KARACHI: Delivering a lecture at Bahria University on how digital technologies have been transformed from tools of convenience into instruments of control, former inspector general of police Dr Sanaullah Abbasi warns that “surveillance capitalism”, which he describes as a “new form of market”, poses an existential challenge to human autonomy, democratic governance, and the concept of a self-determined future.

Speaking to participants on the topic ‘The New Leviathan in Digital Disguise: Surveillance Capitalism, Its Mechanisms, Impacts, and the Imperative for Resistance’, Dr Abbasi, who also served as the director general of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), said that surveillance capitalism represented the economic and social reality of the information age. It did not emerge from any “heroic conspiracy”, he added, but from a specific historical moment that allowed a new logic of “accumulation” to take root.

Dr Abbasi said that the system turned human experience into an open resource to be harvested and behaviour into a commodity to be sold, enabling a consolidation of knowledge and power unprecedented in human history.

“[The] consequences — the erosion of democracy, manipulation of the mind, intensification of inequality, and the threat to human autonomy — are not collateral effects, but the direct outcomes of its underlying economic imperative,” he said.

Sanaullah Abbasi says ‘surveillance capitalism’ represents the economic, social reality of the information age

While citing a study, he argued that surveillance capitalism was not merely a new business model but a new form of market power that posed an existential threat to human autonomy, democratic governance, and the concept of a self-determined future.

He described it as a mutation of capitalism that unilaterally claimed human experience as free raw material to be translated into behavioural data. This data, he explained, is then processed, owned, and utilised to predict human behaviour at scale, representing an unprecedented form of power.

During the lecture, Dr Abbasi also addressed the psychological and societal harms of the model, including manipulation, addiction, deepening inequality, and algorithmic bias.

The former FIA chief said that the battle for the digital future was already unde­rway. He warned that the path of least resistance led to a world of perfected instrumentarian control, a “digital ghost in the machine” that subtly steered human choices in the service of corporate profit.

He stressed that the alternative lay in a deliberate, collective, and courageous effort to reclaim democratic authority over the digital realm.

That, he said, calls for enacting robust and future-proof legislation, reframing anti-trust principles for the data age, and dev­eloping technological alternatives that prio­ritise human well-being over extraction.

“The challenge,” he emphasised, “is not to reject technology, but to reclaim it for a fut­ure where it serves humanity rather than the other way around”.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2025