6 - Surveillance Capitalism and Dataization among Religious Organizations in Singapore

Summary

Introduction

A religious orientation can be broadly defined as a mode of thinking in relation to religion. According to Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge which stipulates that ideas need to be understood within a given socio-historical context, a religious orientation can be more specifically defined as a socio-historically conditioned mode of thinking of a given community or group of people. Religious orientations do not function in a vacuum and can be affected by the political and economic order which governs a given society or community, or the social positioning, roles, functions, and milieus of the group or community in question. For example, the religious orientation(s) of Muslims in Singapore and Malaysia have been affected by feudalism, colonial capitalism, and neoliberal capitalism.

However, change constantly occurs, and the forces affecting religious orientations today may differ. When Karl Marx expounded his critique of capitalism, he studied the scientific and technological advances of his time—steam engines and machines—which are considered rudimentary by today’s standards. Instead, today, society is moving towards a new form of capitalism whereby technological and scientific advances have necessitated that artificial intelligence, automation, and bio-technological inventions dominate. As such, we are moving towards a form of capitalism that leverages data as a product, tool, and currency to fuel profits and give advantages to organizations and individuals.

This new form of political economy is called surveillance capitalism, which can be defined as a “new form of information capitalism which aims to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to produce revenue and market control” (Zuboff 2015). It has been further characterized as “the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data” which are then “computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioural futures markets” (Laidler 2019). Companies like Meta, Google, Twitter, TikTok, and other technological giants and even smaller players are the surveillance capitalists in this new political economy. Governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are also involved in using surveillance capabilities developed in the commercial sector even though they might not reap profits from these capabilities (Faris 2022).