https://youtu.be/-zyJ0_59rDw

There are grains of sand that I love when hearing soundtrack stuff written and performed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. One of those parts is above, which is one of the songs from the soundtrack for "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo".

That song came to me as I was reading Nick Srnicek's "Platform Capitalism", a quite new book on how digital platforms have risen and gained enormous heft in modern-day capitalistic society, which affects us all. From the book:

The second major attempt to revive profitability was through an attack on the power of labour. Unions across the western world faced an all-out assault and were eventually broken. Trade unions faced new legal hurdles, the deregulation of various industries, and a subsequent decline in membership. Businesses took advantage of this to reduce wages and increasingly to outsource jobs. Early outsourcing involved jobs with goods that could be shipped (e.g. small consumer goods), while non-tradable services (e.g. administration) and non-tradable goods (e.g. houses) remained. Yet in the 1990s information and communications technologies enabled a number of those services to be offshored, and the relevant distinction came to be the one between services that required face-to-face encounters (e.g. haircuts, care work) and impersonal services that did not (e.g. data entry, customer service, radiologists, etc.).

The former were contracted out domestically where possible, while the latter were under increasing pressure from global labour markets. Hospitality provides one illuminating example of this general trend: the percentage of franchised hotels in the United States raised from a marginal figure in the 1960s to over 76 per cent by 2006. Alongside this, there was a move towards contracting all other work associated with hospitality: cleaning, management, maintenance, and janitorial services.

The drivers behind this shift were to reduce benefits and liability costs, in an effort to maintain profitability levels. These changes inaugurated the secular trends we have seen since, with employment being increasingly flexible, low wage, and subject to pressures from management.

I like how Srnicek doesn't condemn capitalism, but allows it to speak its own mind. Frankly speaking, capitalism is greed, cynicism, and what used to be called psychopathy, at its best.

The best part of capitalism - if you're a callous person at the top of that fascistic hierarchy - is to make workers believe they cannot function without leaders, and to make money without pause. This is nothing new.

However, to have workers/consumers do the actual work for you, that's more new.

The activities of users and institutions, if they are recorded and transformed into data, become a raw material that can be refined and used in a variety of ways by platforms. With advertising platforms in particular, revenue is generated through the extraction of data from users’ activities online, from the analysis of those data, and from the auctioning of ad space to advertisers. This involves achieving two processes. First, advertising platforms need to monitor and record online activities. The more users interact with a site, the more information can be collected and used. Equally, as users wander around the internet, they are tracked via cookies and other means, and these data become ever more extensive and valuable to advertisers. There is a convergence of surveillance and profit making in the digital economy, which leads some to speak of ‘surveillance capitalism’.

While the data extraction model has been prominent in the online world, it has also migrated into the offline world. Tesco, one of the world’s largest retailers, owns Dunnhumby, a UK-based ‘consumer insights’ business valued at around $2 billion. (The US arm of the company was recently sold to Kroger, one of America’s largest employers.) The company is premised upon tracking consumers both online and offline and using that information to sell to clients such as Coca-Cola, Macy’s, and Office Depot.

Now, compare that with what Google two days ago mentioned will be unleashed upon the world in November, a thing named Google Duplex:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-conversation.html

This allows Google - and other firms, as Google are far from alone - to both mine your data and directly affect your mind far beyond advertising by actually calling you via a phone line. That is not truly new, but it's the first time it's been industrialised in this vast manner.

A week ago, Yuval Noah Harari spoke about the current effects and near-future uses for advertising:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000m7b

In the episode, he speaks of how looking at a mobile phone can allow advertisers to trace your eye movements, and by analysing those in relation to how - for example - you react to a sexually attractive person, they are able to guess your sexuality and serve advertisements to you. Harari mentioned something other than that, namely that you may not even be conscious of your own sexuality, but corporations will be, and will sure as muck use/sell that information.

Remember how the Coca-Cola company made Fanta just for the benefit of the Nazis, as they didn't drink Coca-Cola? How long do you reckon that Coke Corp. will have a ponder before letting nazis, or extreme right-wing governments purchase information on your sexuality?

People, upon hearing these things, balk at the risks. They joke of following the lead of The Unabomber or J.R.R. Tolkien, just becoming a total luddite. The thought is alluring. However, we can take the power back; we just have to organise and continuously fight back, and not give our stuff to corporations like Facebook/WhatsApp/Uber/Google/Apple.

What's the way forward?

Personally, I believe in decentralising the net.

Tim Berners-Lee, who is perhaps mainly known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, recently unveiled Solid, which is "an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web."

https://medium.com/@timberners_lee/one-small-step-for-the-web-87f92217d085

As this article in The Guardian states, there are quite a few different applications and quasi-Microsoft-Office-suites available via services like Blockstack. More from that article:

The decentralised web isn’t quite here yet. But there are apps and programs built on the decentralised model. Many are experimental but some of the more developed products include OpenBazaar (a decentralised marketplace), Graphite Docs (a Google documents alternative), Textile Photos (an Instagram-like alternative for storing, managing, and sharing photos on the DWeb), Matrix (which provides Slack and WhatsApp alternatives) and DTube(a YouTube alternative). Social network alternatives include Akasha and Diaspora. There is also a new independent experimental browser for exploring the peer-to-peer web called Beaker Browser. The Internet Archive, the nonprofit organisation that archives the web through snapshots of web pages and other media, has made a first attempt to decentralise its website by bringing together many of the technologies.

"Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web", Zoë Corbyn

So, all in all, we can take the power back.

Can't help but think of the end scene of "Fight Club". Spoiler alert:

https://youtu.be/VC6Z_kdQoHw