Reclaiming Media: Answering Surveillance Capitalists with Care-Based Democracy

ABSTRACTThis project explores the political economy, logic, strategies, agents, values, and ethical implications of this latest iteration of modern capitalism, and it seeks to delineate what surveillance capitalism is and what its consequences are for human dignity and worth. Using technologies of which they are ignorant, surveillance capitalists interfere with our ability to become ourselves individually and collectively. Without consent, they invade privacy, impede moral autonomy, harm democracy, and muddle care. Surveillance capitalists also violate a number of foundational ethical principles, failing the standards of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle. I sketch out a broad alternative to surveillance capitalism, one where our media systems are built on decentered understandings of a care-based democracy. Reinvigorating both the press and collective self-government, the caring digital citizen has less need for surveillance, requiring good faith understanding and the moral autonomy to pursue excellence. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 As a term, surveillance capitalism was used earlier by Foster and McChesney (Citation2014) but with different connotations related to financialization in the digital age.2 With surveillance capitalism, pinpointing the exact individual most susceptible to someone’s individual message.3 Fairclough (Citation2015) referred to this as member resources whereas Hall (Citation1980) described the cultural tools necessary for media decoding.4 Captured in Kant’s categorical imperative: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.5 Thus, avoiding the tendency in the Global North for “the centrality of journalism [to generate] undemocratic journalism scholarship” by favoring narrow versions of journalism and democracy that exist in those very places (Zelizer, Citation2011, p. 469).6 I.e., the real personalization.7 A combination of the radical contingency of history/existence and the endless ingenuity, creativity and dialectical agency of humans.