Surveillance Capitalism “…they have been engineered to be indecipherable to be undetectable to create ignorance in a vast group of all of us that they call users. Our ignorance is their bliss”

0:19

According to Zubov our personal and private experiences have been hijacked by Silicon Valley and used as the raw material for extremely profitable Digital products. The term surveillance capitalism is not an arbitrary term. Why, surveillance because it must be operations that are engineered as undetectable indecipherable cloaked in rhetoric that aims to misdirect Obfuscated and Just downright Bamboozled all of us all the time.

1:37

How all this comes into play when I buy a pair of shoes on the Internet well you know some people will say to me but Professor Zubov, I like those targeted ads They’re so useful or I enjoy personalized services sometimes people will say you know, I have nothing to hide so I don’t care what they take. Each one of these statements is a profound misconception of what’s really going on? We think that the only personal information they have about us is what we’ve given them and we think we can exert some control over what we give them and therefore we think that our calculation our trade-off  is something that is is somehow under our control that we understand it and what’s really happening is that we provide personal information, but the information that we provide is the least important part of the information that they collect about us.

3:23

Way back at the beginning back in the year 2000, 2001, 2002, back in those days, data was considered just extra data. They were considered waste material and people called them things like digital exhauster or data exhaus.t Eventually, it was understood that these so-called waste materials harbored rich predictive data. The search information we retain we do for quality purposes. So for example the google spell checker has been built using our inputs?  Someone issuing a query and then issuing another corrected query. Those corrections and it actually takes more than 30 days worth of data to build the world-class spell corrector that we have The companies like to say we collect data so that we can improve our service and that’s true. They collect data and some of it is used to improve the service to you but even more of it is analyzed to train what they call models of patterns of human behavior. So once I have big training models, I can see how people with these characteristics typically behave over time and that allows me to fit your data right into that arc and to predict what you’re likely to do and not only now but soon and later. This is what I call behavioral surplus, these data streams filled with these rich predictive data why surplus. Because right from the start there was more data than was required to improve products and services. Once you have the behavioral surplus the comprehensive behavioral data of hundreds of millions of people, you can start predicting the preferences of specific groups. Think popular shoes for mail managers or the preferred restaurants of a group of people sharing the same zip code. Maybe they do a prediction of where I have dinner tonight. Well, how can I imagine what they will predict about me? Well, you know at the simplest level, they may predict the kind of food you’re in the mood for right now and then sell that prediction, auction that prediction to their business customers in the restaurant business who will then send you a very quick ad. We know you’re in the mood for a delicious pasta dish tonight. We can invite you to our restaurant. Here’s a discount coupon There are some people who are saying well It’s very improbable that those targeted ads really can achieve something because people have their own will and they will not buy some shoes just because there is a net in front of them. One of the misconceptions it that it is really important for us to move away from surveillance capitalism is something that is only manifest in our lives when we’re online or somehow it’s only restricted to online targeted advertising. It’s easy for us to say these these things don’t affect me. The fact is this is being conducted at a layer that is not accessible to us. We have no idea what today’s algorithms can predict about us or what behavioral data they used to do it as a simple thing like buying a certain kind of shampoo can divulge essential information about us? For example, the New York Times reported a case of a supermarket chain. The  girl was pregnant even before she did or was prepared to share the news. The markets algorithms discovered that the girl switched from fragrant shampoos to more neutral smelling products. Since the olfactory senses of pregnant women becomes stronger the market algorithm assumed this girl must be pregnant. The father didn’t know until he was repeatedly sent special offers for baby products. Thanks to the analysis of trillions of terabytes of behavioral data that we unwittingly leave around the digital domain Big Tech sometimes knows us better than we know ourselves, they can predict things like our personality our emotions our sexual orientation our political orientation a whole range of things that we never ever intended to disclose.

11:42

It’s very difficult to have a concept of this for a for a very good reason It’s not because we’re stupid It’s because these processes have been disguised They operate in stealth. They have been engineered to be indecipherable to be undetectable to create ignorance in a vast group of all of us that they call users. Our ignorance is their bliss. There are some things that have broken through into the public view that we do know about so let’s talk about Facebook’s Massive scale contagion experiments and this is where Facebook experimented with subliminal cues planted in its Facebook pages. That would actually influence offline real-world Behavior and emotions to see if they could make people feel happier or sadder using subliminal cues in with language manipulation and word manipulation and so on well when the experimenters wrote up this work in the very prestigious scholarly journals that published the results of these experiments. They emphasize two key findings number one – we now know that we can manipulate subliminal cues in the online context to change real-world behavior or Real-world emotion. We know that we can be successful at doing this. Number two, we can exercise this power these methods while bypassing user awareness.

“Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.
At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.”―Chuck Palahniuk,

Welcome to the real Brave New World. In Huxley’s Brave New World people were created and conditioned to love their lives (their servitude) and to be ignorant and distracted by conditioned pleasure and happiness. Our real Brave New World instead of creating and conditioning people to love their environment we created a virtual environment that they love and we are conditioned by  them through that environment so we stay ignorant and distracted.

“If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers — and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.”―Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

BTW I know what she is talking about Uyghur people in China is bullshit at least in my opinion. She don’t understands geopolitics or history I think, but she understands very well brainwashing which they use to create world for the Naive, world I am speaking about so world in which most people live in.