The mind in chains: How surveillance capitalism fuels a new era of control

AS I WRITE this, I can't help but reflect on the world we lived in three decades ago. A time before smartphones, smart watches, and social media — before the algorithm learned how to think for us. We lived without constant notifications, beeps, and pings.

- Mike Ntsasa (CPRP) Executive at Independent Media.

Our thoughts were not interrupted by endless feeds, and our time wasn't meticulously mined by the apps we now can’t live without. Life then, in hindsight, may have felt slower — perhaps even richer.

Today, we live in a digital vortex. News, entertainment, and social interactions are all just a click away. According to Statista, the average global user spends 151 minutes (over 2.5 hours) per day on social media platforms. In South Africa, this figure is even higher, reaching 3 hours and 44 minutes a day. But with that access comes compromise — a significant one. These platforms may be free in monetary terms, but they extract a far more valuable currency: your data, your time, and ultimately, your mind.

Today, we are in a multi-screen world, engaging all our senses at once. The dinner table now has a third cutlery item — the mobile device. Families eat together but scroll separately. Friends sit next to each other yet socialise through their phones. The collective attention span has shrunk, eroded by the constant fear of missing out (FOMO). It’s become harder to be present in one moment, as the allure of the next notification pulls us away from what — or who — is right in front of us. What we are witnessing is a different kind of capitalism — one that trades in attention rather than labour, and thrives on prediction rather than production. Shoshana Zuboff, in her seminal work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, explains how our personal experiences are now raw material. Every like, share, scroll, or hesitation becomes behavioural data — some of which may improve user experience, but the rest is transformed into “behavioural surplus.” This surplus is fed into systems of machine intelligence to build predictive models of our future behaviour, not just to understand us, but to influence and shape us.

The New Oil Isn’t Data — It’s Behaviour