Research: The User and The Beast

Cookies at War: A Somatic Approach to The Kill Cloud

Joana Moll · Artist & Researcher, ES · Bio

Download Full Research Paper (28 November 2024)

This research is part of a larger project exploring new paradigms for understanding Ad Tech, the Internet's primary business model. The project focuses on how Ad Tech amplifies the military- industrial-security complex's surveillance abilities, subtly merging military and civilian sectors and leading to a silent militarisation of civil society.

The User and the Beast analyses the role of Ad Tech (advertising technology)—the primary business model of the Internet—in expanding the capabilities of the Kill Cloud, reinforcing a co-dependency that silently (yet incisively) blurs the boundaries between the military and the civilian sectors, posing significant threats to democratic processes by benefiting totalitarian modes of operating at a global scale. Joana Moll’s research also explores how the increasing militarisation of digital space leverages the human body to advance the agendas of both capital and the military-industrial-security complex, known as neoliberal militarism.

These ideologies are subtly inscribed in the body through seemingly mundane actions like clicking and scrolling, turning the body into a site of militarisation that enhances data extraction and social control, ultimately perpetuating the ideological and economic objectives of military neoliberalism. Interrupting this logic and reclaiming the body (and bodies) as a space of awareness and resistance is essential—not only to counter the rise of a global surveillance state fueled by the growing entanglements between Ad Tech and the Kill Cloud, but also for understanding what it means to be human in the age of digital militarisation.

Despite being the primary business model of the Internet, the Ad Tech industry is surprisingly unknown to most of its users. In essence, Ad Tech is a term that encompasses a wide range of technologies and strategies used to advertise digitally, and it generates most of the revenues for companies such as Facebook and Google. Although Ad Tech is a highly complex ecosystem, build of an ample spectrum of technical processes, products and companies, its primary resource is user data. Thus, data extraction processes are vital to this industry, consolidating Ad Tech as the world's leading industry in processing and commodifying user data, or in other words, as a major enabler for mass and centralized surveillance. Yet, despite the extraordinary importance of Ad Tech within the global economy, its methods and processes are extremely opaque and thus incredibly difficult to control and regulate.

Joana Moll’s research is part of a larger project whose main goal (or radical gesture) is to create new paradigms to enact and apprehend Ad Tech, so that more democratic and sustainable ways of inhabiting these systems can arise. To achieve this, the project intends to embody an extended map of Ad Tech through a performance. The current map of Ad Tech mostly addresses its techno-economic aspects, but these are also grounded in critical relationships to natural resources, the generation of emotions, and (future) politics. Thus, this project intends to extend this map by including the underlying affective, political and material dimensions of the industry.

The initial research phase of “The User and The Beast” has been developed within RED ACTS, a network promoted by the UOC and Hub d’Art, Ciència i Tecnologia, Hac Te, with the support of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, and in collaboration with CCCB and Hangar.