetized was far from the reality we thought we were living in.

The idea that everything you do in the digital world is being collected is disturbing, to say the least. But what is done with that data is even more so. Why you ask? Because after harvesting, one of the many things secretly done with the data is called “adaption”. This is where the data is used to modify your behavior. This, in turn, increases profit. It also allows for the selling of “certainty”. For the first time in history the odds, or likely percentages of an outcome has been replaced by the absolute knowing of what action would happen next. Of course, there is also the realization that there are corporations in this world who know far more about you, than you ever will. And you will never have this knowledge because someone else is in control of YOUR data, as they sell much of it to the highest bidder.

Let’s take a moment to consider where AI fits into all of this secret data collection. AI has to be trained, and to do that vast amounts of data are required. I suspect that the reason social media became so integral to online life is due to the ongoing need for vast amounts of data. I do not accept that it was created by a cleaver young person. In my mind, social media was created to collect untold amounts of data to feed AI, with more real-time user data on the way tomorrow. In my mind, this is why the president’s digital ninja bought Twitter, and why social media has become the leviathan that it is. But there is a problem, or at least the potential for a problem.

As it stands now the entirety of human intellectual property, copyrights, and creation, have been stolen in order to train AI. If at any time in the immediate future corporations are forced to respect the rights of living men and women again, this is where the problem of monetizing AI could arise. Not to mention the issue of AI creations getting copyright protection. This all remains to be seen, even though it is obvious our rights have been trampled to facilitate automation.

There is so much more that could be talked about at this early stage of Surveillance Capitalism, not to mention the era shift we are experiencing as it happens. For those of you who want to know a lot more, you can grab the tome by Shoshana Zuboff called, “Surveillance Capitalism”. It is not light reading, and while spot on, pulls many punches with regard to the dangers we face in the age of corporations gone wild.

For my part I have learned to protect my data as much as is possible in the current environment. I have also employed privacy services to notify corporations that I claim rights to my data and it is not to be sold. It does have an effect which I proved by having my background searched. There was no data prior to 2001, go figure. And where most people’s data could write a book, mine was limited to employment and places I have lived. I have never had a social media account with my name, or one used to communicate daily life, or general communication. Decisions like this are up to each of us. For me it is important to go on the record that I claim my rights regardless of how others will act. When all is said and done, I currently accept that much of what is mentioned here will change drastically in the favor of rights in the new era. I continue to hope those days are not far away.

I would like to wish you all a happy, healthy, higher-minded, and vibrational new era.