Monitored Monitored Business and Surveillance in a Time of Big Data Peter Bloom First published 2019 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Peter Bloom 2019 The right of Peter Bloom to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7453 3863 7 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3862 0 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7868 0392 4 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0394 8 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7868 0393 1 EPUB eBook This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America Contents Acknowledgements vi Preface: Completely Monitored vii 1. Monitored Subjects, Unaccountable Capitalism 1 2. The Growing Threat of Digital Control 27 3. Surveilling Ourselves 51 4. Smart Realities 86 5. Digital Salvation 112 6. Planning Your Life at the End of History 138 7. Totalitarianism 4.0 162 8. The Revolution Will Not Be Monitored 186 Notes 203 Index 245 Acknowledgements This is dedicated to everyone in the DPO – thank you for letting me be your temporary Big Brother and for the opportu- nity to change the world together. Preface Completely Monitored In 2017 Netflix released the hi-tech thriller The Circle with a star-studded cast including Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, and John Boyega. Beneath its standard plot lies a chilling vision of a coming dystopian tomorrow. It presents nothing less than the rise of a new virulent form of tyranny where big data and social media can track anyone, anywhere, at any time. This frightening scenario may sound far-fetched but it in fact mirrors real-life developments. As reported in the Guardian, former Facebook president Sean Parker warned that its platform ‘literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains’. And while The Circle had a predictable Hollywood happy ending, our own future is far less assured. Rapidly emerging is the growing threat of ‘totalitarianism 4.0’, one that is rising alongside the present hi-tech revolutions of ‘Industry 4.0’ fuelled by advances in big data, artificial intel- ligence, and digital communications. Rather than the ominous visage of Big Brother in 1984, this new attempt at total control will come in the form of wearable technology, depersonalised algorithms, and digitalised audit trails. Everyone will be fully analysed and accounted for. Their every action monitored, their every preference known, their entire life calculated and made predictable. Yet this also raises a key question – who is behind this updated totalitarianism? Perhaps it is more accurate to ask who or what is benefitting from this totally monitored society? And just as importantly who and what is not being monitored and why? viii MONITORED The key to answering these questions is to critically explore and reconsider our common understandings of the term accounting itself. Accounting is conventionally associated with financial accounting, a fact that is not surprising given that finance has largely driven the twenty-first-century economy. However, it also refers to the collection and analysis of infor- mation about people – specifically the use of techniques to account for our beliefs and actions. Thus just as financial tools can be used to quantify and interpret the profits of a business, so to can social accounting techniques be employed to map the behaviour of people through the accumulation of their personal and shared data. It is absolutely crucial, therefore, to better understand how the proliferation of these new accounting techniques – partic- ularly linked to big data, social media, and artificial intelligence – are transforming the ways people are socially controlled and how, in turn, the present status quo is being reinforced. On the one hand, new technology has made it easier to track all aspects of our existence – from work to home and everything in-between. On the other hand, political and economic elites appear to conduct their business in secret, with little public oversight or knowledge. Further, the actual movement of capital and the spread of its power seems to happen in relative darkness, hidden by esoteric financial modelling and compli- cated accounting strategies whose primary purpose is evasion rather than detection. Significantly, in the present period financial and social accounting have increasingly merged – as the ability to collect and analyse people’s data is aimed at and judged according to the same fiscal values of maximising their economic value. The overriding purpose of this book is thus to demonstrate how these accounting techniques are making the majority of people in the world more accounted for and ultimately accountable, while rendering elites and the capitalist system they profit from dramatically less so. PREFACE ix Being Complete Monitored One of the most interesting and worrying features of the modern world is the ease in which personal information is obtained and exchanged. Everything from your favourite type of music to your present need for a new hammer to even your New Year’s resolutions are digitally monitored and increasingly exploited by corporations and governments. Our thoughts and our actions are becoming progressively archived, as data from our past are being used to openly and not so openly shape our present and future choices. More precisely, the question is: to what extent has being made more accounted for also made us and society generally more politically and ethically accountable? One thing is abundantly clear: it is certainly simpler to follow and judge the lives of others. It is now possible to monitor almost everything we do, from what time we wake up in the morning, to how many steps we take throughout the day, to the types of movies we binge watch at night, to the number of times we check our emails at work, to the amount of time we spend working from home. And this information is not merely personal – it is increas- ingly shared for the entire world to see and analyse for their own voyeuristic and profitable purposes. Who hasn’t looked up an old friend or partner on Facebook? Who hasn’t Google searched themselves or those they know to discover in seconds a previously unknown accomplishment or possibly even hidden salacious secrets? And information that is private is seemingly easily uncovered by those with the technological know-how and criminal desire to do so. At the turn of the new millennium it would appear that everyone and everywhere is, for better or for worse, more visible. This form of total personal and collective exposure has given birth to a new type of citizen. While conventional ideals of free speech, civic engagement, and social responsibility certainly have not disappeared (at least in principle), they are being x MONITORED enhanced and to some extent replaced by updated forms of digital morality for guiding individual and social behaviour. In particular, people are expected to properly manage their infor- mation so that they do not use it in ways that are destructive either to themselves or others. This could mean something as obvious as not posting offensive views on your social media account, or something as fundamental as regularly monitoring your heart rate. However, there is also a dark side to this dig- italised citizenship. It is increasingly used to pressure people into being more productive, efficient and marketable – thus progressively making them more fiscally accounted for in their everyday actions and habits. Underlying all these changes is the rise of a brave new world of accountability. The fact that we have so much information about ourselves and our communities means that we have no excuse not to act in a way that is not personally and economi- cally valuable – either to yourself or your employers. There is no longer any reason to be fat given that you can count your calories on your mobile phone, and look up the nutritional content of everything you eat with the push of a button. There is no justi- fication for being unemployed when you can create a LinkedIn account, update your CV online for prospective employers to view and build up your marketability through taking online courses. How can you possibly not get all you need done in the day when all you have to do is download a helpful ‘to do’ app on your phone that will practically manage your affairs for you to maximise your productivity? Obviously these sentiments are slightly exaggerated. Still, they point to the growing relationship between being fully accounted for and being made fully accountable. Failure is attributed to one’s own lack of willpower or unwillingness to gather the information necessary for your success. Equally sig- nificant, we must constantly monitor what we say and do, for you never know what from your past will come back to haunt your present. If The Circle threatened us with the prospect of PREFACE xi being made ‘fully transparent’ – of having everything you do and say available made public – we are in danger in real life of becoming completely monitored and made ‘fully monitored and accountable’. Systematic Oversight The hi-tech risk of total accountability is definitely real. Yet ironically it also masks a modern-day threat that is just as troubling – the power in being almost completely unaccounted for and unaccountable.