The Power of Awareness: Overcoming Surveillance Capitalism

This is a personally driven community presentation from my work experience on the effects of current forms of technology. In it, I argue that big players like Google and Facebook build predictive profiles that are then sold to advertisers who then attempt to influence individual behavior for commercial/political gain. These business models have quietly reshaped society without public knowledge or consent. Surveillance Capitalism is not an inevitable feature of modern life, but a specific and correctable situation, one that requires informed and persistent civic engagement to reverse.

Vistor’s Note : I presented this in person here in my area in July of 2026. I also plan to host a zoom presentation of this material. See the bottom of this page for links to the material and to sign up for any future zoom or in person presentations. You are free to download and use this material to bring awareness to the harmful effects of Surveillance Capitalism. I do ask that you attribute me as the original author.

Much of this presentation is about slightly altering our thinking. How we think can have a big impact on what we wish to see in the world.

It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism - an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything

Why did I include this quote? I see divisiveness of not wanting to believe in anything. Can we agree that the world needs healing right now?

[!Warning] In my attempt to make the argument that unrestricted surveillance capitalism can be used as a tool to usher in a movement of Authoritarianism, some of this material might be psychologically disturbing . Under the right conditions, like the conditions we are seeing today, destructive concentration of power can happen in any political party, though it may take on different forms.

About 20 years ago, I read an article from a Hip Hop blogger that received an anonymous letter about a clandestine meeting between music industry executives and promoters.

The author of the letter was thrown out of the meeting for expressing hostility to a plan of artificially elevating gangster rap over other hip-hop music with the goal of creating a prison pipeline that some of the top music execs we’re invested in.

Article headline about record labels actively recruiting Black men with criminal records to record rap

Now, this story is mostly considered an urban myth. But if you look at the history of the private prison system, there are similarities to that timeline of events.

 Reddit comment about the “Secret Meeting” story

This Reddit commentor in 2019 agreed that something was off during that time period. Other commentors from that time tell a similar story.

Queensryche Operation Mindcrime Music Video

Looking at my troubled young adult years, this Rap Music story reminds me of the music that influenced me. I wonder if my understanding of the world was shaped by the music I listened to.

Presentation Research: Music as a generational way to express the difficulties of our time. As an aside, are we lacking political music in our current era?

This story, true or not, reminds me of what is happening with the pervasive parts of technology. Always-online systems and services gather data, and this data is slowly used to shape society without our knowledge or consent.

March 1971 : Daniel Ellsberg, released the Pentagon Papers. Nixon used his position to go after him and cover it up. Nixon resigned after public pressure.

NOW : We have an administration that, as far as I can tell, is operating unlawfully with complete impunity. And neither party in congress is willing to stop it.

Think about where we’re are right now …to where we were fifty years ago .

Consumerism has slowly taken over our way of life. Now we are confronted with an Authoritarian political and financial system that works together to disenfranchise its own people.

Consumerism has been impacting society slowly over time for the last 50 years. With our limited understanding of how this data is used, we have been largely driving down this road unaware.

Freedom : I like being free to decide what I want to see on my computer; by extension, I want my customers to also have that choice (Currently that’s not the case)

Responsibility : I want technology to be designed around principles that benefits humanity, not destroys it. I want society to have a say in how our technology progresses

I care about my daughter’s future : I want to do something about this for the future generation.

Making my life harder : It’s more difficult to support my customers’ objectives when technology is designed specifically to obscure choice to push people into harmful/unwelcome products and services later on when you are unaware

Enshitification happens when the customer becomes the product. When attention and information is sold as a product the user experience morphs from something useful to something exploitative.

Trend 1 : You are no longer the customer (Even though by all appearances it looks that way)

Predatory pricing is an illegal antitrust business strategy where a firm deliberately sets its prices extremely low, often at a loss, to drive existing competitors out of the market or deter new entrants

Trend 2 : Many modern devices are designed with data capture capabilities. This enables manufacturers to operate at a loss harming small businesses who develop safe competing technologies.

Trend 3 : These data-capturing abilities can be used to elicit reactions causing divisiveness with the goal of commodifying our attention

Trend 3 Example : We spend energy fighting unwanted features and processes, with those processes being used as data-gathering points of reference to decide how much a person will tolerate

A business model that mines behavioral data to be packaged into “prediction products”. This data eventually ends up in the hands of commercial predators to influence society for commercial gain.

Behavioral Prediction: Companies like Google and Facebook collect behavioral metadata from activity online.

Focusing on patterns that reveal information about a user’s habits which is then used later to finger print individuals. The goal is to predict future choices and behaviors.

Behavioral Modification: Beyond predicting, this model often seeks to nudge or modify user behavior for commercial gain, such as driving consumers to specific locations or products. (Minor Example)

Ubiquitous Surveillance: Data is harvested not just from online searches, but from smartphones, smart home devices, and wearables.

Deliberate Non-Transparency: Typically corporations will hide this illegal activity by not disclosing how their products gather data, leaving users in the dark. Once the damage is done it’s next to impossible to obtain remedy.

Examples of damage range from bad actors using purchased data to scam victims, to steering election results by gaming social media.

Surveillance Capitalism is often described as an “knowledge coup” undermining personal privacy and potentially threatening democratic values by favoring financial interests over individual autonomy.

Famous example : It was found that a teenager purchased pregnancy products around the beginning of her second trimester.

A prediction model was used to build a profile of her pregnancy. That system was used to mail maternity related advertisements before she told her family she was pregnant.

Cost Subsides : Marketing to powerful advertising companies is one of the ways costs are subsidized to the consumer. Many products are built and deployed by any company wishing to know more about their customers which is why the cost of many technologies over the years are increasingly sold at a loss.

Harmful: Creates artificial pricing decreases which has the opposite effect of making competing product prices higher, consolidating power amongst bad actors in the market.

The primary focus of designing harmful products is to increase the types and amounts of data collecting inputs

Harmful: Products are not designed specifically with your interests in mind. This increases the likelihood that products are designed against your wishes or needs, A feature might be taken away after the purchase, decreasing your freedom and control over the products and services you purchase.

There are some good side effects of these practices : A good example of a possible trade off is driving directions. Mapping service use mobile phones to gauge traffic jams and providing alternative routes.

But many of these harmful practices involve selling metadata to advertisers , devaluing purchasing power and negatively impacting agency .

In the long run, when profiles of each customer are created to track future habits, those profiles can be used to take away the power of society. When the product focus is on improving the ability to extract information from society rather than developing new products that improve society, we are all harmed .

Unless we have real representation in our government. Companies don’t have vested interest in protecting privacy.

Your behavior becomes the resource for first-party companies to design democracy-harming products and keep efforts in the dark about how it shapes our society.

With the right information about behavior, first-party companies can sell their prediction products to governments and political candidates to destabilize online discourse and steer elections.

Because these companies don’t share what they are doing with this data or how they are developing these products, it takes mistakes from these bad actors to learn how this technology progresses over time.

If you want to understand how democracy can be shaped in a harmful way over time, see the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal in the pamphlet for more information about this 2012 data breach.

Ultimately, these harms are brought about by our cultural pathologies. Here are some psychological profiles that I think keep these problems going.

[!note] Many of these profiles are cultural problems. They are not easy to resolve. But by changing our behavior, little by little, on an individual level, we can slowly shift the balance.

See the Pamphlet for more information on these topics.

Externalizing Responsibility : Refuse to blame other people, parties or systems. Accept responsibility for our part in the problem through our actions or inactions.

Social Norms Acquiescence : Going along with cultural norms that put you in a divisive position of being right and others being wrong, to dominate a person or situation.

Sentimental Behavior Indulgence : Feeding off of outrage emotionally as a way to feel like something is being done, while outwardly doing nothing to decrease the level of harm.

Action might look different for each individual. We all come from different walks of life and have different skill sets .