What Is That Hiding in Plain Sight? Part Three.

In 1964, an international group of scientists travelled to Galapagos Islands to put together an information-gathering experiment on turtles. Leading the expedition was Professor R. Stuart MacKay - an expert on the evolving technology of telemetry.

The turtle swallowed a tiny telemetry device – the device then sent information about the turtle’s movements to a computer located in another part of the world. Henceforth:

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MacKay’s inventions enabled scientists to render animals as information even when they believed themselves to be free, wandering and resting, unaware of the incursion into their once-mysterious landscapes.*

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We are now these turtles.

We feel we are wandering free, when all the time we are also under surveillance.

How does this ignorance of the obvious take route in human life?

In Alexandrian terms, we know that sensory appreciation can lock an individual into an unhealthy “standard” of coordination, while the individual is firmly ignorant of believing any such incumbrance even exists… 

Until, of course, they have their first series of Alexander lessons. 

We’ve all been witness to the startled and incredulous reactions students have as they wake up to the implications of Alexander’s Discovery. A revolution begins that they had no idea could even exist. As they look around and see so many heads being pushed down into torsos - in the lives of those they love - they try to proselytize to blank stares and uncomfortable silences. 

A revolution appeared in their life, but they can not convince others it even exists!

As a result, most give only silent testimony by the way they live.

This is how the blind becomes ascendant over the informed.

Of course – when pressed – most people will admit to a lingering sense of disease about their posture… “Yes, my posture is not so good.” But to suggest that this might prematurely end their life – or leave their last years in an agony of discomfort – is close to preposterous.

Now switch the place of your blindness towards Surveillance Capitalism. 

(Oh no! Not THAT again – see? Resistance… Remember, this is about feeling what it is like to be ignorant of Alexander’s Discovery, not a polemic on Surveillance Capitalism.)

How are you the turtle?

Because your every action – online or not – is under increasing surveillance: when you use google maps to get to a destination; as you walk along a London street; when you check your heartbeat on a connected device or interact with an app; when you look for a holiday or zoom with a friend… 

All of these actions – and countless more, both online and offline – are under surveillance.

This is a fact, not a supposition.

Billions of dollars have been invested in harvesting information about everything you do – a predictive profile about your behaviour now exists on a data bank somewhere, side by side with the turtle. Just like the turtle, you are not only ignorant of this profile - you have no rights to know its content. Because it is not owned by you. It is owned by a trillion-dollar corporation that uses it to modify your behaviour to make money out of the data they stole from you.

It’s a Faustian contract that you entered in ignorance.

Swinging back to Alexander land again: what makes Alexander’s Discovery hard to appreciate is this same inability to infer how simple everyday actions could herald such profound consequences.

The commandeering of democracy, really?!
The reason pain is pandemic, really?!

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 polarization and disintegration of our social and moral order.

There has to be something that connects these two phenomena.

How can both live side by side without there being some common material from which they are woven?

Well, I will write about that next…

*Quotes from “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” by Shoshana Zuboff.