By Hilal Yazan, Organiser in Ealing

Following on from a recent blog on taking on corporate power, I wanted to share some of my reflections based on books I’ve read recently. I’ve been reflecting a lot on the world as it is, and I think corporate power is where we need to place our focus as community organisers. 

It came out some years ago, so some of the things in ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by Shoshana Zuboff shouldn’t be so alarming to us now. Yet the message of the book shook me to my core, despite my natural anti-tech tendencies. Corporations, especially Google and Meta, are harvesting every single thing we do on the internet to build up a complete picture of us where they can predict and, crucially, shape, our behaviour and then selling that behavioural data (behavioural surplus) onto other companies. Our actions become ‘raw material’ for them. 

You might ask, why does this matter? Corporations’ interest in knowing everything there is to know about us and our actions doesn’t just stop at knowing this and selling this data on. As we have already seen with more innocent seeming examples like Pokemon Go, and much scarier examples like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, behavioural surplus is already being used not only to predict but to shape our existence in this world. We are all talking about the rise of the far right and how we respond to that challenge. Multiple studies have shown that social media such as YouTube’s algorithms are pushing people towards more extreme content over time. 

In ‘Stolen Focus’, Johann Hari talks about the attacks on our attention coming from many directions, not just the big corporations shaping our experience of the internet. His key message is a call to arms, because being unable to focus is not just an individual issue with an individual solution like limiting one’s phone use. We’re not just losing our ability to read a book, or write something down, we are also losing our capacity for critical reflection and the deeper thinking that comes from slowing down. This is a collective problem because it also takes away our ability to meaningfully connect to others around us. And when we lose our ability to connect, we lose the ability as humanity to be able to organise around the challenges of our time: a burning planet, loss of jobs, housing crisis to name a few. And unless we have a way of connecting with people, they will be increasingly drawn towards narratives where the blame for the crises is laid at the wrong door. For me, AI is the logical conclusion of a technological system with a model built on influencing your behaviour: what better way to do this than to get you to outsource your ability to think? 

In so many ways we don’t even question people’s distracted attention – I’m certainly guilty of going on my phone in the middle of a conversation and I see it at work and outside of work all the time too. It may feel minor, like it doesn’t make a difference, but long term it contributes to the sense of overwhelm not conducive to the clarity of thinking and decisiveness of leadership we need to have any chance to take on corporate power. 

Of course, being in a difficult situation like being jobless or without status or in temporary accommodation or a mouldy flat can itself wreak havoc on your attention (I’ve been there), leaving no time to think about collective, systemic change, but also making it easier for you to be drawn to narratives where the solution is simple(r). 

This is why our method for broad-based community organising is more important than ever. Whilst big tech drags people into a more-extreme digital world and corporations’ attack on our living standards drains our focus, building face-to-face relationships is the slow but potent antidote for tackling an increasingly polarised world. How I’m thinking of this in my own organising is seeing the relational meeting (121 or house meeting) as an opportunity to reground people and build their sense of agency to make change in the physical world. 

As an example, a teacher was telling me recently how young people are increasingly avoiding situations where they could risk even minor embarrassment or do something challenging because they do not want to ‘lose aura’ (lose cool points) – a consequence of living in a world where anything you do could be recorded and mocked by others. At the school, they are doing a lot of work to draw young people back into the real world through running lots of clubs to give them real life experiences. 

Jake* a young person I met at a college recently who has gotten involved in our campaign for better job opportunities has found his voice through this work – being in a room with others who want to make change, discussing what the group can do together. He is a student rep and expressed his frustration that he had been made to apply to be student rep online: ‘we should be together in person so that we have to talk to each other and everyone can see who is most passionate’. He is now working to build relationships with his peers to campaign for jobs for young people. So through community organising, through connecting with others in meetings and 121s, young people and people of all ages are having the opportunity for a collective regrounding based on their current experience of the world and the chance to hear how others around them are experiencing things too.

What I am saying is in many ways obvious, but the reason I feel the need to say it is that I worry if we do not organise with our eyes open to how big tech is shaping our world, our power analysis is massively incomplete. As always, it’s action that gives me hope, and the fact that we are still winning some fights gives me the hope that we will be able to build the power we need to fight possibly the biggest fight of our lives, as Zuboff says, for ‘the fight for a human future’.  

Recommended reading:

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff
• Stolen Focus, Johann Hari