I narrate key points in my post “Get the Flock Out of Here”
Surveillance is no longer the unique purview of the central state; it has been fully privatized for profit by Big Tech and Corporate America, creating a vast, sprawling structure of control I call Privatized Totalitarianism as the mechanisms of data collection and profiting from this data collection are privately owned but the data is for sale to anyone, including government agencies of every stripe.
We thus have a hybrid mix of public and private control structures. The government (with a monopoly on force and declaring what's legal) has its systems and tools to collect data on the citizenry, and corporations (platforms, monopolies, quasi-monopolies, cartels) have their privately owned and operated "black box" systems and tools to collect data on the citizenry.
Both profit when the privately harvested data is shared with the government. The government gets the privately collected data and in return dismantles or disables the guardrails that once protected the public from state and private-sector encroachments on privacy.
In a centralized system in which power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of the few, everyone in power benefits from this cozy marriage of corporate and state exploitation of data collected by surveillance and whatever is conducted or transacted online, which together increasingly includes every aspect of daily life.
Whatever is digitized can be collected and sold, whatever is surveilled "for our own good" can be harvested and sold, and whatever is sold becomes a means of control.
When it comes to data collection, the more data collected, the greater the profits and the means of control. It's important to note here that the control structures of Privatized Totalitarianism differ from the rigid enforcement of tradition state-totalitarianism, where no dissent is allowed.
In the marriage of self-serving State and Privatized Totalitarianism, a narrow band of ultra-processed, i.e. carefully curated and controlled "debate" and "dissent" is not just allowed, it's constantly lauded as "proof" of our "free markets" and "liberty", in the same way a starchy, grease-soaked, heavily sweetened goo dyed orange is lauded as a "healthy veggie snack."
Get the Flock Out of Here
One of the core traits of a 1984-type totalitarian dystopia is 24/7 surveillance of every prisoner, oops, I mean citizen. Surveillance collects the data that leverages the tools of control: without surveillance, the structures of control do not have the data needed to monitor, track and control the populace in a profitably fine-grained manner.
