Capitalism is never far away here, either, of course. The comedian who livetweeted the Plane Bae saga won the, for instance, who immediately sought to profit from the attention and gave the woman a free credit on her T-Mobile account; rather cheap advertising, certainly. And now, West Elm Caleb’s transmutation into the melted air of memery led to him being the. Truly an ignominious fate if ever there was one.
That’s what so many of us, left behind by global austerity, are scrabbling for: a way to shake a few cents out of the panopticon. But, to return to Hochschild’s original definition, you may note something is missing from some of the actors I described earlier: They’rebeing paid. Most don’t even want the attention.
The purpose of surveillance is, in no small measure, to enforce your will on the surveilled, compelling them to change their behavior before your almighty lens. But in order to crowdsource this in the way that surveillance capitalism demands, to generate unlimited data and #content, the dream-turned-nightmare of sousveillance is absolutely essential.
The internet has brought us to the brink of such a world, but it also started to bleed money out of the equation. Now, in this game of economic musical chairs, sometimes you’re not the product but the raw material. You’re the thing being extracted for someonecan’t make scratch from it. But some mayonnaise company just might.
Great read