In the Victorian era, hoop rolling was a popular game among children. They would run behind a large, moving hoop with a stick trying to keep it upright and maintain its momentum. But “at a certain point, it’s going to wobble… and if you stop running, stop paying attention, that hoop will wobble and it will fall. Then you lose,” Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, told me when we spoke recently. “And democracy is like that hoop.”
Published in 2019, Surveillance Capitalism outlined how large technology companies, with Google and Facebook as the prototypes, extract data from users to sell predictions of their behaviour to advertisers. Their methods of extraction are increasingly invasive and ubiquitous, with the so-called internet of things providing new surveillance opportunities even when users are offline. While extracting people’s everyday experiences and determining how we act, the Big Tech companies have bypassed democratic institutions and even our own awareness. Unhindered by democratic oversight, technology companies have control over society’s access to information and media. We are potentially facing, as Zuboff writes, the “prospect of muted, sanitised tyranny”.
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