A Surveillance State Built on Maternal Love that Feeds Surveillance Capitalism

"Digital connection is now a means to others' commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx's old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human's experience." (pg 9)

What Are We Even Talking About? That Thing We Call The Parasite

What Is The Network?

The Parasite: A Venereal Disease that Feeds off Love

Yes, I think this uses the material better, and your ideas are both interesting and arrestingly presented. I think a reader who hadn't attended our park hours conversations might have trouble putting the pieces of this together, however. A structure that tied your point about maternal care and the anxieties the parasite relieves to the larger issues in a unified way would give the essay the impact it wants for a reader who didn't sit through the development phase.

[Second Draft]

What Are We Even Talking About? That Thing We Call The Parasite

1. Introduction

My first paper aims to conceptualize what Professor Moglen means when he says “the parasite.” The first draft of this paper improperly described the parasite as the totality of the network. This view of the parasite privileges the way we feel about the parasite versus what it is. What the first draft of my paper illustrated was that I did not even understand what the parasite is. I will use my personal experience to parse out what this thing is that we call “the parasite” and how it operates off human fear due to its need for human attention.

2. What Is The Network?

The Network is an organism made up of two types of cells, or fundamental structures, known as pipes and switches. Pipes physically carry signals (or packets of data), photons, and neurons between switches around the network. Switches, think of diamonds, determine which signals go to which network, to which pipes, and with what rules. This nervous system was meant to be flexible enough to allow everyone to learn whatever they want, wherever they want, regardless of ability to pay or government restrictions; it was meant to be a tool of knowledge.

3. The Parasite: A Venereal Disease that Feeds off Love

What, then, is this thing that we keep referring to as The Parasite? The parasite is not the entire nerve system of the Internet but rather some software meant or hacked to work in ways that undermine human freedom. This network has memory. This memory is a log of the addresses data is coming and going to. The Parasite consists of software like Facebook that collects this data and sells it to government agencies. This behavior turned a tool of knowledge into a surveillance tool.

The organs of this parasite are sites such as Facebook, X, and Instagram. As Professor Moglen explains, “those organs behave in a simple fashion. They metabolize human attention. . . . and they emit pheromones that stimulate more attention. This parasite has changed the human body and mind because it has altered how people relate, communicate, and behave toward each other. Before the Parasite, “[t]he nature of human contact was very different.”. Like true addicts, we have agreed to sell ourselves for our continuous fix of stimulus and response. However, we fail to see that “each one of those interactions makes a link for the machine, correlates stimulus and response. And there are the software organisms, organs of a larger thing, collecting, metabolizing that attention, and stimulating the production of more attention, which is called “engagement” in the political economy of now. ”

Even though the parasite metabolizes human attention, it is imperative to understand that it capitalizes off human fear. Applications like Tinder and Bumble help us fight against the fear of being alone; applications like X and Instagram also do this to an extent. Carrying a phone everywhere helps fight against the fear of getting lost or even kidnapped. Tracking devices and applications becomes reasonable to a mother who has had one of her children almost snatched off her arms. The parasite is then a venereal disease that feeds off human love and fear.

4. A Surveillance State Built on Maternal Love

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a momma’s girl through and through. My mother left behind her other children and a Ph.D. in chemistry to clean corporate bathrooms in downtown Brooklyn for the opportunity to give me a better life. When she could no longer work cleaning, she did whatever job she could find: construction, cleaning houses, nannying, etc. She has sacrificed so much that it is hard for me to say no to her. My mother has a lot of anxiety due to various traumatic experiences. When my brother, Edwin, was only a couple of months old, a woman tried to snatch my mother from my mother's arms. She once had to jump out of a moving cab when she noticed the driver driving past our house and told her to “not worry about it.” To top it all off, she is aware of the fact that I am a rape survivor. All these experiences have created a need to know my whereabouts -- this is where applications like Life360 come in to soothe that fear. Life360 allows my mother to know where I am at all times. It tells her when I get on and off a car, how long the ride was, how fast it went, and the exact trajectory. It even notifies her when my battery is low. My mother’s love has enabled companies like Life360 to create an actual surveillance state. What is parasitic is that life360 “is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it." Companies can keep poking at mother’s fears to justify making money off our data. Life360’s CEO noted,

" We see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core Life360 services free for the majority of our users, including features that have improved driver safety and saved numerous lives.”

The parasite did not develop my mother’s fears, but this fear is the problem the parasite promises to fix in exchange for human attention/data.

[I refiled this in the wiki as your FirstEssay, which it is, and have left its content unmodified until we meet to discuss it on Friday.]

The Parasite embodied: The Quiet-not-so body of The Network

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-- AllysonChavez - 30 Oct 2023

-- AllysonChavez - 30 Oct 2023

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The Parasite embodied: The Quiet-not-so body of The Network

The network, which we view as The internet, is alive. As Professor Moglen noted in class, Mathematician Claude Shannon, known as the pioneer of information theory, was asked ‘Can machines think?“ He replied, “Yes. I compute so... I am a machine, and you are a machine, and you can think, can’t you?” We must regard the parasite as an entity, an agent, or, in the words of Professor Jane Bennet, an actant created by software. The software structure that makes up what we know as “the internet” is better understood as an organism. Professor Moglen describes this organism as a parasitic one, naming it “The Parasite.” This organism is parasitic because it lives off human attention in exchange for making our lives “better.” Why, then, are we not scared or freaked out by this organism that exists around us the same way electricity does? I believe that is because we cannot see it. When humans cannot see a tangible body, it becomes harder to comprehend the power this thing has on human behavior. One way to overcome this human blindness, or “double consciousness,” is by adopting a definition of matter that allows something like electricity to be an actant rather than an object. We must detach materiality from the idea of passive and mechanical substances. There is nothing passive about the parasite. Here, I borrow the term “Vibrant matter” coined by Professor Jane Bennet. Vital materialism that sees matter as vibrant could allow us to see The Parasite finally. The vital materialism of vibrant matters recognizes the liveliness of things humans deem unalive. Crystals are an example of how Inorganic matter is capable of self-organization. In the case of electricity, “or the stream of vital materialities called electrons, is always on the move, going somewhere, though where this will be is not entirely predictable. Electricity sometimes goes where we send it, and sometimes it chooses its path on the spot, in response to the other bodies it encounters and the surprising opportunities for actions and interactions they afford.” ( Bennett, Jane, 1957- author. Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.) By choosing, I mean when electricity selects the path of least resistance. How do these electrons know? By thinking of electricity as made up of vibrant matter, we can see that these electrons carry knowledge. Choosing the path of least resistance requires electrons to make a choice, and it is the knowledge that is inherent in their body that informs that choice.

Looking at the unalive thing we see as the internet as made up of vibrant, lively matter, we begin to uncover the parasite's body. The organs of this parasite are sites such as Facebook, X, and Instagram. As Professor Moglen explains, “Those organs behave in a simple fashion. They metabolize human attention. . . . and they emit pheromones that stimulate more attention. And so the parasite . . .you’re aware of the fact that it begins to change the structure and function of the human body and mind.” This parasite has changed the human body and mind because it has altered how people relate, communicate, and behave toward each other. Before the Parasite, “[t]he nature of human contact was very different.” Websites like Facebook, X, and Instagram create a false sense of availability -- the person who has Instagram, Facebook, or X must meet the expectation of instantly responding. If the person doesn’t react to the stimulus delivered by the parasite, there are social consequences. People will think that you do not care about them, that they are not necessary. This backlash is present because the parasite has made us addicted to the constant stimulus of attention, thus securing its survival through our fear and inability to be alone. Like true addicts, we have agreed to sell ourselves for our continuous fix of stimulus and response. However, we fail to see that “each one of those interactions makes a link for the machine, correlates stimulus and response. And there’s the software organisms, organs of a larger thing, collecting, metabolizing that attention, and stimulating the production of more attention, which is called “engagement” in the political economy of now. “

The parasite has changed how we relate to other bodies by making itself the necessary connection conduit. We, therefore, “ are more capable or at any rate more determined to interact than any human being that you know. . . Trillions of times a day across the human race, reinforcing the parasite’s understanding of how to gain human attention. . . Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, remembered forever, nothing lost or stolen or destroyed, every byte all of it there in the parasite’s memory.” Our dependence on stimuli means that we live within the biological radius of the Parasite because it cannot sustain itself without metabolizing human attention. It makes us believe that through it we are closer to other humans as ever better. In reality, this “connectedness” requires my physical body to be distant from other bodies to be nearer. The parasite stands, at all times, between you and anyone who you direct message on Instagram.

A concept of vibrant matter allows us to see that the internet is a parasite, as real as protozoa, helminths, and ectoparasites. This Parasite is a living organism surrounding you, watching you, metabolizing all at once. The fact that this parasite is not embodied in a way Western dualism of organic(alive)/inorganic matter(nonalive) can comprehend does not mean that the parasite is not alive.