The Surveillance Economy Is Here. This Is How We Fight Back.

Rejecting surveillance capitalism means insisting, clearly and unapologetically, that markets should serve the people — not the other way around, writes NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Sam Levine.

By Sam Levine, Jacobin

“In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make,” Ida Tarbell wrote in her autobiography. “He can choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics, sound democracy and the common law prescribe, or choose the secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow man.”

The enterprising journalist’s observation was not abstract. It was shaped during her childhood in postbellum Pennsylvania’s Oil Valley, where she saw the rise of a monopoly engorged with the labor of working people.

At home, she witnessed her oil refiner father humiliated by John D. Rockefeller’s South Improvement Company, a clandestine railroad cartel that fixed shipping rates behind closed doors. Yet Tarbell also witnessed something else: collective resistance. Her community dragged these hidden abuses into the light, organizing anti-monopolist meetings, staging boycotts, and petitioning lawmakers to rein in corporate abuse.

More than a century after Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil, a new coterie of oligarchs has emerged. Then, as now, economic control was concentrated in the hands of a narrow billionaire elite wagering that Americans are too fragmented, too exhausted, and too jaded to mount a meaningful challenge. Then, as now, the basic terms of democracy were being tested by private power that recognizes hardly any limits at all.

As a consumer and worker rights attorney who has served in every level of government, I see this test playing out across our economy — most starkly with the advent of surveillance prices and wages, a system where paychecks are set to the lowest a worker is willing to accept, and prices to the highest a consumer is willing to pay.