The Un-Mattering of People: The Present and Near-Future of Surveillance Capitalism and the Fate of Care in Healthcare

Abstract

The encroachment of surveillance capitalism into healthcare takes place as healthcare becomes increasingly industrialized. The industrialization and datafication of healthcare create a receptive environment for firms that concentrate the means of computation—companies that have grown thanks to technologies of surveillance and remote behavioral actuation. In healthcare, Big Tech finds a massive business opportunity as it becomes fundamental to infrastructure and an unavoidable mediator of medical services. Also, Big Tech can now capture the missing piece in its quest to harvest, control, and use the complete human experience as raw material for their business interests. Central to this encroachment is the misguided notion that the problems of care are problems of information. Big Tech is best situated to address problems of information using powerful data platforms and artificial intelligence systems. Care, a practice by which a human sets out to solve the problematic situation of another human, is replaced by the processing of their data. Care becomes depersonalized, dehumanized, disembodied. Evidently, advances in information technology can make significant contributions to the project of offering careful and kind healthcare to every person. And yet, the realization of this vision would require outlawing Big Tech’s parasitic practices as they commodify humans to advance these firms’ anti-human and anti-democratic project of domination. Abolishing surveillance capitalism and its contribution to corrupting the mission of healthcare may help ensure that information technologies can be harnessed to advance the core mission of healthcare: the care of people.