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If you don’t know what I mean when I say “surveillance capitalism” or “people farming”, here’s a quick overview I did for the BBC a little while ago:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/surveillance-capitalism-has-led-us-into-a-dystopia/p06p0tdy
(Where we differ with Shoshana, who coined the former term, is that she sees it as a corruption of capitalism, whereas I see it as the natural evolution of capitalism in the digital network age.)
@aral good overview. And I fully agree with the conclusion that we need to break the cycle by building better and alternative.
Unfortunately the public sector is itself similarly interested in the same toolset and would rather take part of the surveillance cycle rather than strive for better, more ethical path forward.
I have no good answer.
@Luolong Here’s what I think might work/am working on: https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
Amélia Bjórnsdottir/Ursidíno (she, they) @amelia What I mean is that Shoshana believes we can fix capitalism (that surveillance capitalism is a broken form of capitalism). I believe surveillance capitalism is just capitalism working as designed. I don’t believe you can fix it. It’s not broken. (It’s working perfectly for a relative handful of people.) It just happens to be extractive, exploitative, inequitable, and unjust by its very nature.
@aral @amelia Yes, it’s odd to coin a new term for digital surveillance capitalism when companies have been carrying out surveillance on customers for decades. The only thing that’s possibly new is the idea of collecting and surveilling consumers as a company’s sole business model. Generally in the past that was an in-house function.
@aral a different approach that also has a lot of merit imo, is #technofeudalism, where this whole situation is not viewed as a continuation of capitalism (or corruption of capitalism), but as a new system altogether, that topples capitalism.
@Adrian It’s definitely feudalistic in nature.
@aral
Not sure the argument is factual. Don't regulatory frameworks like the EU's GDPR, or California's CCPA, or the like in other places, prevent the hypothetical refrigerator manufacturer (or any proxy data processor like Google or Facebook) from sharing your personal identifiable information with the hypothetical insurance company?
@jonathan Depends on jurisdiction, enforcement, and terms and conditions. And, hey, all else fails, we have a multi-billion dollar anonymised ;) ;) ;) data industry.
@aral In my research I link it to attention extraction, as in extractive industries. "Attention" (and engagement) being the finite resource.
@aral I'm "natural evolution" hypothesis, very obvious incentive structure.