In the film CTRL, by Vikramaditya Motwane, to erase her boyfriend Joe’s memories from digital space, Nella downloads an app called the ‘CTRL,’ run by Mantra Unlimited. Her five-year-long relationship with Joe, along with a channel, NJOY, dedicated to capturing their relationship, left an extensive digital footprint.
The CTRL app promises Nella a fresh start, a life not bound by her past, a life in which she has the freedom to lead and is independent. Except, she is not.
Now, Nella is constantly controlled by the flirty AI assistant, Allen, about her meetings, schedules, and the videos to post online for increased viewership. Nella follows the instructions, and starts making good economic returns out of this new relationship with her AI Assistant. CTRL, an incredibly gripping dystopic film of recent times, mirrors and subtly warns of the adverse effects of surveillance capitalism, as it has been called by Soshana Zuboff of Harvard University.
Nella is extremely disappointed with the negative image she garnered in the digital world due to her dramatic breakup, which was captured on a video that went viral. In exhibiting how Nella’s real life is indeed just the digital life, CTRL perfectly reflects the integration of digital and physical spatiality in today’s world.
We live in times when someone’s absence from digital spaces can warrant the relegation of their importance in the real, physical world. The digital footprint of actors, academics, journalists, and bureaucrats is as essential as it is to be present and contribute in the real world. Further, integrating digital and physical spaces becomes complete as our gadgets monitor our everyday activities.
On the face of it, The applications in our digital devices seem genuinely concerned for our health and ensure we don’t miss our meetings, just like Nella’s AI assistant in the film helps her get back on her feet after a bad breakup. The applications we install don’t seek to rehabilitate or coerce us to follow a particular ideology.
In fact, like Nella, we voluntarily feed the information in fitness or reminder apps, which later dictate our movements through multiple notifications. Today’s economy runs on the information we give, search, and display on social media. Sharing our personal information is crucial to help the creators of applications improve the service and product quality.
But then, not all the information we provide is used for our improvement. Some of it is used to predict behaviours and provide personalised advertisements based on one’s search history. This very harmless process of prediction was the forte of Google, but more companies like Amazon, Meta, and Apple joined the league. The roots of this prediction-knowledge-hungry technology lie in the unsuccessful attempts to make war-time technology and the subsequent development of cybernetics by Nobert Weiner.
Scientists drew arbitrary equivalences between humans and machines during the Second World War. They made technology that traces the behavioural patterns to predict a man’s future course of action. This idea was later capitalised to increase revenue through targeted advertising.
CTRL, however, shows something beyond mere advertising: it displays behavioural modification. Such instances can be witnessed in the way Nella gets hyper-dependent on her AI, which dictates every step of hers. This rather dystopic vision is partly already real. For instance, the Pokemon Go application visibly demonstrated behaviour modification to the entire world as the players were herded to eat, drink, and buy from places where the application creators wanted them to.
Giving access to control of our lives willingly and becoming so dependent on technology that we also modify our behaviour according to AI-generated suggestions is already underway in our everyday lives.
Social media app algorithms exposing us to a world of garments, jewellery, and new appliances, which may be remotely based on your search history and then direct us to purchase or subscribe is one such instantiation of behaviour modification.
A rather personal love-and-breakup story soon turns into a thriller when Nella’s AI begins to read and reply to the messages and browse through her device whenever she is away. A series of events leads to the death of a character, her realisation that Mantra Unlimited is responsible for his death, and her eventual arrest and release. The erasure of the personal and public sphere and the complete capture of personal for making gains by big companies, shown in the film, is a horrifying reality already.
By willingly giving away our personal information, we are the fuel or the raw material that runs this stage of capitalism. In the times of Industrial Capitalism, humans were labour. In an interesting turn of events, human experiences and their personal life on digital platforms are the source that keeps this stage of capitalism running.
With the power to now modify behaviours, just as the film reflects, the politics remain at the fringes. The big capitalists slowly empty the political content of the public, instead luring them towards the products. It then creates a complex web: our willing dependence on digital media, where our digital footprint decides our fate in the real world; modifying our behaviour by big capitalists to fill their pockets; and slowly getting depoliticised, making us ever more vulnerable to the capitalist giants.
By laying bare these inner logics of surveillance capitalism, the movie directs us to confront the difficult question: how to fight this stage of capitalism?
Providing no answers, the movie instead ends on a grim note. In a scene after Nella’s release from prison, working at her father’s bakery in Delhi, Nella still desperately hopes for comments and likes on the cake pictures she posts on social media. Surveillance capitalism does not embody the 20th-century Big Brother syndrome you want to escape.
Orwellian Big Brother is about a totalitarian political system where every move by its citizens is monitored. Surveillance capitalism is a step ahead in even modifying the behaviour to integrate yourself into the market economy willingly.
One is induced to participate in the economy, not threatened to. This becomes extremely clear in the movie when, after Nella’s release from jail, she re-installs the CTRL app that has now fashioned itself to cater to the very mental health needs that it destroyed in the first place. CTRL, an excellent dystopic film of recent times, warns of our present bleeding into a future of voluntary servitude.
Vipanchika Sahasri Bhagyanagar is a history PhD student at Purdue University, West Lafayette.
