The Dwellings Under Watch: How Tech Giants Are Turning Public Life Into Private Profit

Rahul Ramya

10th September 2025

People’s Story: Bihar’s Vanishing Land
Ramesh, a farmer in Bihar, holds a Jamabandi land record issued decades ago by due legal process. But when the state digitized land records through outsourced agencies, his plot was missing from the database. Officials told him to “prove” his rights again—at his own cost. The error wasn’t his, yet he must spend months in offices, bribes in hand, to get back what is legally his. For him, digitization isn’t modernization—it’s dispossession.

People’s Story: Kenya’s Excluded Citizens
When Kenya rolled out the Huduma Namba digital ID system, thousands of citizens from marginalized communities found themselves excluded because their parents or grandparents had lacked colonial-era paperwork. Without the ID, they couldn’t access healthcare, schools, or even mobile banking. Technology, meant to unify, deepened exclusion—punishing the poor for historical wrongs.

People’s Story: Chile’s Streets of Resistance
In Santiago, when subway fares rose steeply after “smart” ticketing reforms, thousands of students jumped turnstiles in protest. The government treated them as criminals, but soon the protests swelled into a nationwide uprising against inequality. The spark was digital transport pricing, but the fire revealed a deeper truth: when people feel robbed of dignity by technocratic reforms, revolt becomes their language.

My Dedication

I dedicate this work of understanding to the thinkers and truth-seekers who have given me lenses to see through the fog of inevitablism—Shoshana Zuboff who unmasked surveillance capitalism, Madhumita Murgia who chronicled how artificial intelligence reshapes human dignity, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum who expanded the horizon of justice through capabilities, John Rawls who laid bare the architecture of fairness, and Karl Marx who exposed the anatomy of power and exploitation. To them, and to all those unnamed voices of resistance across slums, villages, and cities who refuse to surrender their agency, I owe the courage of this assertion: that knowledge is not submission to systems, but an act of reclaiming dignity against the tides of disempowerment.

Cities and Beyond: The New Battleground

Cities have always been places where people gather, trade, and build communities. Today, however, the battleground is no longer just cities—it is every kind of dwelling: villages, slums, peri-urban belts, and sprawling metros. Digitization has penetrated everywhere, reaching from smart cities like Toronto or Pune to rural hamlets in Bihar, Kenya, or Indonesia through government apps and social media platforms.

What connects them all is a new logic of governance: surveillance capitalism wrapped in the promise of modernization. The systems claim to solve problems of inefficiency and corruption but often end up creating fresh inequalities, silencing dissent, and shifting power away from people and toward corporations and state elites.

This transformation is sold as “inevitable.” But inevitability is not destiny—it is a political tool. Understanding how it works is the first step to resisting it.

Smart Cities or Watched Settlements?

Take Cisco. It runs “smart city” projects in over 120 cities worldwide. Through its Cisco Kinetic platform, the company promises safer, more efficient urban life by collecting data from connected devices. On the surface this sounds harmless: traffic managed smoothly, waste collected efficiently, energy saved intelligently.

But the deeper reality is that data itself becomes the raw material. When Cisco collects information about how people move, consume, or behave, it can sell or leverage this data for private profit. What was once the everyday rhythm of public life now becomes a marketplace.

Google’s Sidewalk Labs shows the model more clearly.

In New York, it installed free Wi-Fi kiosks, which doubled as “fountains of data.”
It partnered with the US Department of Transportation to launch Flow, a system that predicts and manages how people move through traffic and transit. Cities had to feed in real-time parking and transport data, ceding a degree of control.

Here, the mechanism of extraction becomes reality business. Algorithms don’t just describe the city—they govern it. Instead of elected councils debating planning rules, sensors and codes decide. A nightclub may be approved not because the community wants it, but because an algorithm shows noise will stay “within limits.” Parking is priced not for public fairness but for corporate efficiency.

The shift is subtle but profound: the pulse of human choice is replaced by the hum of code.

Toronto’s Google City Dream and the Myth of Inevitability

In 2017, Toronto became the site of Google’s first big “city of the future.” Alphabet (Google’s parent company) partnered with the Canadian government to build a neighborhood powered by sensors and algorithms. To executives, this was a dream come true: a city they could design and control.

They described it as inevitable progress—who could possibly oppose cleaner streets, smart waste bins, or responsive traffic lights?

But inevitability is a myth. Just as John Steinbeck described banks in The Grapes of Wrath as unstoppable “monsters,” tech giants today present their systems as natural forces beyond our control.

The truth is simpler: these are political and economic choices—by companies, embraced by governments, and too often hidden from citizens.

Mechanisms of Extraction

To many citizens, digitization is sold as efficiency. Stand in one line instead of five. Get welfare directly in your bank account. Reduce paperwork. Yet behind the veil of efficiency lies a mechanism of extraction. The process follows a familiar pattern. First, governments insert digital tools into governance and public service delivery, often contracting private firms for implementation. Second, responsibility shifts. Errors or exclusions that once would have been blamed on government clerks are now pushed onto citizens: if your fingerprint does not match, it is your fault. If your record is wrong, you must fix it. Third, the data produced becomes a continuous source of value—harvested by corporations for profit and by states for control.

In this way, everyday life itself becomes a mine. A farmer’s land certificate, a widow’s pension record, a worker’s attendance log—all become resources to be processed, sold, and managed. What is presented as modernization is in fact the conversion of society into a permanent resource field for those who control digital infrastructure.

The Role of Governments

Governments are not neutral players in this transformation. They actively promote digitization of services and governance, often justifying it as modernization, efficiency, or transparency. But in practice, this shift frequently undermines democratic participation. Where citizens once had the option to challenge irregularities by petitioning clerks or appealing to local officials, they now face opaque digital systems in which decisions are automated and errors untraceable.

In India, when Aadhaar-linked ration cards fail to authenticate, families are told to update their biometrics rather than question the exclusion itself. In Mexico, street vendors have been punished by digital tax systems that demand online compliance beyond their literacy. In Sri Lanka, welfare distribution through digital platforms excluded thousands of elderly citizens who lacked smartphones. Each case reveals the same truth: governments present digitization as a people-friendly reform but quietly use it as a means to shift accountability, reduce political contestation, and strengthen control.

Even more troubling is the way officials benefit privately. By awarding lucrative contracts to technology firms, many create opportunities for rent-seeking. Contractors earn profits, officials secure kickbacks, and citizens are left to navigate costly errors. Thus, digitization often produces not transparency but a new architecture of corruption.

Government as Gatekeeper—and Rent-Seeker

Here lies the crucial twist. Governments are not passive spectators—they are gatekeepers and active participants. In theory, digitization in governance can be motivated by good intentions: modernization, transparency, efficiency. But in practice, incentives are mixed.

Some state actors genuinely see digitization as progress. Others view it as a source of rent-seeking: awarding contracts for profit-sharing, receiving private rewards from corporations, or outsourcing responsibilities without accountability.

This is visible across the world:

In India, government agencies outsourced land record digitization to private contractors. Instead of empowering citizens, it created chaos. In Bihar, thousands of landowners found their legal “jamabandi” records (hard copies created lawfully over decades) missing from digital systems. Citizens who had done everything right were suddenly forced to “prove” their rights again—fueling corruption as middlemen thrived. The government bore no responsibility; the burden was shifted onto the citizen.
In Kenya, the Huduma Namba project digitized citizen identities but excluded thousands due to mismatched records—forcing them into bureaucratic limbo.
In Mexico, digital platforms for welfare disbursement cut leakages but also cut out protest: people had no officials to face when funds vanished or errors occurred.

In all cases, people’s democratic power to challenge irregularities shrinks when decisions are buried inside digital codes.

Karl Polanyi warned in The Great Transformation that when social processes are disembedded from human oversight and handed to markets (or here, to algorithms), society experiences deep dislocation. His “double movement” predicts that people will eventually fight back to reclaim dignity.

Expansion into Rural and Slum Spaces

Digitization is no longer limited to glass towers or high-tech corridors. It has penetrated rural areas and slums, often through smartphones and social media apps.

Governments push digital welfare platforms, biometric IDs, online grievance systems, and mobile-based farming advisories. Corporations push apps for payments, credit, or social networking.

While these appear empowering, the ground reality is different:

Digital literacy is shockingly low. In many rural parts of India, Africa, and Southeast Asia, people can operate WhatsApp or TikTok but cannot navigate official apps for welfare or dispute redressal. This gap makes them vulnerable to fraud, exclusion, and manipulation.
The illusion of inclusion hides new inequalities. A farmer denied a subsidy because of a fingerprint mismatch has no one to argue with; the system’s “infallibility” silences him.
In slums, “smart” surveillance cameras are installed in the name of safety, but they often lead to over-policing of the poor rather than real improvements in living standards.

Digitization, in this sense, is not neutral—it is a reshaping of power relations, often deepening existing inequalities.

Disempowerment and the Fall from Dignity

When power shifts from elected bodies and face-to-face officials to technocratic establishments, people feel not only disempowered but also disemboweled of dignity. Bureaucratic arrogance is bad enough; algorithmic arrogance is worse because it denies even the possibility of dialogue.

A person stripped of dignity by opaque systems becomes dissatisfied, disgruntled, and prone to revolt. And when inequalities of class, caste, gender, and geography intersect with such disempowerment, the social fabric becomes explosive.

The chaos in Bihar’s digitized land records is not just a technical glitch—it is a moral crisis. Citizens who followed due legal process for generations are told to “prove” their rights again, while corrupt middlemen flourish. This corrodes trust not just in government but in democracy itself.

Hannah Arendt reminds us that the essence of politics is the ability to appear, speak, and act in public. When systems deny this, people are reduced to data points, robbed of their political being.

From Democracy to Authoritarian Drift

Rent-seeking governments that outsource power to corporations don’t just hollow democracy—they tilt it toward authoritarianism.

This is visible across the globe:

In the Philippines, digitized surveillance under Duterte blurred into authoritarian control.
In South Korea, despite its tech-driven prosperity, scandals over digital contracts fueled massive protests demanding accountability.
Sri Lanka’s economic crisis showed how digital modernization projects, riddled with corruption, deepened people’s anger against elites.
Bangladesh aggressively digitized public services, but critics argue it has also helped consolidate authoritarian power.
In France and Mexico, digital reforms sparked social movements demanding that human dignity not be sacrificed at the altar of efficiency.
Nepal too has witnessed tensions between promises of digital transparency and realities of exclusion.

Each case shows how rent-seeking through digitization erodes democratic checks and lays the ground for authoritarian drift.

Counterarguments—and Responses

Proponents argue digitization is a blessing:

It reduces corruption by cutting out middlemen.
It saves time and brings efficiency.
It makes services accessible even in remote areas.

All of this is partly true. But the counter-arguments are equally strong:

Efficiency without accountability becomes tyranny. A “fast” system that denies people a chance to challenge errors is not justice.
Cutting out middlemen often creates new digital middlemen. Private contractors, data brokers, and app developers replace old power-brokers.
Access is meaningless without literacy. If citizens cannot understand or use systems fully, inclusion is a façade.

Amartya Sen’s capability approach reminds us that true development is not about formal access but about real freedoms—people’s ability to use systems meaningfully. Martha Nussbaum adds that dignity is central: technology that robs dignity, however efficient, is ethically flawed.

Philosophical Anchors

Shoshana Zuboff calls it surveillance capitalism: the extraction of behavioral surplus from human life. Rawls would argue that systems designed without considering the “least advantaged” are unjust. Marx would see in this digitization a fresh mode of capitalist accumulation, cloaked in progress. Arendt would insist that robbing people of spaces to appear and contest hollows democracy itself.

Eastern traditions remind us that governance without dialogue is adharma (unjust order). The Buddhist middle path urges balance between efficiency and compassion. Ancient Greek thinkers warned against technē without ethos.

Together, these traditions converge: technology without accountability dehumanizes.

Conclusion: Whose World Is It?

Digitization promises to solve real-life problems but often hollows the very possibility of problem-solving by silencing dissent, disempowering citizens, and embedding inequality. The issue is not whether technology is good or bad—it is who controls it, for what purpose, and with what accountability.

Cities, villages, and slums alike now stand at a crossroads. Will public life be shaped by democratic debate and human needs? Or will it be run by algorithms and contracts that maximize profit and rent for elites?

Inevitability is a lie. The future is open. People can reclaim dignity, demand accountability, and resist inevitablism—through literacy campaigns, public debates, civil disobedience, and philosophical clarity.

Karl Polanyi’s double movement teaches us that society will not forever tolerate being disembedded. Resistance is not just possible—it is inevitable.

The choice is ours: whether tomorrow’s dwellings—be they cities, villages, or slums—belong to their citizens, or whether they remain marketplaces where our daily lives are bought and sold.

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