Back to scheduled sad boy hours from your favorite local writing tool! As surveillance capitalism has expanded over the years, so has the scope of data Google collects.
Biometric data (face, voice), location, private medical data, search terms—if it can be used to identify you, to sell to you, it creates value for Google. It may not seem like it, but a single image can transmit loads of sell-able data: from the activities you enjoy, to your interests; "mood, gaze, clothing, gait, hair, body type, and posture"—Google can use all of this to beef up their behavioral predictions. (Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 252).
A photo of your cat, a group shot from Friendsgiving, the tabs you open while researching a character’s illness or a historical execution method; everything is a potential reservoir of data that advertisers would very much like to own.
But it doesn't stop there 😣
There's also a new type of data on the rise—so-called "emotional analytics"—that collects emotional states down to the micro-level. It isn’t just what you click, but how you feel while you’re doing it. A lingering gaze (whomst among us hasn’t gazed into the void of late); a furrowing of the brow; where your cursor or eye travels on the screen… Advertisers track your real-time emotional state so the algorithm can time ads for when you are most easily influenced (or vulnerable).
Which is kind of a nightmare for anyone whose work involves introspection. Writing is slow and vulnerable. Writing requires sitting with discomfort, ambiguity, obsessions... unpublishable thoughts, all the fun stuff. And on platforms like Google Docs, that process happens inside systems explicitly designed to observe, categorize, and monetize behavior.
For-real dystopian.
Three years ago, a growing sense of fatigue/horror at Tech's general authoritarian lurch—and the need to carve out a space, however small, where human work could exist without being harvested—prompted us to build something better than Google Docs (... yeah, we're getting there.) Our need has only grown stronger. As has the Ellipsus community that's grown up around it (that means you babes! Almost 300,000 of you! 😱)
We could have never predicted how bad it would get out there, or how fast. But we’re incredibly optimistic that an effort to move away from Big Tech into human-first, privacy-focused creative spaces will play a huge part in impeding the tide toward surveillance and authoritarianism online.
(... Anyway, they might have the algos: we've got actual people. 🔥) - the Ellipsus Team xo
