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Tag: surveillance capitalism

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The Internet

Why we block ads

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Replied to The biggest boycott in world history by Doc SearlsDoc Searls (doc.searls.com)

According to Business Insider, ad blocking is now “approaching 200 million.”† Calling it a boycott is my wife’s idea. I say she’s right. Look at the definitions: Merriam-Webster: “to engage in a concerted refusal to have dealings with (as a person, store, or organization) usually to express disapproval or to force acceptance of certain conditions.” […]

I hadn’t thought of it this way, but yes, adblocking is a boycott. It is resistance to the online advertising system and its negative externalities, like its complete violation of our privacy, its toxic influence on news writing, and the way it incentivizes design to attract more eyeballs at all costs. Advertising online has brought us endless scroll and clickbait and data harvesting and enshittification of online shopping and political polarization and even genocide. Brands don’t want their name associated with anything “distasteful,” so advertising becomes a deterrent to political writing. This all fucking sucks, and it’s ruining the Internet — and our society.

Blocking ads is a rejection of capitalism’s claim on our constant attention. It is an assertion that we are more than consumers — that it is a human right to not be constantly manipulated by advertising designed to predate our paleolithic minds.*

It is a rejection of the implicit deal that we must trade ourselves and our loyalties for knowledge. It is self-protection from the otherwise overwhelming psychological forces of advertising that assail us every second we are online. It’s resistance to an Internet ruled solely by profit.

 

See also: Stolen Focus

Categories
History Political Commentary Society

We cannot have bodily autonomy in a surveillance state

Jamelle Bouie – Opinion – September 2, 2023

…until the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford settled the matter in favor of slaveholders, the status of an enslaved Black person outside a slave state was uncertain. It was unclear whether property in man extended beyond the borders of states where it was authorized by law.

It was also unclear whether a slave state’s authority over an enslaved Black person persisted beyond its borders.

The reason to compare these proposed limits on travel [for abortion] within and between states to antebellum efforts to limit the movement of free or enslaved Black people is that both demonstrate the limits of federalism when it comes to fundamental questions of bodily autonomy.

It is not tenable to vary the extent of bodily rights from state to state, border to border.

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September 1, 2023 by Heather Cox Richardson

Antiabortion activists call aid to women seeking abortions “abortion trafficking,” which makes it sound like women are being forced to get an abortion, when in fact, the ordinances ensnare women who want to get an abortion and their friends, preventing them from leaving an antiabortion state.

I just learned about the racist invented “mental illness” that a Southerner claimed in 1851 afflicted slaves who ran away, because it shouldn’t be possible for them to be unhappy as slaves.

Such barriers are precisely the same as those for people trying to leave authoritarian countries. Someone who is prohibited from leaving a jurisdiction is not a citizen but a subject.

Emphasis mine.

See also: Technofeudalism

Crucially, authoritarian countries also urge people to turn on each other, reporting them to the state for punishment, often in exchange for a reward.

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It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy by  Jen Caltrider, Misha Rykov and Zoë MacDonald (Mozilla Foundation)

A surprising number (56%) [of car makers] also say they can share your information with the government or law enforcement in response to a “request.” Not a high bar court order, but something as easy as an “informal request.”

 

When fascists control the government, corporations know everything about you, and corporations will do whatever the government wants, there is no way to safely live as anything but what the fascists want, and the way the fascists want.

 

See also:

Our Rage is Not Hysterical

Freedom to believe, not freedom to impose

The question of democracy

Embracing authoritarianism to keep power and quash change

Opting out of convenience to make a point

Categories
The Internet

The eerie coincidences of the Internet

  • Post author By Tracy Durnell
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Liked The Internet Thinks We Don’t Know Its Secret. But I Do. by Merritt Tierce (Slate)

What do I mean when I say the internet is reading my mind? I don’t mean simply that it collects my data and observes patterns and interacts with me by reconfiguring that data in ways designed to engage me… I’m also not talking about my awareness that Instagram is listening, that even when my microphone is “off” or my Instagram account disabled, I know other apps are listening, or my phone itself is listening, or such now-standard input-output cross-platform fence-jumping. I’m not even talking about how my phone is “looking” at things I see in the world… At all times, I understand that the internet is using data I somehow gave it, and that those processes and technologies are now too complex for me to track. But it feels aggressive to me, in the way it would feel aggressive if suddenly every kind of advertisement everywhere you went in the world was designed only for you.

On Friday, after my husband got assaulted, we spent hours searching how to wash off pepper spray (and then cleaning up). Finally after he’d taken like five showers we lay down to decompress and watch some TV. I’m bad at working the smart TV so it just randomly turns on on some Samsung channel despite my attempts to leave it on something inoffensive; a billiards tournament came on (something we’ve never watched). He left it going while I got ready, and two ads repeated: for laundry detergent and personal injury lawyers. Logically, we know it was a coincidence, but humans are so good at seeing patterns and causality — and that instinct is reinforced when sometimes it *is* true that the Internet is spying on you.

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