Conference Agenda

In her seminal article Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? from 2022 Shoshanna Zuboff points to Google’s invention in 2001 of extraction of data from users’ action online as the “illegitimate, illicit and perfectly legal foundation of a new economic order.” As Google turned their search engine into a data extraction machine and other tech-companies soon followed suit, a new double-faced digital economy opened in which commercial data brokering (a 389 billion U.S. dollars in 2024 ) and state surveillance (think Snowden 2012 ) ever since have gone hand-in-hand. The extraction of innocuous data from individual users’ movements on web pages can be cumulated to create large scale models of human behavior to be either sold as information on consumer behavior or used by state intelligence agencies as surveillance of citizen behavior. This is the core of surveillance capitalism. It is based on data extraction as “the original sin of secret theft” . States have avoided to regulate data extraction as it apparently offered a convenience to users who were met with the ease of personalized consumption while boosting the digital economy and providing state intelligence agencies with new and better tools to ensure security in the post 9/11 world of terrorism.

In the presentation I employ a Kantian conception of trust (see O'Neiil 2002, Pedersen 2013, Myskja 2024) to argue that unregulated data extraction has corroded citizens’ possibility for moral trust online . The secret theft of user data makes up a foul stain corrupting the trustworthiness of private tech companies as well as states. The dubious trustworthiness of the providers of the digital infrastructure entails a pragmatic foundation of trust relations in the online realm in which self-interest predominates often in the form of economic advantage. As citizens we are recommended and even forced to undertake important tasks in our lives online and thus required to leave data trails and contribute with “free oil” to run the motor of the digital economy. This leaves – so I will argue in my oral presentation – citizens either in a state of digital resignation (Draper and Turow 2019), more or less frantic attempts at obfuscation of our data trails Brunton and Nissenbaum 2015) or confines us to lazily trust (Pedersen 2023) that the data extracted from our online interactions are handled in ways that are not detrimental to our autonomy.

Litterature:

Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation: A user's guide for privacy and protest. Mit Press, 2015.

Draper, Nora A., and Joseph Turow. "The corporate cultivation of digital resignation." New media & society 21, no. 8 (2019): 1824-1839

Myskja, Bjørn, “Public Trust in Technology – A Moral Obligation?,” Sats. Northern European Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 1 (2024): 11-128

O’Neill, Onora. Autonomy and Trust in Bioethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002

Pedersen, Esther Oluffa. “A Kantian Conception of Trust.” Sats. Northern European Journal of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2013): 147-169

Pedersen, Esther Oluffa. “The Obligation to be Trustworthy and the Ability to Trust: An Investigation into Kant’s Scattered Remarks on Trust”, in Perspectives on Trust in the History of Philosophy, ed. David Collins et al. (2023): 133-156

Zuboff, “Surveillance capitalism or democracy? The death match of institutional orders and the politics of knowledge in our information civilization” Organization Theory (2022): 1-79