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by dandare 905 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.