[dandare]

The term "surveillance capitalism" is needlessly loaded - it has nothing to do with capitalism, neither as economic nor as political system.

All it tells me is that whoever started it had a left bias and whoever is using it does not know any better.

[bigfudge]

I disagree. I think it’s descriptive in that it tells who is the proximal source of most surveillance. You can be against all pervasive surveillance but still want to distinguish the main source in a particular context. Surveillance in the UK is qualitatively different to that in China, for example. Different people run it and have easy access to it. Both are bad but worth distinguishing.

[dandare]

And who is the source? Capitalism, the economic and political system? BS.

On Wikipedia, you can find that:

>Economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of connection and monitoring [...]

Which is partly truism and partly straw-man. Truism because "Economic pressures" are "driving the intensification" of everything, yet we don't use terms [something]-capitalism anywhere else. And straw-man because capitalism is only one of many possible sources of economic pressure.

If all you want to is distinguish the source from state-actor surveillance then "for-profit surveillance" or even "surveillance marketing" are much more fitting terms.

[bigfudge]

This seems somewhat pedantic to distinguish surveillance capitalism from surveillance marketing or for profit surveillance.

Modern capitalism is tending towards large, powerful corporations and there are important network effects/economies of scale which drive pervasive surveillance. If you want to argue that this isn’t surveillance capitalism because capitalism can take many forms I’m not sure that’s especially enlightening.

[GaryNumanVevo]

Nonsense. It's not like the UK government is building the technology required to surveil at this scale. They're effectively laundering data in pursue of "societal good" which gets filtered through dozens of tech firms who only exist to collect and analyze this specific data.

Capitalism, in this instance, is exploiting a niche, that is the UK government (and others) want more control over their populations. These firms are more than happy to oblige, given the government contract is lucrative enough.