The industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century in Britain brought sweeping changes to societies worldwide.  It saw technology develop at a rate never seen before, and this development was fuelled by one aim: profit.  It was in this era that capitalism really got going; merchants and entrepreneurs in the western world saw an opportunity to make something of themselves, to make profits, to gain power.  It begun a new phase of human development, one in which money was everything.  

In the name of the free-market, capitalists sought to make anything and everything sellable in the market from raw materials to slaves. If people would buy it, they would find a way to sell it (for a profit, of course).  Since the 18thcentury, more and more goods have been engulfed by the market mechanism as individuals seek to rationalize their self-centred world view in the name of the invisible hand.  Of course, consumers, the individual components of an ever-impersonal society, were in control – or so we thought.

The 21st century saw a new revolution; the digital revolution.  In the past 20 years, society has been unrecognisably transformed by technology.  It is hard these days to imagine a functioning life without the daily use of laptops, computers, mobile phones and social media- at home and at work. This is because now, we do everything, from our grocery shopping to buying train tickets, online.  

Google is our new library, Twitter our newspaper, WhatsApp our post office, Amazon our shopping centre and Microsoft our office.  Not only this, Apple and Samsung provide us with the infrastructure to get there at anytime, anywhere.  Rather than being at our doorstep, the world now resides firmly between our fingers.  

Per day, it has been estimated that there are 5.6 billion google searches, 500 million tweets, 100 billion WhatsApp messages sent, 300 billion emails received, and 4.14 million phones bought.  There are roughly 3.8 billion people using social media networks regularly.   The digital revolution is here to stay.

It is therefore clear, that since the creation of Google (a benchmark) in 1998, domestic technology has taken the world by storm.  It provides us with everything we desire, exactly like a newspaper provides us with news, or a coffee shop with coffee.  Only, with instant gratification.  In light of these material improvements, it is easy to think that Big Tech serves us.  Where is the downside?  We are in control of what we do, what we want and what we allow.  The issue is that this isn’t strictly true.

As with its industrial predecessor, the digital revolution has reformed capitalism and the economic system that defines our lives.  Yet the similarities do not stop there: Just as the industrial revolution was motivated by profit, so too is the digital.  

Inevitably, as technology has developed, capitalism, and Big Tech businesses such as Facebook, have moulded in form to extract as much money out of the newly emerging industry as possible.  However, you may ask, how do these companies make the vast quantities of money they do, turning them into the most powerful players in the commercial world?  

Unlike any other product swallowed by the market, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are willing to sell us access to Google, to Facebook, to Outlook and to Amazon completely free.  Here lies a problem.  It doesn’t take an in-depth supply and demand analysis to tell you that if you sell a product for free, you aren’t going to make a profit.  Indeed, it seems ludicrous for any business to create a product for a cost and sell it for free.  At first glance, it might just be the worst business model ever!  

Yet we, the consumer, are finally questioning this delusion.  We are asking, how have these companies grown so big and powerful?  It is estimated that the 5 biggest tech companies - Amazon, Alphabet (parent company of Google), Apple, Microsoft and Facebook- have a combined value of upwards of $5 trillion, making them collectively the third largest country by GDP.  The question remains, where does this money come from?

The answer is as simple as it is uncomfortable.

We are the commodity. 

The alter to capitalism, that most of the developed world has prayed to for centuries has, with impressive ease and effortless cunning, evolved and mutated into a far from friendly brand, a variant coined by Harvard professor Shoshanna Zuboff as ‘Surveillance Capitalism.’  It is taking the world by storm. The capitalist model, ever seeking marketisation and profit, has chosen us, as individuals, to exploit, nurture and then farm, whilst we remain seemingly and naively unaware.  As put by Daniel Hövermann, ‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.’

This began with Google in 2001, when tech companies began to realise that there was huge, untapped potential locked up in behavioural data – how we interact with the internet, how quickly we swipe our screens and how often and when we pick up our smart phone – data is money.  

The business model was simple.  Encourage us to use our phones and online gadgets as much as possible, slip in software to monitor our interactions, then harvest the data of every single online move we make.

When multiplied by millions, let alone billions, of users, Big Tech soon has huge swathes of freely and easily gathered data to be sold on to hungry marketing companies wanting the edge over their rivals. It is no coincidence that you google skiing holidays only to spend the next week flooded by ski wear adverts.  

Not only are your preferences tracked, but also how best to entice you into submission.  If your data analysis shows you often dismiss the first advert you see, from tracking your previous swiping patterns, someone will be willing to pay more to know that and place their advert further down your Instagram home page.  In true big brother fashion, surreptitiously and stealthily, you, the consumer has become the product from which Big Tech derive their huge revenue. For very little outlay, and for years, we seemingly have been oblivious to the depth of the harvesting of us as individuals.

For a business model motivated by profit, it was evident early on that Big Tech was on to a winner. This simple model worked extremely well.  For example, Google’s revenues between 2001 and 2004 increased by a mere 3,950%.  

Inspired by this success, Google and other technology companies, lured in by the potential profits, began to seek further ways to extract personal information from us.  Yet of course, there was a catch.  They knew that society wouldn’t willingly consent to being spied on; they needed to extract our data without our knowledge, and so they did.  Algorithms, supercomputers, and state of the art data science allowed them to keep us covertly under surveillance as we used their platforms increasingly more. 

So, what affect does this have on you?  Many people downplay the danger of Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism because it doesn’t affect them.  After all, why wouldn’t anyone want the instant gratification of the internet? Who wouldn’t want to be served 24/7 with personalised content at zero cost?  I would say that you are missing the point.  It is us, the average man, woman and child that are serving these Big Tech companies, not the other way around.  Our data, our very human experiences, are the fuel that have allowed them to motor towards global dominance in the past 20 years, and it is only now that we are waking up to it.  

In terms of the future of Big Tech, if they remain unchecked, we risk them delving deeper into our private lives as they mine out our raw data as if it was coal.  If we, as a society, are so concerned about government infringement on our civil liberties, with the American imperative of ‘small government,’ freedom of choice and freedom of speech still shouted loud, then how can we put up with private companies doing the exact same thing?  Indeed, it is worrying to think about what would happen if this technology got into the wrong hands…

This is not even to mention the threat that Big Tech poses to our democracies.  Social media and freedom of speech have been buzz words since protestors stormed the Capitol on the 6th of January.  In response, Twitter, Facebook and the like removed President Trump both a platform and a voice and many have now asked, what power do these companies have to restrict a democratically elected President from relaying his messages?  

Whilst controversial, and for many dangerous, I am more worried about the role of Big Tech in election processes.  We have seen in both the Brexit Referendum and the election of Donald Trump, the role in which Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and other tech giants have had in influencing, even manipulating, people’s opinions, often with blatant misinformation.  If Big Tech can predict our behaviour - what we like, what will influence us - the potential for politicians across the spectrum to abuse and exploit our data and experiences for their own ambitions is potentially and truly terrifying.  And this is not to mention the lobbying power of these companies, which will hinder attempts at reform.

Society needs to wake up to this very real danger, because if we don’t, according to Zuboff, we will become numb to the actions that these companies are taking, becoming mere pawns in a more malign nexus of Surveillance Capitalism.   

If we don’t act now, Surveillance Capitalism will be left to mutate into something yet more insidious, as Big Tech companies become ever more powerful and hence ever more difficult to reign in.  Just as the Industrial Revolution wreaked havoc on the environment, the digital revolution threatens to damage our democracies and freedom of speech, choice and the very social fabric that has characterized western liberal democracies from the outset. 

It is time that Big Tech serves us, not the other way around.

Will Cutlan-Smyth