Love in the Time of Surveillance Capitalism: How Algorithms are Reshaping Our Intimate Online Spaces

• In Event: Intimate Surveillance: Collecting People as Data

Abstract

Over the last decade we have learned new ways to be intimate with each other through online platforms. This has created the need for a type of digital literacy that includes these new paradigms for technologically and algorithmically mediated intimacy. This in turn has opened us up to surveillance and algorithmic manipulation, and allowed the Big Other (Zuboff, 2015) into the most private of spaces. While conceptions of intimacy vis-à-vis technology often evoke dating sites and other forms of sexual intimacy, much of our mundane private and intimate interactions take place through platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and larger entities like Google.

In this paper, I examine how intimacy on platforms has been appropriated by what Shoshana Zuboff (2015) calls surveillance capitalism – a “new form of information capitalism [which] aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control” (pg. 75) to be used by what she calls the Big Other, “a ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records, modifies, and commodifies everyday experience” (pg. 80). Zuboff reframes the benign-sounding “big data analysis” within the frame of surveillance capitalism, which exposes the insidious nature of big data mining and analysis, and makes clearer the role of algorithms in extracting value from and shaping our online interactions. I present this as an exploitation of our social media intimacy (Andrejevic, 2011) within a paradigm of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017) in the service of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2015).

Author

• sava saheli singh, University of Ottawa