Philosophy
Surveillance capitalism doesn’t just track desire, it turns your wanting into a resource, then sells predictions (and nudges) back into your future choices. The feed feels “so you” because it’s built from you, redrawing what even shows up as worth wanting.
Watched Into Wanting
Shoshana Zuboff, in her monumental study of what she calls surveillance capitalism, argues that our desire – our actual choosing behaviour becomes the raw material for someone else’s profit. We are not the customers of these platforms; we are the product. What is being sold is not access to us, exactly, but the ability to predict and subtly shape our behaviour. The data our desires generate is processed and sold to those who want to influence the next round of our desiring. The loop is complete: our wanting funds the machine that manufactures more of our wanting.
There is something worth sitting with here, because the easy response (I will simply stop using these platforms )misses the deeper problem. The deeper problem is not that the algorithm influences us, but that it does so in a way that is genuinely responsive to who we are. The recommendations are not random. They are often good. That is precisely what makes the colonisation complete. If the feed showed us things we had no interest in, we would ignore it, and the problem would be minor. But the feed shows us things that actually appeal to us, things that feel like genuine expressions of our interests and tastes. We click because we want to click. The want is real. And yet the want has been shaped, narrowed, reinforced, looped back on itself, in ways we cannot easily observe.
The philosopher Charles Taylor wrote about the way in which language and culture provide us with the background against which things show up as significant, as worth wanting. He called this the horizon of meaning. What the algorithmic feed does, at scale, is construct individualised horizons of meaning, tailored backgrounds against which certain things show up as deeply desirable and others as simply not on the map. This is not censorship. Nothing is forbidden. But the topography of what is easily imaginable to want has been quietly redrawn, and you had no say in the redrawing.
Thought experiment: Try this: think of something you genuinely want, not a product, but a desire for a way of living, a quality of relationship, a kind of work. Now ask: where did this wanting come from? Can you trace it? Is it in the feed? Did a film give it to you? Did a parent? Did a tradition? Is any part of it yours, in the sense of originating with you? The point is not to produce despair but to produce precision. The question is not whether your desires are influenced (all desire is shaped by context, as the kama tradition knew perfectly well). The question is whether you can tell the difference between being influenced and being manufactured. Between cultivation and colonisation. The fact that this is hard to answer is itself information about what has happened to wanting.
“The recommendations are often good. That is precisely what makes the colonisation complete. If the feed showed us things we had no interest in, we would ignore it. But it shows us things that genuinely appeal to us, and in that appeal, the manufacturer is invisible.”
Debord’s insight about the spectacle takes on new dimensions here. We now desire not just images of satisfaction but personalised images of satisfaction. Images filtered through what the algorithm has determined we are most likely to click on, most likely to feel the tug of recognition toward. The spectacle has been customised.