The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Author: Shoshana Zuboff

Essay starts with a definition

Def: [Surveillance Capitalism]

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales; [...] 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth an twentieth.

of 8 definitions.

After reading point 5 I felt really sad. Just look how we're doing with our planet, then think if that's what you want for your children also, been rotten and vacuum inside.

Surveillance Capitalism wikipedia

Identifying the phenomena is the first step to face it, putting into words the problem, this description will help us to take action. Naming the unprecedented.

Reviews

by reading this reviews you will get better informed

The Guardian - We are the pawns

ZDnet - Data, privacy and the threat to democracy

The Intercept - “A Fundamentally Illegitimate Choice”

WSJ review - Review: The New Big Brother

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff) quotes

bold is mine (XoseM)

Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the “hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends. We are not surveillance capitalism’s “customers.” Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.

Technology as a tool

That surveillance capitalism is a logic in action and not a technology is a vital point because surveillance capitalists want us to think that their practices are inevitable expressions of the technologies they employ.

don't blame internet, look at capitalism.

We have never seen this [threat] before, we have problems to identify its nature

who struggled to name the unprecedented in their time as they faced the comprehension-defying phenomena of totalitarianism and labored to grasp their trail of consequence for the prospects of humanity.

Get Off Twitter and all commercial surveillance services

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Photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash

trucks are Social Media mining our soul, extracting our essence as human beings.