[00 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_82

The age of surveillance capitalism, Shoshanna Zuboff, 2019

According to Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, the State is a set of institutions that must satisfy the needs of citizens and protect them through forms of control. The reason why the State cares about its population has a capitalist connotation: Citizens are part of the production system on which capitalism is based. I argue Hedva's claim about capitalism as the person’s identity constructor is based on productivity, and therefore, its non-need for care lies precisely in the link between the system of power (the State) and part of its production system (its population). This link is controlled and guaranteed by a normalization process that subjects the social body to a single prescriptive-descriptive norm, indispensable to the functioning of every institution. Schools, armies, psychiatric systems, and all public bodies that objectify human bodies, homogenizing them to a single normative standard, are examples of subjugation. In this way, the system produces subjectivities that, according to its own rules, are expected or abnormal. As Hedva suggests, the normal is able, and the abnormal needs care. Being deemed “able” also affords these citizens more freedom of action and a right to exist as a whole and as self-determined people. That’s the reason why Hedva sharply questions the theme of personhood, power and agency, asking who is enabled to be a whole person and a citizen with the right to autonomy and self-determination (“The concept of the ‘person’ […] is one that promises self-determined completeness, wholeness, and power”); who at some point becomes disabled (“Not everyone on this planet will one day become queer or not white or a woman or colonized, but they will become disabled”); and why, at some point, are they marginalized based on the ability to be "productive" in a capitalist system (“our bodies are fragile and in need of constant care and support, but that we have built our world as if the opposite were true […] Who profits from these lies?”). Digital technology enables this capitalist process of normalization: everyone must be digitally integrated (subjugated to the norm) as part of the protection that the The state offers the citizen (surveillance), but the same technology is imposed by institutions, belongs to those who control the means of production (capitalism). Examples of these three aspects are that a smartphone is necessary to apply for a UK visa (subjugated to the norm); that in post-pandemic years, many States have tested alert messaging on all mobiles of the population (protection/surveillance); and that in the process of digitalization, many States required the DOC format, implying that the user had to pay for Microsoft products to have access (capitalism). These three aspects of digital technology normalization mean that digital technology enables a form of “surveillance capitalism,” quoting Shoshanna Zuboff, pervading every person's life through a technological normative standard that we all rely on. In this scenario, people have no choice but to participate, highlighting how all the citizens are in a vulnerable, feminized, disabled condition since their agency and their self-determination are denied.

According to Maslow’s pyramid, technology regulates the needs of the individual on different levels: at the safety level (you need to own at least one device for the creation of identity documents, to access your bank account, and to be able to register with the NHS); at the belonging level (to have an email address for work communications, a WhatsApp group for colleagues, social networks to keep in touch with friends); and at the esteem level (self-promotion takes place through personal blogs, social profiles, etc).

Technology is not always explicitly imposed as mandatory, but the bureaucratic and social net in which modern citizens are immersed makes it challenging to live without it. Technology has become essential for humanity: for the State, it’s a means to protect/supervise the citizen, as Zuboff reminds us, and for the capitalist profit makers in the digital world, it’s a data collecting tool to improve sales (“If it’s free online, you are the product”). It leads people to depend on online devices: everybody must always be reachable and traceable to access services and to be recognized by the system. Reporting the smartphone-free experience of The Guardian writer Brooks:

It is simply a fact that it is nearly impossible to separate your life from your smartphone now. Going without one means relying on other people's generosity and patience, making it hard to access essential services. My gran has a family to help her shop, sort out her mobile banking, order her COVID tests, and book appointments. But many other people do not have this support system – which leaves many elderly, homeless, or otherwise vulnerable people out.

All these “elderly,” “homeless,” and “vulnerable people” who can’t access the internet or don’t have smart devices can’t access primary services either. They are, quoting Hedva, “invisible”: out of the norm and disabled to satisfy their needs. For Hedva, the most essential part of the word disability is precisely the "dis," which takes on the connotations of "lack" and "apart from." It is also the most political because it highlights the body’s power struggle. “Dis” stands for disempowered and invisible. According to Puar, this disability is deliberately produced by the system "through the creation and sustaining of debilitation on a mass scale." She argues that what this debilitation offers is not an identifying category as disabled, like medical and limited condition, but a very form of massification. That is interesting in terms of technology since technology creates a single standard, that of the connected world, and those who cannot adapt to this standard, that is, who cannot be part of a “mass of users,” are cut off from the system itself and become the mass of non-users. In this context, in which being visible as a subject is not for everyone, the architecture of modern technology systematically integrated into everyday life is designed on ableist principles and represents the new form of ableism. On 31 January 2014, The Complete Digital 2024 Global Overview Report by We are Social, an English organization founded by Simon Kemp, deals with interpreting cultures and subcultures online. It shows the number of digital users globally: 5.61 billion (69.4%) out of 8.08 billion of the world’s population use a mobile device; 5.35 billion (66.2%) use the internet, and more than 2.7 billion remain offline. That is, 33.4% of the world population is disconnected: these people are placed outside the technological norm, cut off from the mass of users, disempowered, and therefore made invisible.

In this context, in which it seems impossible to live without a "normal" device, a growing number of people are returning to the use of dumbphones as an “act of digital disconnecting,” considering the smartphone to be “the symbol of digitalization.” The list of reasons for rejecting the smartphone is long and varied: cutting screen time and fighting social media addiction; limiting compulsive shopping, reducing concentration problems, preserving privacy, refusing an adoption is shaped by ideology. People rejecting smart devices are demanding more free time, privacy, and agency. Three areas that respectively represent the aspects of technological normalization mentioned at the beginning: surveillance (affecting privacy), capitalism (affecting agency) and subjugation to the norm (affecting free time). One of the strongest motivations for using dumbphones is “digital detox,” as Rothschild and Lindqvist report the return to the dumbphone is “an ‘individual protest’ to the ‘destructive’ effects of these technologies”, the same ones that lead the country's primary infrastructures (government institutions, banks, hospitals) to require mandatory digitalization to access their essential services, constituting a single ableist standard to which everyone must adapt to satisfy their primary needs. The dumbphone offers not only the possibility “to escape hyperconnected lifestyles,” but it also promises “its users the regaining of agency over their digital use” (Ghita C., “Going cold turkey!” 2021). The agency that those same digital uses had denied them, along with the other characteristics that Hedva suggests constituting personhood: power, wholeness, and completeness. In a system of power that takes mass connection for granted, voluntary disconnection is an act of resistance to the system: the political value that Hedva gives to the "dis" particle of dis-abled is maintained within its parallel dis- connection. Those who are disconnected embody disability since they can no longer produce data. “Dis” reinforces opposition to the use of technology that reproduces a binary capitalist system and, therefore, people who are disadvantaged by this dichotomy because they fall on the invisible side. If to protest, you have to be visible as a body and as a person; this type of protest is invisible precisely because those who carry it out place themselves in a position of invisibility, that of those who do not fall within the ableist producer of digital data. Following Hedva, invisibility becomes the means to make problems visible, such as digital technology.