“AI is a product of the mass surveillance business model”
Because of course it is. If they didn’t have all of our information, they couldn’t build the systems.
Modern life is about choosing the least worst option. Subscribing to a service, streaming music, licensing software instead of buying it, and choosing simplicity over managing our own increasingly complicated lives.
None of us love Facebook, but we can’t leave. Instagram never shows us what we want, and the things we share are buried under the algorithm, or shadowbanned. Twitter is a cesspool of trolls and shit disturbers, but we remember the time before it sucked and we keep checking it.
We’re trapped.
“People have to use it because you can’t participate in society without it. […] That’s coercion..”
—Meredith Whittaker
We don’t own much anymore, we lend our eyeballs to companies who give us the least possible benefit to wring the most money out of us. Spotify pays artists a fraction of a pittance, but we keep streaming. We keep subscribing to services to send our invoices, to count our inventory, to run our businesses.
Because life is hard and sometimes the choice is between life with less friction most of the time, or solving an endless number of small problems all the time. More and more often we don’t even get to choose.
Someone above us chose convenience, took a kickback and signed up, and passed that pain down. Higher prices, fewer choices, and less flexibility to accommodate the wild variety that life is all about.
It was all shit, getting shitter, and then computers got good at recognizing patterns. Give them enough input and they’ll notice some things that repeat, and how they correlate to other things that repeat.
The AI companies first took notice, then took our stuff.
The things we shared, the words and art and dreams and confessions that connected us to each other and eased our pains. They took them without asking, swirled them together, and sold them back to us as AI.
And we’d better like it! Because we don’t have a choice, do we?
–NFG
The headline is something Meredith Whittaker said. She’s the head of Signal, a non-profit (remember those?) company in charge of the Signal messenger. It’s good stuff, Facebook uses it as the foundation of Whatsapp.