Dystopian vision on the risks of digitalization for sustainability 6.2
“No, the ‚targets‘ here are me and you: everyone, all of the time. In the name of ‚national security‘, the capacity is being built to identify, track and document any citizen constantly and continuously.” (Wolf, 2012) Naomi Wolf ist Schriftstellerin und politische Aktivistin. This is made possible by the advanced development and dissemination of digitally upgraded surveillance technology. The use of technologies (e.g. drones) to capture movement profiles, recognize faces or other features makes it possible to identify each individual person in a public space. The omnipresent surveillance takes place not only in public, but also in the supposedly private sphere: the recording and evaluation of people's online surfing behaviour allows conclusions to be drawn about the thoughts of every user of an IT device (Helbing, 2018). They are continuously monitored via smartphones and voice assistants. Smart televisions and game consoles monitor leisure-time behaviour, and fitness and health-data trackers collect every individual's most sensitive health data (Helbing, 2018).
“George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’, written in 1948 [...] was intended as a warning. But apparently it was used as an instruction manual: Google knows what we think, Amazon’s Kindle Reader what we read; YouTube and the game console know what we look at; Siri and Alexa listen to our conver sations; Apple and IBM measure our health; [...] Apps, cookies and browser extensions evaluate our internet activities. And our car is a data leech.” (Helbing, 2018). Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences and a member of the Department of Computer Science at the ETH Zurich. Digital surveillance technologies are also used at the workplace, for example for monitoring and predicting the behaviour of all employees (Solon,
2017a; Ball, 2010). Compared to earlier practices, surveillance by the state and companies now takes on a new dimension because it takes place everywhere, incessantly, permanently collecting, linking and evaluating all recordable patterns – be they movement data, data on behaviour or ways of thinking – in both public and private spaces.
“Democracy and the internet are less and less compatible. Content censorship and mass surveillance of users are spreading in both totalitarian and democratic states; dis information and propaganda are increasingly becoming effective antidemocratic instruments.” (Gaycken, 2016) Sandro Gaycken is the founder and director of the Institute for Digital Society at the ESMT Berlin. In this totalitarian state, the knowledge acquired by mass surveillance is deliberately used to monitor, control and oppress the population. With the help of a social credit system, a data-based credit-rating system based on the Chinese model, citizens are assessed on the basis of their behaviour (e.g. in a work context), religion, ethnicity, diseases, DNA or the products they buy (Lee, 2018). Monitoring and assessment target a wide variety of activities such as payment behaviour, criminal records, shopping habits, lifestyles, moral conduct, social behaviour and political convictions. Depending on the conformity of personal behaviour with the values of the ruling regime, individuals are rewarded – or punished for non-compliant behaviour – for example when looking for accommodation, enrolling in schools, applying for social services, in work promotions, when asking for loans, taking out insurance or seeking employment (Kühnreich, 2017, quoted from Gruber, 2017; Helbing et al., 2015; Kling, 2017: 38f.). The aim of the keeping records is (external) control of all individual behaviour. 273