Today, over 60 per cent of the world’s population is online.1 Over the coming decades, not only is this percentage expected to get bigger, but it is likely that we will continue to spend more of our lives on the internet. It is a scary thought when you consider the forces behind the web today.
Far from the digital utopia progressives envisioned in the 1990s, the internet has since morphed into a tool of capitalist exploitation, subjecting its unwitting users to constant digital surveillance. It has become an arena in which our personal data is extracted for profit, enabling companies to build profiles on users to sell targeted ads. The ad-driven business model, pioneered by Google in the early 2000s, is not only beneficial to companies, but also to states, which are increasingly tapping into this pool of unlimited data
