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1 ABSTRACT In this paper, I look at the history of the internet and online advertising. The internet is inextricably linked to capitalism and is fueled by advertising. As a result, companies like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon collect data in large vol- umes to improve targeted advertising. An investigation of new power structures has emerged with the internet and how they dominate its and our future. My creativity lies between art and technology. By merging new technologies like Artificial Intelligence with humor and graphic design, I try to shine a light on the subject. Tutors Johanna Lewengard (main tutor), Moa Matthis (text tutor), João Doria (external tutor), Maria Wahlberg (external tutor). 2 INDEX 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Intentions 1.2 Research Question 1.3 On a Personal Note 2. BACKGROUND 2.1 The Fall of Soviet Union and the Birth of World Wide Web 2.2 Surveillance Capitalism and How Is the Data Collected? 2.3 Brief History of the Display Banner Ad 2.4 The Illusion of Online, How Our Phone Snitch Us Out 2.5 “’Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil,’ cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.’” 2.6 FAMGA 3. WORK PROCESS 3.1 Early experiments 3.2 Avatarify and Workflow 3.3 The Final Countdown 3.4 The Title 3.5 Spatial Design for the Exhibition 4. CONCLUSION 4.1 Exhibition 4.2 Examination 4.3 Reflections 3 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Intentions “I Want to Breathe You in: Data as Raw Commodity” aims to highlight the extreme 1 Shoshanna Zuboff, ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, means that companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft use to 2019, p.9. collect personal information to predict and modify our behavior — what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.”1 The project is an exploration of the conse- quences it has on society today and in the future. The project has a consistently norm-critical perspective, focusing on the new pow- 2 Yanis Varoufakis, “Yanis Varo- ufakis: Capitalism has become er structures that have emerged with the internet. The new world order that Yanis ‘techno-feudalism’ | UpFront,” Varoufakis calls “techno feudalism.”2 Al Jazeera English, February 19, 2021, 4:10 to 5:14, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=_ jW0x- The project is designed as a spatial video installation. My aesthetics and methods UmUaUc. operate within “hybrid media” – where different techniques such as animations, 3D graphics, and graphic design together form a whole. I see my work as a part of the post-internet art movement, influenced by online meme culture as a tool for satire. 1.2 Research Question How can I awaken curiosity and interest in the subject of data collection and online surveillance by combining new technology methods such as AI with graphic design and humor? 1.3 On a Personal Note Before I started my master’s degree on Konstfack, I worked at an adtech startup spe- cializing in streaming video on display banners. Me coming from a graphic design- er’s perspective and being a fanatic ad-block user had the naive belief that banner ads were a necessary evil for newspapers to generate revenue from their online publi- cations. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that online advertising played a more significant role than that. The technology’s sophistication was more incredible than I had previously assumed. I felt stupid because I didn’t understand how the internet worked. After all, I spend a significant portion of my day on the internet and have repeatedly defended it as a tool for personal freedom. I can’t believe how clueless I was regarding Google’s position in the online ads infrastructure. Similarly, I felt stu- pid that I didn’t know that Amazon is also the world’s largest server supplier, owning roughly a third of the market share in 2021. However, as time went on, my interest in and curiosity for banner ads started to grow. I felt glad that I got the opportunity to see how the sausage got made, a peek behind the curtains. 4 2. BACKGROUND 2.1 The Fall of Soviet Union and the Birth of World Wide Web The year 1989 was undoubtedly eventful—the opening of the Berlin Wall, which marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union and communism as state practice. Another change was the transition from government-controlled Keynesian economics to neoliberal Monetarist economics implemented by politicians such as Thatcher and Reagan throughout the 1980s. The significance of the year 1989 was recognized at the time by Francis Fukuyama. 3Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, The American scholar published an essay in the journal the National Interest enti- Summer 1989, https://www. tled “The End of History.” The statement of his thesis was: “What we may be witness- embl.de/aboutus/science_so- ing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but ciety/discussion/discus- sion_2006/ref1-22june06.pdf the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universal- ization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”3 For the last 150 years, the Marxist movement said the end of history would be communism, but as Fukuyama observed in 88/89 – when Gorbachov was reforming the Soviet Union, communism would not succeed in getting there and would stop at the stage before communism. Fukuyama at the time did not see a higher form of society that would replace liberal democracy. After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, capitalism became the only imaginable mode of production. The concept that it is more manageable to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism originally came from American Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson but has been more widely spread by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. In this new period, issues like an ecological disaster became much more pres- ent in people’s imaginations. Žižek displays that it is easier to imagine the world’s end than a much more manageable change in the mode of production, however radical it may be. The answer to this conundrum is the topic of the book Capitalist Realism, by Mark Fisher. Žižek and Jameson’s phrase is the opening point of Fisher’s book. The term “capitalist realism” itself is the mechanism by which capitalism embod- ies every aspect of life, making the mere potentiality of a shift to a different system unimaginable. Fisher says that this is especially true for the first generation born after the fall of the Berlin Wall; capitalism as praxis and ideology is enmeshed with every- thing. All of our desires, thoughts, emotions, and actions are capitalistic before we even have them or perform them. 4 “…a whole generation has passed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In the 1960s and Mark Fisher, ‘Capitalist Real- ism’, 2009, p.12. 1970s, capitalism had to face the problem of how to contain and absorb energies from outside. It now, in fact, has the opposite problem; having ail-too successfully incorporated externality, how can it function without an outside it can colonize and appropriate? For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.” 4 5 “What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed Mark Fisher, ‘Capitalist Real- ism’, 2009, p.13. to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations, and hopes by capitalist culture.” 5 5 In addition, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, outlined the building blocks for the World Wide Web in 1989. Which, as we know, would become the most valuable information and communica- tion instrument of the digital age. As mentioned before, Mark Fisher’s thesis in Capitalist Realism says that every- thing after the fall of the Berlin Wall is impregnated by capitalism, which includes the World Wide Web. The internet is or has become a capitalistic product and has become its most excellent tool. It is the world’s biggest mall; it is also the world’s best salesmen who knows what we need when we need it (or rather what we do not need when we are at our lowest). It follows us from store to store; it knows what we have read, what images we have seen, whom we have met, whom we live with, where we live, etc. All this collecting of data to place a product in front of our face at the right moment; this is what Shoshana Zuboff calls “Surveillance Capitalism.” 2.2 Surveillance Capitalism and How Is the Data Collected? From the perspective implied by the concept of surveillance capitalism, people’s lives 6 Shoshanna Zuboff, ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, are an enormous data resource for creating behavioral archetypes. The so-called 2019, p.14. behavioral surplus gets fed into “machine intelligence” and fabricates into simula- tion tools that predict future behavior. Finally, these prediction resources get traded in what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as “behavioral futures markets,”6 a new type of marketplace for behavioral predictions. Google was one of the first companies to understand the importance of the data 7 Shoshanna Zuboff, ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, they had, such as search queries, once regarded as “data exhaust.” Google first used 2019, p.51.