Know Yourself: The Exploited Consumatron

As just about everything on this planet becomes commercialised, humans themselves are not exempt.  Necrocapitalism is pushing every life form and resource towards its death sentence, the supermarketization route.  The role of the consumer is no longer limited to consuming.  They are now a product themselves. 

More accurately, they are a digital slave with three distinct roles servicing the dystopian necrosystem: the first one is to buy products, the second role is to work for the psychonomy, and the third is to exist as a free, monetizable dataset which helps the psychonomy become more efficient at further exploiting us.  In this self-reinforcing loop of exploitation, we are the losers.  We are unpaid workers in the very system which profits from us. It is the greatest scam of the modern age, so perfectly executed that it is easy to miss.

We have yet to realise just how valuable our social media presence and digital footprint has become to this system, in financial terms.  Each of us is a monetizable and tradeable data set, an information asset in the AI economy which is monetized by the very corporations we were already purchasing products and services from. These companies are using our data without compensating us, for the very purpose of making more money from us.  It is the equivalent of telling your friend one of your most dirty secrets, then letting them profit from it.  If this all sounds confusing and perverted, it is.  It can only be described as self-endorsed blackmail.

The repercussions of digital supermarketization on our ethics are catastrophic.  We are habituated to treat others as inanimate products we scroll through, as we increasingly interact with humans on purely transactional terms. Whether it is an employee we are about to hire, a friend we turn to only at a time of need or a potential partner we just swiped right on Tinder, all facets of our life are beginning to resemble a consumeristic “browsing” process.

Our police forces increasingly see people as objects, treating protesters as obstacles in a video game.  Soon it will be easier to program compassion into a robot, rather than “re-program” compassion into human police staff.  The Robocop age will become reality as we rely on algorithms to maintain social cohesion. Yearly surveys by city authorities in the future will reassure citizens: “new survey finds that robot police forces continue to be more effective, more compassionate, and less racist than real humans”. 

As more of our lives become automated, we tend to ignore the fact that this system is now watching us with more, bigger, wider eyes than ever.  We are increasingly dependent on the very system which only sees us as currency.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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