Entre a utopia e a distopia: o capitalismo de vigilância e suas consequências na democracia

Abstract

Information technologies have advanced by great strides in just a few decades and have had profound impacts on media vehicles, and on personal, social and political relationships. In addition, they generated a transformation in the dynamics of the international system, as recent technological innovations gradually democratized and made their access more viable, providing actors who had practically no voices to generate repercussions in political terms. The advance has not come without prejudice, as a new method of capital accumulation has been implemented by corporations, which lead these technological innovations. The big companies of capitalism have changed their figure. Currently, large transnational technology companies, also known as big techs, occupy the space of what used to be financial institutions, automobile manufacturers assemblers and oil companies, with a considerable agency in the international system. In exchange for the use of services by users, corporations build a database with their preferences, thus composing the so-called surveillance capitalism. Given these changes, the research intends to analyze, think and unravel, in light of the recent academic debate on the subject, the formation and stabilization of surveillance capitalism and big tech empires through the examples of Google and Facebook, as well as their implications on the institutions of democracy using concrete examples to illustrate these interrelations. The objective is to understand the different effects that companies, as transnational actors have on democracy and its institutions, and how the system of checks and balances reacts to this phenomenon, of having foreign companies impacting the public debate and the information system of the populations. The expectation of this work is to contribute to the, so far, incipient bibliography on the subject and to help in future debates on the interrelationship between democracy and social networks.