Surveillance Capitalism: You Are the Commodity

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Mark 8:36, New King James Bible

(Malone News)—Have you ever spent time really thinking about the shared business model underpinning the explosive profit and capitalization of Amazon, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook/Meta?

Most reflexively respond that these three leading new economy companies have different business models, and in a superficial way, that is true. But at a deeper level, they are all based on the same core business model – Surveillance Capitalism. Many are familiar with the phrase, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” This observation has become a common meme, suggesting that when a service is free, the user’s data, attention, or behavior becomes the commodity sold to third-party advertisers or companies. This concept is often applied to many online platforms, including social media, search engines, and content websites. This is really an oversimplification.

Surveillance capitalism is a business model based on the unilateral claim of human private experiences as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These personal data are then extracted, processed, and traded to predict and influence human behavior. Specific data concerning individuals is the commodity. In this version of capitalism, the prediction and influencing of behavior (political and economic) rather than the production of goods and services is the primary product.

This truth has more to do with the metaphor underpinning The Matrix movie series rather than classical market capitalism. In The Matrix, human beings are cultivated as batteries and harvested for their energy, which serves to fuel the Matrix itself. The concept of humans as batteries is a metaphorical representation of their enslavement and exploitation by machines.

In the Surveillance Capitalism business model, you are enticed and cultivated to obsessively participate in the platform, and then your thoughts, emotions, feelings, and beliefs are harvested from all available sources, including platform-based interactions. The extracted value of these items is then algorithmically processed to yield predictive both individual and collective “futures.”

In contrast, Murray Rothbard considers capitalism to be a “network of free and voluntary exchanges” where producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others (ergo: “Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges…”). According to Rothbard, true sources of wealth are:

1. Individual Entrepreneurship: Innovation and risk-taking by individuals drive economic growth and wealth creation.
2. Voluntary Exchange: Free markets and voluntary trade allow for efficient allocation of resources and wealth creation.
3. Gold Standard: A monetary system tied to gold or a similar commodity-based standard restricts the money supply and prevents government manipulation.

In “The Anatomy of the State,” Rothbard argues that there are two means of producing wealth:

Economic Means refer to producing and exchanging goods and services through voluntary human effort, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Economic means are additive, generating wealth for all parties involved.

Political Means refers to using force or coercion to seize wealth from others. Political means are reductive, distorting incentives and undermining long-term prosperity. Taxation is a form of theft in which political means are used to seize wealth from others. Reasoning by analogy, Surveillance Capitalism is a form of theft in which accumulated personal wealth in the form of fundamental, personal, and proprietary aspects of your soul is extracted and commodified without your permission.

Under Surveillance Capitalism, theft by commodification is practiced by machines acting on behalf of a small subset of humanity to involuntarily extract (or seize) value (wealth) from other human beings. Under Rothbard’s logical formulation, this is fundamentally a political rather than an economic transaction. Once reformulated, repackaged, and marketed, this value generates wealth for the Surveillance Capitalist by removing and thereby diminishing the personal wealth of the individual who is typically (and intentionally) uninformed of the loss.

In the case of the Facebook and Google versions of Surveillance Capitalism, behavioral and emotional futures are repeatedly auctioned off to third parties who use the information for various economic and political purposes. In most cases, the extracted value is repeatedly resold to multiple buyers. Amazon does the same but is more vertically integrated. Like Facebook and Google, Amazon extracts the information from you and processes it to yield predictive futures. However, rather than selling to third parties, Amazon uses this information internally to support the direct marketing of its products and those of third-party vendors.

Under the Surveillance Capitalism business model, you are not the product, but rather, your thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and knowledge are the natural resources being mined to yield the raw materials that are then used to build predictive “futures” products. This goes far beyond the 20th and even 21st-century analysis concerning the psychological basis for totalitarianism described by Hannah Arendt and Mattias Desmet. The commodification of your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs via the Surveillance Capitalism business model is what enables and powers the expanding daily reality of globalized techno totalitarianism.

What is Commodification, and How Does It Differ from Commoditization?

Commodification transforms inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people, or animals) into commodities or objects for sale. It means losing an inherent quality or social relationship when something is integrated by a capitalist marketplace. Concepts that have been argued as being commodified include broad items such as the body, intimacy, public goods, animals, and holidays.

Intangible, non-produced items (love, water, air, Hawaii) are commodified, whereas produced items (wheat, salt, microchips) are commoditized. Karl Marx extensively criticized the social impact of commodification under the name commodity fetishism and alienation.

In Marxist economic theory, prior to being turned into a commodity, an object has a “specific individual use value.” After becoming a commodity, that same object has a different value: the amount for which it can be exchanged for another commodity. According to Marx, this new value of the commodity is derived from the time taken to produce the good, and other considerations are obsolete, including morality, environmental impact, and aesthetic appeal. In a sense, the value of a commodity reflects both the intrinsic value of an item or service and the value added by extrinsic factors (scarcity, marketing) that increase its perceived value.

Before the term was even created, Marx predicted that everything would eventually be commodified: “the things which until then had been communicated, but never exchanged, given, but never sold, acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conscience – all at last enter into commerce.”

Where Does This Go from Here?

Once you have understood this, please go ahead and explore it further.

Many adjacencies, corollaries, and derivatives are associated with the fundamentals of Surveillance Capitalism. Take a moment to consider the interface between the Surveillance Capitalism business model and the Censorship-Industrial Complex business. Or Surveillance Capitalism and Politics – with Cambridge Analytica Ltd. being an early embodiment. Or Surveillance Capitalism and the Biodefense-Industrial Complex business. Or Surveillance Capitalism and Transhumanism. Or a thousand others.

All of these economic models and domains recognize no boundaries. All exist in a sort of Wild West, actively rejecting and deflecting all legal and ethical constraints on economic, political, and medical activities. These are treated as unacceptable boundary conditions to advancing “innovation,” market domination, and capital accumulation. Ethical, moral, religious, and legal constraints must be disregarded or circumvented in the name of progress and profit.

Overriding all of this is what is essentially an emerging suite of marketing technologies consisting of military-grade psychological warfare tactics and strategies; PsyWar. Surveillance Capitalism provides the economic model, logic, extracted data, and value that fuel and guide modern psychological warfare deployment.

I am deeply troubled by the many observable interactions between modern psychological warfare technologies, tactics, and strategies, the observations and predictions of Hannah Arendt and Mattias Desmet concerning the psychology of totalitarianism, and Surveillance Capitalism.

I fear the further development of feedback loops between these fundamental social, political, and economic forces. I sense that these feedback loops will enable and drive human society toward the dark collectivist and globalist transhuman future with which the World Economic Forum seems so enthralled.

By deploying PsyWar capabilities on top of these other business models, which are being expanded and enhanced by the predictive “futures” products of Surveillance Capitalism, humanity will be driven towards a new surrealist reality in which all feelings, beliefs, morality, and behavior will be a synthesized product in which wealth accumulation will become the exclusive right of a small controlling elite who no longer recognize the existence of their own souls, but rather exist at the interface of man and machine, and seek to birth a new species of man/machine fusion. Turning and turning in a widening gyre, disassociated from the falconer. Intentionally and unthinkingly giving rise to a slouching rough beast.

In the short term, I am also deeply troubled by the challenge posed by all of this to my faith in free market capitalism and my fascination with the logic of the Austrian School of Economics and its modern “Anarcho-capitalist” embodiment. I worry that when capitalist absolutism becomes decoupled from fundamental Judeo-Christian ethics, and everything becomes commodified all the time, then all remaining human souls become at risk of being crushed into dust under a globalist techno totalitarian millstone.

About the Author

Robert W. Malone is a physician and biochemist. His work focuses on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research. You can find him at Substack and Gettr.