Surveillance capitalism and the metaphysics of presence

The relation between a person who receives the most elementary of coordinates, such as a telephone number, address etc. and the one who gives it, is always even at its most simplistic level a twofold exercise in the act of trust. Why is this so? Because even after you have received whatever figure or GPS position on the map - you still assume or rather believe a. that the address provided is the right one, and b. that it is really the location or number of the person who you may have been communicating with. This, or rather the apprehension of this before we leap into the fray as it were is important - irrespective of whether we decide to go or not because it re
plicates at it’s most elementary level the split between the signifier and the signified, at its surface, - concerning the address provided and its referent. However there is an added level of meaning here which the Saussurian distinction does not take into account and that is that the coordinates concerned are those of the person whom we sought or believed we were interacting with - in other words we believe we were not lied to. 

Why would someone choose to mislead us is obviously too naive a question to ask on a public portal, but are we even aware of the coordinates within which what we count as perception pure and simple are themselves misleading? Even as we believe them?

This I claim is the structure of surveillance capitalism operational today. Like an Eskimo with a fishing rod by a hole in the ice from the cartoons of our yesteryears, public social media platforms such as LinkedIn for example post tens of thousands if not millions of jobs on their platform every day. An applicant to one of these positions is not merely a person who believes that there is such a job that the advertisement claims to be hiring for - let us say a secretarial position in a magazine office or whatever. But, more importantly - the purpose of the advertisement is to hire an individual applicant as such and not for example merely to act as a kind of sponge for Curriculum Vitae’s which fit a certain profile that the ‘company’ in question claims to be hiring for. 

In other words what I am claiming here is that in fishing for a job today really is a way in which a company may be presenting a front for a few underemployed employees for example who may be posting tasteless advertisements so that the platform which holds them can effectively function with a degree of legitimacy and perhaps allow two or more companies to coordinate their wares and functioning so that in the end nothing really ever gets done. 

But is this true only for social media platforms for instance? What for example do we learn about the executive enactment and repealment of the Farm Bill laws in India within the span of a year in a rare act where the Supreme Court of India actually exercised its autonomy.

The degegularisation of mandis as the only place where agricultural produce could be sold effectively opened up the market and allowed large retailers to compete with such local markets by other means then buying in large bulks. The introduction of contract farming and their regularization would permit for standardisation which would help manufacturers. The terms of agreement between a buyer and farmer however should potentially be regularised to keep at bay exploitative practices. The deregulation on caps of stocks which retailers can keep before selling to consumers would potentially problematise practices of hoarding already at work in the country which often leads to the waste of stockpiled food-grains. 

These coordinates are indeed what the conditions of technofeudalism are which have been raised by leaders such as Yannis Varoufakis, the ex-finance minister of Greece and presently a member of the European Parliament. The conditions of platform capitalism which were raised earlier, as a form of digital exploitation which we do not know is happening or is happening even with our willing consent in the form of profiles registered on social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter effectively provides companies who trade in data such as Reliance for example, with indicators of our preferences and browsing habits which they sell to manufacturers for money. Twitter for instance has reported that 13% of its income is from the sale of data mostly in the form of access to it Application Programming Interface. Reliance however, the leader in terms of market share in terms of the sale of data in cellular devices in India has recently expanded into the Indian supermarket industry with chains of Reliance Trends and Reliance Fresh which stock groceries and agricultural produce.

This is a situation where companies like this are sold your data which you upload on platforms to companies who can specialize the kind of advertising you see and who also are making forays into the supermarket industry regulating the prices of commodities which are purchased by the average customer - who are slowly migrating as it were from mandis to supermarkets in any case. 

This farming of our very interaction is the situation that sociologists name surveillance capitalism - and it has serious implications to any possible understanding of the question of agency in this world. 

My question here is how are we to understand the question of the metaphysics of presence today? What does it mean for instance for the average moderator of a group or page on Facebook who regulates the kind of comments which can and cannot be made, a scenario not very different in principle from the position of the mother at a dinning table at home, be when the interaction and posts made by users form what is effectively the bread and butter which many household economies run on. Indeed, is this job not very different in principle from the work of a newspaper editor at a good publication from yesteryears? Perhaps with the added benefit that instead of collating facts and framing stories - this moderator merely screens comments, posts and pictures for spam, self-promotion and abusive behavior? This position indeed is the new warden as it were whose role - watered down as it may, is not even to run a program or regulate timings of any kind but merely to screen for impropriety; and suddenly it appears that we are back amidst Victorian England and the tea bag party all over again.

Make no mistake - this is what neo-colonialism looks like and it is as real as the fruit in the market, the air-conditioned shop you buy it from and the cellphone you may have in your pocket. Should we hence be surprised that recently the Supreme Court of India, in another judgment which seems to keep abreast of the times and conditions we are in - added to our fundamental rights - the right to privacy? 

The dissolution of privacy itself is not something that I think is a regressive measure in any society which can hold its customs with a sense of pride, where there may be a free and independent press for example, and where children are educated in schools which are inclusive in ways that can pass down the mores and findings which have been the product of earlier investigations. What is disturbing about the present violation of our privacy - if you want to call it a violation that is would be the fact that this information is being used to fund platforms which are often worth  more than most of the countries in the world. 

It is not merely about the money which such platforms make but the fact that the number of profiles which these platforms host provide them the opportunity to conduct what is recognizable today as social engineering. And this does not disprivilege earlier forms of organization as much as plug into the most banal dimensions of them such as their insecurities about profiling, be it racial, linguistic, national or along any other ethnic or political orientation. 

This construction of a self as it were, an activity which we have been engaged in since the dawn of privacy at least - even if the day of that idea is done, or so it may seem presently - has been digitalized and made into fragments of useable data of interest to your bank and credit card companies for example, but also the local government, peer associations who may be setting up businesses, rivals, partners and others in ways which our own mediation such as the presenting of the front of a shop and the security which may have been entailed in owning it seems to have withered away so to speak. 

I am not sure whether this in itself would be entirely a bad thing for it would make an emerging generation more circumspect about what they may choose to share - just as this very apprehension may create slightly more frigid relations which indeed may lead to a lack of trust in institutions and markets in terms of new enterprise. But is this not the same as what the essence of austerity has always been ? In which way would I mean this - well the withdrawal of investment in public infrastructure and monetary measures such as stimulus for the economy that a government may choose to withdraw from has always borne such effects. Rarely are such periods remembered kindly even if some writers such as P Sainath for instance may title their work sarcastically; here I am referring to his first book, ‘Everybody Loves A Good Drought’.

What a longer term development which this reconfiguration of how we see ourselves in a world which really does move at the push of a button would be perhaps pages such as forums in a website becoming a repository for useful index specific information - be it in terms of bodybuilding, which I believe may have seen the first of such pages, to electronic toys, political leads and any other such indulgences that may be taken an interest in these days. 

But in entirety this does seem to be signaling something of an end, if this term is used with the tentativeness and care that it deserves, of what very many public institutions seem to have been in yesteryears, be it banks, schools, supermarkets or shops - many of whom may be accessed today via screens while browsing their wares, and whose inventories are resupplied via tabulated records kept electronically and shared as orders when stocks may be required. 

This brings us to the question of the metaphysics of presence and here is where I think we would be witnessing the most decisive changes in terms of what is the terrain and texture of social experience that may be surfacing today when information is really not a scarcity - even if the courage to express it seems threatened in some situations. You would recall the group Anonymous which served as a cover for the voicing of political dissent. I think it is evident that the ubiquity of identity which is seemingly the inverse of anonymity effectively serves the same blanketing mechanism where a voice as it were is liberated as it has the safety of numbers and the luxury of not being accountable for their acts, deeds, and words individually - and here I think we can see why the position of the moderator of a page may have been instituted on platforms such as Facebook in the first place. 

This is indeed a public sphere which is less afraid, that is more outspoken - and in these terms better equipped to pass on experiences to an emerging horizon that will not experience the world in the ways in which we have - even if certain continuities appear, and others seek new ways to entrench themselves. The construction of canons indeed is often a way in which not a past per se as much as a tradition is retroactively constructed as a means via which a people may identify themselves and come together I suppose over anything from football or movies or indeed literature which would be what I would opt for, speaking as a former shy kid. 

But it is also clear that there are ways in which this quickening of our communications as it were does seem to present to us less time to to consider precisely what is it that may be said, and a quicker interpretation does tend to identify threats, and violence in ways which a sober discussion would tend to wean away, and here I think we can identify certain structural features implemented on social media platforms such as Twitter, which highlight emerging trends with a hashtag which anyone can open as an index and perhaps place their own spin on any recent development, maybe perhaps reducing their digital identity to some kind of signature which perhaps some may even interpret as an artwork - and these are often the most explicitly political projections. 

The question which emerges is where does this leave the family of yesteryears and it would be easy to dismiss this issue as a retreat into a new form of interest in real estate and perhaps the question of class being displaced to an extent to that of proximity with the neighbor who becomes perhaps a less theological figure and more like a presence who we recognize in terms of their relation to an abode, a paradoxical feature as never has mobility been as exaggerated as the present seems to hold. A fact that governments seem to have responded to in recent years with increasingly isolationist measures safeguarding their borders.