What is That Hiding in Plain Sight – Part IV

In my last post, I struggled to discover some commonality in the way both Alexander’s Discovery and Surveillance Capitalism succeed in remaining hidden as an obvious explanation of so much unnecessary suffering…

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To understand that the way I sit and stand, the way I walk, the way I work at my desk – that these everyday actions have profound consequences in the health of my life seems impossible to know in the moment of the act itself.

In the same way, while hitting a Like button on Facebook, it is hard to conceive this as one of the causes for the evolving polarisation and disintegration of our social and moral order.

There has to be something that connects these two phenomena.

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The answer begins with the weaponisation of language.

ALEXANDER EXAMPLE

I first woke up to this through working with a professional violinist who played in an elite orchestra. She was in serious trouble with her bowing arm – the pain had been increasing for months, and she was frightened it could prematurely end her career.

She found her way to my door.

As I watched her play the reason she suffered was obvious. 

It was not a physical defect related to her arm; it was an educational error in how she conceived the movement of her arm.  She mislabelled the functionality of her bowing arm so that it was effectively weaponised against her well being.

She was innocent, yet that didn’t change the fact of her suffering.

I asked her: “Where does your arm begin?”

She pointed to the gleno-humeral joint, which I fully expected.

Try to raise a bowing arm while believing your movement is only occurring around the glenno-humeral joint! In her case, this belief produced an active resistance to the required upward swing of her clavicle at the sterno-clavicular joint. This caused pain – self-inflicted by mislabeling what she believed an arm to be. 

Without that, her arm improved instantly.

She was behaving out of a misguided concept to keep down what must be going up.

We see this a lot – what is true is often the opposite of what we believe to be true. And in the following example, we will see that this is also a feature that keeps Surveillance Capitalism hidden…

SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM EXAMPLE*

You are often asked to click your agreement to Privacy Policies before you can go ahead using something with the prefix “smart”, i.e. smartphones, smart cars, smart thermostats, smart doorbells, smart locks, smart refrigerators, smartwatches, smart bands, smart key chains etc.

Why should they care?

We innocently believe they care because they want us to know how they are safeguarding our personal data. How kind. We think that we have them under our control, but the reality is: they have us under their control.

Just as a shoulder is not an arm, so a Privacy Policy is not a protection.

On the contrary - these are not “Privacy Policies”; these are “Surveillance Policies”.

Here’s Zuboff with a detailed explanation:

“Finally, the research team unearthed an even darker secret: privacy policies do not matter. Of the 211 apps in the group, 81 percent did not have privacy policies, but for those that did, “not all of the provisions actually protected privacy.” Of those apps without privacy policies, 76 percent shared sensitive information with third parties, and of those with privacy policies, 79 percent shared data while only about half admitted doing so in their published disclosures. In other words, privacy policies are more aptly referred to as surveillance policies, and that is what I suggest we call them.”*

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

It leads us to education: who is in charge of that?

The victors write history. Gaslighting is a new name for emotional abuse. 

In this maze of mirrors – how do we know what is real?

*Concepts and examples are taken from “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” Shoshana Zuboff, 2019.