The Rise of Big Mother: Benevolent Digital Surveillance

Extract

[...] Do connected societies contribute to redefining the concepts of freedom, happiness, and consent? Does the digital contribute to dethroning the cardinal virtue of freedom, for a new order of values? Should we finally consider that the 'Big Brother » foreseen by George Orwell has left place to Big Mother, a more benevolent and conciliatory entity, promoter of soft surveillance accepted? Ultimately, it comes down to questioning the following issue: to what extent does the benevolent digital surveillance power rely on the consent of individuals? [...]

[...] Furthermore, digital technology also helps the survival of certain governments. These governments appropriate these services to maintain their power (the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed the exploitation of data from 87 million Facebook users to influence the results of the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries in the United States). The state and businesses have common interests. States have been interested in promoting data capture by private actors, based on shared benefits: the correlation between state interest and entrepreneurial interest has enabled many partnerships and scandals: data harvesting by Zoom, NSA wiretappingNational Security Agency) via the GAFAM, through massive data collection by Facebook. [...]

[...] HIGGS, Eric. Satellite Culture: Global Positioning Systems, Inuit Wayfinding, and the Need for a New Account of Technology, Current Anthropology, December 2005. CABANAS, Edgar; ILLOUZ, Eva. Happycratie. How the happiness industry has taken control of our lives, Paris, Premier Parallèle, 2018. ENGELS Friedrich. Anti-Dühring, Éditions sociales, 1878. HENNO, Jacques. All files. The incredible American project to thwart terrorist attacks, Editions Télémaque, 2005. KEYNES, John Maynard. [...]

[...] Before the emergence of the digital, modern states were already seeking to apply algorithmic methods. Understanding the crowd, space, despite distance, was a challenge, governance by numbers a solution. Furthermore, the rationalization of public action pushed to integrate liberal logics, even logics of the enterprise: the government of the expert favoring in fine the government of the enterprise. This rationalization was already leading to the corruption of the State, called upon to manage entities rather than citizens, reifying populations. Thus, in the same logic Friedrich Engels indicated the following: 'the intervention of a state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one field after another. [...]

[...] In the face of Big Mother, to what extent does the power of benevolent digital surveillance rely on the consent of individuals? CASE STUDY Subject proposed : " In the face of Big Mother : to what extent does benevolent digital surveillance power rely on the consent of individuals? In 1949, the British writer George Orwell publishes "1984". This science fiction novel describes a future world, a highly performant and intrusive surveillance society, and an alienated individual's intimate life. Because it draws inspiration from the totalitarian regimes of the Cold War and predicts that the still nascent new technologies will become omnipresent control tools, the novel becomes a predictive reference, a warning launched to every conscious man. [...]