The Implicit Politics of SXSW
CMO Network
3/12/2014 @ 4:19PM
The Implicit Politics of SXSW
... The annual gathering of technologists and their corporate patrons bore witness to speeches by today’s two most notable fugitives from the law; Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, both icons for data freedom, who spoke from self-imposed prisons to warn of a dystopian world of government surveillance that their crimes help combat. It was reported that much of Assange’s audience got bored with his unmoderated spiel, and walked out of the auditorium.
This gave attendees some extra time to fire up their smartphones so retailers could watch what they peruse and buy. Algorithms could analyze every word of their emails. Search engines could memorize the sites they looked for or visited, and then tee-up information predetermined to elicit their responses. Services could geolocate their exact positions (and map their movements), and sell it to marketers. Then, for extra measure, attendees could add descriptive personal info to their social feeds, so companies like insurers, banks, and would-be employers could scrape it for later use.
The implicit politics of SXSW — buzzworthy anti-government screeds aside — are that it’s OK for big businesses and their technologies to watch, track, and use information about every bit of consumers’ lives, both willingly provided and unknowingly revealed. The lengths and depths to which this data will be used are a non-issue. The real threat is government intrusion into our lives, since that’s the precious purview of commercial interests ...
You see, technology is inherently democratic, just like content is free and crowds are best at vetting and sharing truth. These and other implicit morals of the digerati in attendance at SXSW inform the political assumption that companies possess a right to surveil their customers because those consumers have agreed to it, whether by active op-in or failure to opt-out. So, for instance, when Disney announced earlier this week a $1 billion plan to track the movements of visitors to its theme parks, it prompted no mention of its political implications, probably because the fine print on the back of its tickets will absolve it of any culpability, should such an accusation arise ...
