What Happens When You Marry The NSA's Surveillance Database With Amazon's Personalized Marketing?

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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140221/09375526309/what-happens-when-you-marry-nsas-knowledgebase-with-amazons-personalized-marketing.shtml

What Happens When You Marry The NSA's Surveillance Database With Amazon's Personalized Marketing?
from the spying-in-the-service-of-seduction dept
by Glyn Moody
Fri, Feb 21st 2014 7:39pm

By now, most people who shop online are aware of the way in which companies try to tailor their offers based on your previous purchasing and browsing history. Being followed by strangely relevant ads everywhere is bad enough, but what if the government started using the same approach in its communications with you? That's one of the key ideas explored in an interesting new article by Zeynep Tufekci, strikingly presented on Medium, with the title "Is the Internet good or bad? Yes."

Tufekci suggests that neither of the two main metaphors regularly wheeled out for today's global surveillance -- George Orwell's "1984" and Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon -- is right:

To understand the actual -- and truly disturbing -- power of surveillance, it's better to turn to a thinker who knows about real prisons: the Italian writer, politician, and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was jailed by Mussolini and did most of his work while locked up. Gramsci understood that the most powerful means of control available to a modern capitalist state is not coercion or imprisonment, but the ability to shape the world of ideas.

The question then becomes: how can people's ideas be shaped so as to control them? Simply bombarding the population with messages only works for a while, until people become jaded and resistant to them. That's where Edward Snowden's revelations about "big data surveillance" come in, Tufekci suggests: