Why do we love being spied on?
This article came out the other week about how Facebook is spying on us. That isn’t really that interesting—we’ve known that Facebook spies on us for over a decade now. But that was preisely the interesting thing about it ot me—how I didn’t care, and probably nobody cares. This story won’t lead to anything. (It’s already been a couple weeks and nobody even remembers). It will come and go, like always. The question is—why are we okay with it? But beyond that, it isn’t just that we’re okay with it—we seem to love it. We allow it to go on for so long, we don’t expect it to stop, in fact we expect it to continue. These reports about Facebook (or whatever other big tech company) spying on us are almost like reassuraces at this point—the companies are almost like checking in with us, to let us know they’re still spying. If they stopped spying, we would feel like something was wrong. Why’d they stop?
Another example came out today, of Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology, which was in half of their Amazon Fresh stores. The idea was that you could pick an item off the shelf and just walk out—your payment would be processed through Amazon’s magical technology. The truth was that the just walk out stores “relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.”
The magical technology ended up being a mix of our two favorite things, as neoliberal subjects—exploited labor and spying.
Spying is such a central part of this shitty future that we are living through—2024 is a very futuristic date! And most of the technology we have is either geared towards spying, or a cover for spying. Without spying, we would not really be in the future at all—most of the big advances in the future that we delude ourselves into thinking of as “progress” is really just spying in one form or another. It goes on because that’s all that the future is—and without that, there would be no future.
We also love spying because it makes us feel important. It’s tied in with privilege—if we are being spied on, we are at least valuable in that way, worth being watched, tracked, etc. The Just Walk Out technology combined it all into a perfect package—giving you this elite shopping experience, of just walking out with your food, not having to pay (paying is beneath you! paying is for poor people!); but underlying it, you got to be spied on. The spying wasn’t overt, but on some level, I’m sure everyone knew; it isn’t really a big surprise, is it? So you got both—you got to take food without paying, and you got to be spied on. Bigtime shit. Our two favorite things combined in one—it’s no wonder Amazon has been so successful; it knows exactly what we want, what we love.