AI, Surveillance & Human Agency
How algorithms shape behavior — and how to keep your autonomy
A practical-literacy track on recommendation systems, persuasion loops, surveillance models, and algorithmic governance. It explains influence mechanisms in concrete terms and provides digital self-defense habits — so AI is used as a tool, not obeyed as an authority.
How the Feed Shapes You
Recommendation systems, persuasion loops, and the attention economy
Practical Digital Self-Defense
Concrete habits to reclaim attention and privacy
Reclaiming Your Attention
How compulsion is engineered — and how to disarm it
The Surveillance Stack
From data harvest to behavioral control — the documented machine
How the Recommendation Feed Shapes You
Engagement-optimized feeds personalize reality, reward outrage, and quietly narrow what you see.
Scholarly SynthesisThe Surveillance Business Model
Why 'free' platforms extract behavioral data — and how prediction products are sold.
Speculative HypothesisUsing AI as a Tool, Not an Authority
Principles for keeping judgment human while still using AI productively.
Scholarly SynthesisThe Attention Economy and Your Dopamine
How products engineer compulsion — variable rewards, infinite scroll, and the war for your focus.
Scholarly SynthesisWhen the Algorithm Is the Authority
How opaque models make consequential decisions — and why 'the math' is not neutral.
Speculative HypothesisDeepfakes and the Crisis of Evidence
When any image, voice, or video can be faked, how do we know what's real?
Wellness EducationPractical Data Privacy Without Paranoia
Realistic habits that meaningfully shrink your data exposure — ranked by effort and payoff.
Historical AnalysisCambridge Analytica: Data as a Weapon
How harvested social data became psychographic targeting — the documented scandal that made surveillance capitalism concrete.
Historical AnalysisSnowden, PRISM & Bulk Collection
The 2013 disclosures that confirmed mass, suspicionless surveillance — and what they did and didn't reveal.
Scholarly SynthesisFacial Recognition & the Biometric Net
How face, gait, and voice became trackable identifiers — Clearview AI, error rates, and the stakes of a body you can't change.
Scholarly SynthesisPredictive Policing & Algorithmic Justice
When models forecast crime and risk, whose past becomes whose future — and the feedback loops that bake in bias.
Scholarly SynthesisSocial Credit & Behavioral Scoring
Scoring citizens by behavior — what China's systems actually are, and the quieter Western equivalents.
Speculative HypothesisThe Alignment Problem & the Paperclip Maximizer
Why making powerful AI do what we actually mean is genuinely hard — the control problem, stated honestly as open.
Speculative HypothesisThe 'Dead Internet' Hypothesis
The claim that much of the web is now bots and AI content — separating the documented kernel from the overstated whole.
Scholarly SynthesisData Colonialism: You Are the Resource
Reframing the data economy as extraction — your life as the raw material refined into prediction products.
The challenge is to analyze powerful systems with evidence rather than panic. Recommendation feeds optimize a measurable proxy (engagement), not your wellbeing; the harms are design choices, not bugs; and the deeper risk may be epistemic — the erosion of a shared, verifiable reality. Keeping AI a tool rather than an authority is the practical through-line.
- 01The attention economy: variable rewards, infinite scroll, and the engineering of compulsion (Postman, Carr, Lanier).
- 02Surveillance business models: how behavioral data becomes prediction products (Zuboff).
- 03Algorithmic accountability: opaque, scaled models in credit, hiring, and justice (O'Neil).
- 04Synthetic media and the 'liar's dividend': what happens to evidence when anything can be faked.
- 05Digital self-defense: realistic, risk-based privacy and attention practices.
How do we preserve verifiable truth in a deepfake era? What governance keeps consequential algorithms contestable? Where is the line between useful personalization and behavioral manipulation?