Presentation Abstract
It is a personally pushed group presentation from my work expertise on the results of present types of expertise. In it, I argue that huge gamers like Google and Fb construct predictive profiles which can be then bought to advertisers who then try to affect particular person conduct for industrial/political acquire. These enterprise fashions have quietly reshaped society with out public information or consent. Surveillance Capitalism will not be an inevitable characteristic of contemporary life, however a selected and correctable state of affairs, one which requires knowledgeable and protracted civic engagement to reverse.
Vistor’s Notice: I introduced this in individual right here in my space in July of 2026. I additionally plan to host a zoom presentation of this materials. See the underside of this web page for hyperlinks to the fabric and to join any future zoom or in individual shows. You’re free to obtain and use this materials to convey consciousness to the dangerous results of Surveillance Capitalism. I do ask that you just attribute me as the unique creator.
A lot of this presentation is about barely altering our pondering. How we predict can have a huge impact on what we want to see on the earth.
It has regularly been seen that the surest long-term results of brainwashing is a peculiar type of cynicism – an absolute refusal to consider within the fact of something
— Hannah Arendt
Why did I embrace this quote?I see divisiveness of not eager to consider in something.Can we agree that the world wants therapeutic proper now?
[!Warning]
In my try to make the argument that unrestricted surveillance capitalism can be utilized as a instrument to usher in a motion of Authoritarianism, a few of this materials is perhaps psychologically disturbing.
Underneath the appropriate circumstances, just like the circumstances we’re seeing as we speak, damaging focus of energy can occur in any political celebration, although it might tackle totally different types.
Who Am I
I’m Scott Larson. I’m a pc skilled who has been serving Santa Rosa and the encompassing areas.
I began serving to folks with pc expertise independently in 2007.
I write about the advantages and weaknesses of varied types of expertise and its philosophical underpinnings.
My Story
The Secret Assembly that Modified Rap Music and Destroyed a Era
About 20 years in the past, I learn an article from a Hip Hop blogger that acquired an nameless letter a few clandestine assembly between music business executives and promoters.
The creator of the letter was thrown out of the assembly for expressing hostility to a plan of artificially elevating gangster rap over different hip-hop music with the purpose of making a jail pipeline that among the high music execs we’re invested in.
Article headline about file labels actively recruiting Black males with prison data to file rap
Now, this story is generally thought-about an city delusion. However when you take a look at the historical past of the personal jail system, there are similarities to that timeline of occasions.
Reddit remark in regards to the “Secret Assembly” story
This Reddit commentor in 2019 agreed that one thing was off throughout that point interval. Different commentors from that point inform the same story.
Queensryche Operation Mindcrime Music Video
my troubled younger grownup years, this Rap Music story jogs my memory of the music that influenced me. I ponder if my understanding of the world was formed by the music I listened to.
Presentation Analysis: Music as a generational solution to specific the difficulties of our time. As an apart, are we missing political music in our present period?
This story, true or not, jogs my memory of what’s occurring with the pervasive elements of expertise. All the time-online techniques and companies collect information, and this information is slowly used to form society with out our information or consent.
The Watergate Scandal
March 1971: Daniel Ellsberg, launched the Pentagon Papers. Nixon used his place to go after him and canopy it up. Nixon resigned after public stress.
Information Photograph: Trump on Greenland
NOW: Now we have an administration that, so far as I can inform, is working unlawfully with full impunity. And neither celebration in congress is keen to cease it.
Take into consideration the place we’re are proper now…to the place we have been fifty years in the past.
Consumerism has slowly taken over our lifestyle. Now we’re confronted with an Authoritarian political and monetary system that works collectively to disenfranchise its personal folks.
Consumerism has been impacting society slowly over time for the final 50 years. With our restricted understanding of how this information is used, we’ve been largely driving down this highway unaware.
Ethics of expertise
Ethics of expertise pertains to:
{Hardware}/Software program Design Influence: How our decisions and conduct turn out to be effected by the design and implementation of expertise (Is expertise being designed to forestall selection?).
Human-technology relations Influence:How expertise impacts social relationships (Instance: are there surveillance elements of expertise that trigger a concern of talking out?)
In my occupation I:
Carry out danger assessments of expertise: After I discover dangerous options I like to recommend competing options, or present a report back to my prospects on my considerations
Observe how expertise shapes human conduct: I write about how dangerous expertise impacts tradition and human company
First-party = corporations like Google or Amazon that supply influence-related companies to organizations that wish to promote to customers (You)
Second-party = Advertisers, or any establishment that pays a First-party to assemble information for revenue
Third-party = Shoppers
Why am I doing this?
(good query, LoL JK)
Freedom: I like being free to resolve what I wish to see on my pc; by extension, I need my prospects to even have that selection (At the moment that’s not the case)
Duty: I need expertise to be designed round rules that advantages humanity, not destroys it. I need society to have a say in how our expertise progresses
I care about my daughter’s future: I wish to do one thing about this for the longer term era.
Making my life tougher: It’s tougher to help my prospects’ goals when expertise is designed particularly to obscure option to push folks into dangerous/unwelcome services afterward if you end up unaware
I’ve been noticing tendencies
Enshitification occurs when the client turns into the product. When consideration and data is bought as a product the person expertise morphs from one thing helpful to one thing exploitative.
Pattern 1: You’re now not the client (Despite the fact that by all appearances it appears to be like that manner)
Predatory pricing is an unlawful antitrust enterprise technique the place a agency intentionally units its costs extraordinarily low, usually at a loss, to drive current rivals out of the market or deter new entrants
Pattern 2: Many trendy gadgets are designed with information seize capabilities. This allows producers to function at a loss harming small companies who develop protected competing applied sciences.
Pattern 3: These data-capturing skills can be utilized to elicit reactions inflicting divisiveness with the purpose of commodifying our consideration
Pattern 3 Instance: We spend vitality combating undesirable options and processes, with these processes getting used as data-gathering factors of reference to resolve how a lot an individual will tolerate
What I don’t like about trendy applied sciences
Good applied sciences: Many are designed to steal consideration, cut back our potential to grasp relationships between our expertise, one another, and the world
Firms are utilizing adversarial incentives in {hardware} design to mine information from personal life realizing that it degrades society
These consideration stealing strategies stay hidden behind Finish Consumer License Agreements(Client Impacting) and Non-Disclosure Contracts(Minimizes Whistle blowing). Makes figuring out motives troublesome.
What’s Surveillance Capitalism?
A enterprise mannequin that mines behavioral information to be packaged into “prediction merchandise”. This information ultimately results in the palms of business predators to affect society for industrial acquire.
Key Elements of Surveillance Capitalism
Behavioral Prediction: Firms like Google and Fb gather behavioral metadata from exercise on-line.
Specializing in patterns that reveal details about a person’s habits which is then used later to finger print people. The purpose is to foretell future decisions and behaviors.
Behavioral Modification: Past predicting, this mannequin usually seeks to nudge or modify person conduct for industrial acquire, akin to driving customers to particular places or merchandise. (Minor Instance)
Ubiquitous Surveillance: Knowledge is harvested not simply from on-line searches, however from smartphones, good residence gadgets, and wearables.
Deliberate Non-Transparency: Sometimes companies will cover this criminality by not disclosing how their merchandise collect information, leaving customers in the dead of night. As soon as the harm is finished it’s subsequent to unattainable to acquire treatment.
Examples of harm vary from unhealthy actors utilizing bought information to rip-off victims, to steering election outcomes by gaming social media.
Surveillance Capitalism is commonly described as an “information coup” undermining private privateness and doubtlessly threatening democratic values by favoring monetary pursuits over particular person autonomy.
Digital Breadcrumbs/Metadata
These techniques don’t essentially seize your private data, like identify and telephone quantity, to trace you (which is how they get round most privateness legal guidelines).
As a substitute, they construct profiles primarily based in your conduct patterns and use that as a fingerprint to interact with you if you end up interacting with any of those services or products.
Well-known instance: It was discovered that a young person bought being pregnant merchandise across the starting of her second trimester.
A prediction mannequin was used to construct a profile of her being pregnant. That system was used to mail maternity associated commercials earlier than she informed her household she was pregnant.
Present functions of this expertise
Value Subsides: Advertising to highly effective promoting corporations is among the methods prices are sponsored to the patron. Many merchandise are constructed and deployed by any firm wishing to know extra about their prospects which is why the price of many applied sciences over time are more and more bought at a loss.
Dangerous: Creates synthetic pricing decreases which has the alternative impact of constructing competing product costs larger, consolidating energy amongst unhealthy actors available in the market.
The first focus of designing dangerous merchandise is to extend the categories and quantities of knowledge gathering inputs
Dangerous: Merchandise will not be designed particularly together with your pursuits in thoughts. This will increase the chance that merchandise are designed towards your needs or wants, A characteristic is perhaps taken away after the acquisition, lowering your freedom and management over the services you buy.
Advantages of this Expertise
There are some good negative effects of those practices: A great instance of a attainable commerce off is driving instructions. Mapping service use cell phones to gauge site visitors jams and offering various routes.
However many of those dangerous practices contain promoting metadata to advertisers, devaluing buying energy and negatively impacting company.
In the long term, when profiles of every buyer are created to trace future habits, these profiles can be utilized to remove the ability of society. When the product focus is on enhancing the flexibility to extract data from society relatively than creating new merchandise that enhance society, we’re all harmed.
Closing Ideas (Consciousness and Empowerment)
Except we’ve actual illustration in our authorities. Firms don’t have vested curiosity in defending privateness.
Your conduct turns into the useful resource for first-party corporations to design democracy-harming merchandise and maintain efforts in the dead of night about the way it shapes our society.
With the appropriate details about conduct, first-party corporations can promote their prediction merchandise to governments and political candidates to destabilize on-line discourse and steer elections.
As a result of these corporations don’t share what they’re doing with this information or how they’re creating these merchandise, it takes errors from these unhealthy actors to find out how this expertise progresses over time.
If you wish to perceive how democracy will be formed in a dangerous manner over time, see the Fb–Cambridge Analytica information scandal within the pamphlet for extra details about this 2012 information breach.
What we will do
Behavioral Consciousness
Finally, these harms are caused by our cultural pathologies. Listed here are some psychological profiles that I feel maintain these issues going.
[!note]
Many of those profiles are cultural issues. They don’t seem to be simple to resolve. However by altering our conduct, little by little, on a person degree, we will slowly shift the stability.
See the Pamphlet for extra data on these matters.
Externalizing Duty: Refuse accountable different folks, events or techniques. Settle for duty for our half in the issue by means of our actions or inactions.
Social Norms Acquiescence: Going together with cultural norms that put you in a divisive place of being proper and others being flawed, to dominate an individual or state of affairs.
Sentimental Habits Indulgence: Feeding off of shock emotionally as a solution to really feel like one thing is being performed, whereas outwardly doing nothing to lower the extent of hurt.
Motion may look totally different for every particular person. All of us come from totally different walks of life and have totally different talent units.
Responding to Nationwide or Regional requires security: Calls to help initiatives, or payments to extend safety on the expense of freedom, make us much less protected. Buying and selling safety for freedom reduces our potential to behave.
Giving freely our energy to behave over to folks or establishments that will have agendas that run opposite to our personal won’t be in the most effective pursuits of a free society
Train Alternative
I’m a agency believer that the instruments we use form how we relate to the world.
We will resolve to stay with instruments that circumvent our will to behave, or strive one thing new and empowering.
A kind of instruments is the software program that runs in your pc known as the Working System.
At the moment, the Microsoft Home windows Working System has a monopoly on the PC market, however that’s altering. Open Supply, Free software program (as in Freedom-generating) like Linux has come a great distance.
The Linux Working System works like Home windows or MacOS, with out all of the junk. Its designed from user-centered and selection perspective.
Just lately, Microsoft and Apple have been designing new variations of Home windows and MacOS with AI options.
In my expertise, the way in which these AI options are designed and forcibly deployed take away person management.
Sure applied sciences pushed by AI enhance many elements of our lives, particularly within the medical business.
However with out transparency, we don’t have a say in how these applied sciences influence our lives.
Consciousness
Our psychological blind spots can usually forestall us from seeing an issue. We don’t wish to consider our lives are exploitable.
The organizations that interact in harvesting information often have incentives to function in the dead of night regardless of our lack of ability to see what’s proper in entrance of us, to maintain the cash flowing.
Data is energy: Voicing our considerations with others is highly effective. I encourage every of us to not purchase into the politically right perception that we will’t discuss these necessary matters with each other.
The view that every part is a political ideology is pushed onto society to maintain us divided and prevents our potential to arrange.
On the similar time, discourse needs to be respectful. Having beliefs doesn’t make it proper to imagine we’ve all of the solutions and impose them on others. We have to hear to one another with curiosity, relatively than wanting to vary one another’s viewpoints.
To correctly maintain these corporations accountable and steer them in the appropriate path, we want a stronger give attention to ending Residents United, and we want lively enforcement of antitrust legal guidelines.
See the pamphlet for extra data on organizations you’ll be able to help to assist make these initiatives occur.
It’s been my expertise that persistence in supporting a greater world, by means of motion, will ultimately yield outcomes.
We will’t depend on authorities initiatives to try this for us, particularly now; we every want to speculate time in making the world a greater place if we wish to see enhancements.
Conclusion
Knowledge gathering is a fancy downside as a result of we obtain many advantages from these applied sciences in society.
With the current lawlessness in our political and company establishments, I’m beginning to marvel if the advantages are well worth the trade-offs.
If you’re focused on studying extra about gaining Freedom with the expertise you utilize, please scan the QR code on the pamphlet, and I can maintain you updated on future occasions.
Reflections and Questions
How does this make you’re feeling?
In the event you can replicate on how you’re feeling about this, we’re already making progress.
What are some issues this tech may be capable to predict about you?
If we don’t prefer it, what sorts of life adjustments have to occur?
This isn’t an inevitable extension of Capitalism, however a selected mutation that requires our voice to form it.
By: Scott Larson
Date: 2026-04-03
Welcome and thanks for displaying up for this occasion!
[! hint]
You should use the bottom of the pamphlet to jot down down questions
The Presentation ought to take round an hour to finish
There will likely be about 40 minutes on the finish of the presentation for questions
The presentation slides and the pamphlet will likely be accessible on my web site after the presentation. Use the QR code on the backside of the presentation to make use of the shape get on my mailing for the hyperlinks to the supplies and notifications about future occasions. I’ll be internet hosting a zoom presentation of this materials within the close to future so in case you are focused on attending once more on-line or know people who is perhaps ship them a hyperlink to the shape.
Define
Introduction
Who am I
My Story
Philosophy of Expertise
Why am I doing this?
What I don’t like about trendy applied sciences
What’s Surveillance Capitalism?
Closing Ideas (Consciousness and Empowerment)
Conclusion
Reflections and Questions
Synopsis
I’m a pc skilled who has been serving Santa Rosa and the encompassing areas since 2007. I’ve expertise in investigative {hardware}/software program problem-solving and in writing in regards to the advantages and harms of expertise.
2026 goes to be a troublesome time. Political and social divisiveness is at an all-time excessive. On this presentation, I discover the pervasiveness of sure client merchandise, specializing in the moral and political ramifications of those merchandise being designed and deployed as a profit whereas, on the similar time, secretly getting used to counterpoint capitalists and by extension, its companions on the costly of society.
To assist us by means of this yr and to enhance our democracy, I advocate for enhancing schooling in social and political consciousness by drawing on elements of consciousness that promote self-determination, encouraging folks to make knowledgeable decisions in troublesome conditions relatively than accepting what’s.
Abstract
This presentation is a primer on the hostile results of Surveillance Capitalism.
Surveillance Capitalism is a system or a set of applied sciences that intention to glean data from society to revenue from particular person conduct. Having these techniques in place reduces freedom in our society and is a trademark of Authoritarianism.
With out consciousness and motion, all types of law-abiding behaviors, like protests, are criminalized by governments and companies that work collectively to deploy surveillance applied sciences in an effort to streamline commerce, or, in worst-case situations, steal sources from the general public. When expertise turns into open to surveillance actions, it turns into simpler for prison actors, in and out of doors the nation, to focus on the weak, just like the aged and kids. Let’s work collectively to make our societies safer by understanding these threats.
Behavioral Consciousness
Finally, these harms are caused by our cultural pathologies. Listed here are some psychological profiles that I feel maintain these downside going (Please word that many of those are cultural issues that we have to, however will not be simple to, resolve by altering our conduct, little by little, on a person degree and cease ready for others to avoid wasting us):
Externalizing Duty:
Blaming different folks and establishments for the reason for the issue and never taking duty for our half in creating, or permitting the issue to exist (I.E: selecting to disregard the issue by making excuses that its too onerous, or it’s too time consuming to resolve)
Marginalizing folks you don’t agree with, or which have a special viewpoint/political stance than you by participating in, or Indulging in weapons of mass distraction: Attacking folks which can be utilizing politically incorrect wording, or attacking factors of view you don’t like. There’s a time and place for every part, Not each state of affairs is an excuse to additional your political viewpoint and in lots of circumstances, this conduct finally ends up inflicting divisions and sidelining resolutions
Social Norms Acquiescence: Going together with cultural norms that put you in a divisive place of being proper and others being flawed with the intention of dominating an individual or state of affairs. Psychologically we’re wired to maneuver in the direction of ego stability. When conditions current themselves that threaten this stability, we are inclined to assault the state of affairs or messenger
Sentimental Habits Indulgence : Feeding off of shock emotionally as a solution to really feel like one thing is being performed whereas outwardly doing nothing to lower the extent of hurt. Disregarding exterior circumstances by refusing to appreciate that the world is formed by particular person motion. Self-righteousness can inadvertently generate cruelty in our society on a big scale. The circumstances round these behaviors may look totally different for everybody. The necessary level to pay attention to is that distinction is an asset for robust societies. All of us have various varieties expertise due to our variations. Lets all work collectively even when we disagree on sure factors.
Responding to Nationwide or Regional requires security: By demanding security, or going together with calls to extend security from the chaos of the world we make the world extra prone to authoritarians and subsequently extra harmful. Keep away from the psychological pull to really feel protected throughout harmful instances. Research present that the notion of feeling protected promotes a false sense of safety and improve a willingness to obey upfront. Calls to help initiatives, or payments to extend safety on the expense of freedom falls below this class, makes us much less protected and takes particular person company away from folks and provides it to authoritarian leaders and establishments that will have agendas that run opposite to our personal.
See the “Supply Materials” part beneath for sources I draw from on these matters to craft these recommendations.
Sources (To Study Extra)
Understanding the Neuroscience, epistemology, and the metaphysics of the alternatives we make
Find out how our reliance on extreme left mind pondering is negatively shaping our future and how one can deploy extra proper mind pondering
Philosophy of rising applied sciences
Surveillance Capitalism
Programs
Freedom Coaching (https://freedomtrainers.internet/trainings/) Learn to refuse to cooperate with official insurance policies and actions nonviolently. Freedom Coaching helps us learn to take away our acquiescence at an enormous scale, the place undemocratic actors will be stopped of their tracks.
Organizations you’ll be able to Assist
Combat for the Future (https://www.fightforthefuture.org/) |We harness the ability of the Web to channel outrage into motion, defending our most simple rights within the digital age.
Freedom Home (https://freedomhouse.org/)| Freedom Home is the oldest American group dedicated to the help and protection of democracy all over the world. It was formally established in New York in 1941 to advertise American involvement in World Struggle II and the struggle towards fascism
Hanna Arendt Heart (https://hac.bard.edu/) | The Mission of the Hannah Arendt Heart at Bard Faculty is to create and nurture an institutional house for daring, dangerous and provocative desirous about our political world within the spirit of Hannah Arendt.
American Promise (https://americanpromise.internet/) | The “For Our Freedom” modification is a proposed addition to the U.S. Structure designed to control political spending, making certain that election expenditures will be restricted to guard free speech, truthful elections, and political participation. It goals to empower states to control marketing campaign financing, countering the results of choices like Residents United
Potential options
This expertise, and and the way it’s getting used to surveil society and to remove selection is being accelerated by our present political and cultural local weather. This began occur with the arrival of the web and has sharply elevated in tempo with AI.
The The Hannah Arendt Heart for Politics and Humanities launched an fascinating article (https://medium.com/amor-mundi/expropriation-notes-on-the-revolution-to-come-1e4de79a693b) on the issue lately that I feel has the potential to enhance our state of affairs.
The issue is that we’ve misplaced our potential to talk and be heard and if we wish these circumstances to return, we have to kind councils grounded within the expertise of individuals performing collectively.
Supporting various companies & Unsubscribing from unhealthy actors
Reduce Off the Spigot (https://cutoffthespigot.com) | A search engine that appears class by class to seek out options to badly behaving corporations, huge companies, and personal fairness corporations.
Resist and Unsubscribe (https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/) | Individuals are feeling powerless to thwart the Trump administration’s assault on our nation’s values. Praised by tech CEOs, surrounded by sycophants, and** enriched by his return to the White Home, the president’s actions march on unchecked. Individuals, nevertheless, have a strong weapon that has been hiding in plain sight.
Particular reference sources on how these applied sciences are used
(Listing abuse sources for: License Plate readers, facial recognition and search/ai )
Supply Materials
Understanding how Surveillance Capitalism Works
Behavioral Consciousness
Presentation Hyperlinks
Tune In opposition to Struggle and Corruption
For What It’s Price – Buffalo Springfield
Think about – John Lennon
Eminence Entrance – The Who
I’m a Native Pc Technician who has an curiosity in empowering folks with applied sciences that allow autonomy.
You could find out extra about me on my web site https://scottRlarson.com.
You possibly can electronic mail me at inquiries@scottRlarson.com
If you’re focused on a philosophical tackle this topic, take a look at my “Andor In Our Time” (https://www.scottrlarson.com/tags/andorinourtime/) video essays on how the Andor TV collection from Disney has classes to show us about getting extra concerned in civics.
If you wish to be taught extra about my journey from Home windows to Linux, or these applied sciences you’ll be able to go to my web site and take a look at my articles on the topic. (scottRlarson.com)
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