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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff Review – We Are the Pawns

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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff Review – We Are the Pawns

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The extraction is so grotesque, so creepy, that it is almost impossible to see how anyone who really thinks about it lives with it – and yet we do. There’s something about its opacity, its insidiousness, that makes it hard to think about, just as it’s hard to think about climate change, a process that will inevitably undo society as we currently understand it, yet is experienced by many of us as slightly better weather. Likewise the benefits of faster search results and turn-by-turn directions mask the deeper, destructive predations of what Shoshana Zuboff terms “surveillance capitalism”, a force that is as profoundly undemocratic as it is exploitative, yet remains poorly understood. (via) ^rwhi817440456

The players think they are playing one game – collecting Pokémon – while they are in fact playing an entirely different one, in which the board is invisible but they are the pawns. (via) ^rwhi817440485

It seems people are very willing to give up their private information in return for perceived benefits such as ease of use, navigation and access to friends and information. (via) ^rwhi817440525

the agency we can actively assert over our own futures, which is fundamentally usurped by predictive, data-driven systems (via) ^rwhi817440532

The belief that human behaviour can be perfectly modelled, predicted and controlled entrains as a consequence the collapse of equitable relations between individuals and trust in institutions, and the substitution of algorithmic certainty for any semblance of participatory, democratic society. There is no appeal to collective, contestable decision-making or to responsible business practices under this purported perfection of human behaviour. Surveillance capitalism, run as the code for everyday life, erases both free will and free markets – an outcome as horrifying to confirmed believers in “good old” capitalism, such as Zuboff, as to those of us who weren’t so sure about the original in the first place. (via) ^rwhi817440820

As experience has shown, the world – life itself – is cloudy, contingent and defined by change. As horrifying as the surveillance capitalists’ view of a totally controlled, perfectly articulated and error-free future might be, the inevitable failure of its vision, and the resultant violence – already evident in our fractured worldviews, competing fundamentalisms, weakening of social bonds, and distrust of one another – is perhaps more so. The work begins in demolishing the framework of this world order, but it continues in the establishment and enactment of new and better futures. (via) ^rwhi817440852