International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 46

A (Guided) Tour of the Digital Wild West
(supposedly non-existent), sex (supposedly replaced by “gender fluidity”), income,
financial standing, value of primary residence, whether they have family,
whether they have teenage children or not, loans taken out, whether they observe
Ramadan (!), their vehicles and when they were bought, and so on. Each and
every profile has been sold to advertisers, bringing Facebook, through those intrusive
“Ad Preferences,” somewhere between one and three billion dollars every
quarter.
Behind the shiny, happy post-hippy-all-brothers-and-equals image, the private
data extorted—in the darkest of shadows, because “transparency” is for losers—from
2 billion customers, subscribers, and others are subjected to immensely
detailed manipulation, which provides the constituent members of GAFA with the
most formidable concentration of coercive power in history. As of today, GAFA is
colonizing networked humanity, reaching into your lounge, your bedroom, your
dining room, kitchen, and office—right down into your pocket.
The Incestuous Relationship Between GAFA “Libertarians”
and the Pentagon, CIA, and Others
Amazon created the cloud used by the American intelligence community; Microsoft
devised the “Azure Government Secret” cloud (for the use of federal government,
individual states, the Pentagon, and so on); Google is piloting the Pentagon’s
artificial intelligence project, and so on. Which joker coined the term “net
neutrality”?
An Iron Grip on Global Information and Media
Never neutral, technology is always molded by the values of those
who create it. In the case of Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies,
those values are libertarian and mechanistic; trust in them depends
on algorithms; state and other forms of regulation are viewed with
suspicion and hostility. (New York Review of Books, January 18
2018)
A few anonymous individuals now decide how the planet gets its information,
how it consumes, and how it communicates. Facebook is truly the “editor-in-chief
of the Earth”: 45 percent of Americans access news via this platform,
while another 25 percent do so via Google. In this way, between them, these two
private companies control the news environment of billions of the Earth’s inhabitants.
One more demonstration of how right Marx and Engels were: “The ideas of
the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling
material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (Marx and
Engels, 1968 [1846]).
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