Surveillance Capitalism and Our Democracy

[the other mike]

Published on Feb 5, 2019
Surveillance capitalism is the foundation of a new economic order. Firms compete on the manufacture of "prediction products" traded in lucrative new "behavioral futures markets."

Surveillance capitalism's proprietary digital architectures -- what Shoshana Zuboff calls "Big Other" -- are designed to capture and control human behavior for competitive advantage in these new markets, as the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification" that favors private market outcomes free of democratic oversight or control.

Acclaimed scholar and author Shoshana Zuboff, Ph.D., Harvard Business School professor emerita speaks on the publication of her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. The event is moderated by Christopher Lydon, radio host of Open Source.

She definitely knows what she's talking about.

 

[the other mike]

'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism

Surveillance capitalism is a human creation. It lives in history, not in technological inevitability. It was pioneered and elaborated through trial and error at Google in much the same way that the Ford Motor Company discovered the new economics of mass production or General Motors discovered the logic of managerial capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.

Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data surplus, and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this surplus.

The company developed new methods of secret surplus capture that could uncover data that users intentionally opted to keep private, as well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not provide. And this surplus would then be analysed for hidden meanings that could predict click-through behaviour. The surplus data became the basis for new predictions markets called targeted advertising.
Shoshana Zuboff
https://www.theguardian.com/technol...surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook#img-3

 

[Aletheia4u]