PerspectiveCyber Threats Go Beyond Hackers and Scams but to Democracy Itself

Much of the discussion surrounding threats of the information age are focused on digitally enabled foreign influence and interference.

However, analysis of adversaries’ information campaigns as seen in the 2016 presidential elections and Brexit referendum doesn’t capture the full extent of the problem that is the manipulation society already created.

Maryanne Kelton, Sian Troath, and Zac Rogers write in The Interpreter that tech giants haven’t just inadvertently created a new path for information warfare. Rather, they have created the architecture for the persistent manipulation of whole societies – an architecture freely used by both adversaries and the tech corporations themselves. As trust has eroded in democratic societies, state and non-state entities alike have exploited the masses of surplus data to engineer people’s behavior for strategic and financial gain.

Just as market capitalism led to a market society, surveillance capitalism has led to the manipulation society. However, while the market conditioned all aspects of social life, restricting but not abolishing human agency, monetizing people’s personal information to predict and engineer future behavior under the regime of surveillance capitalism has begun to displace human agency altogether. Human are becoming participatory agents of exploitative and persuasive technologies.