#119 - Surveillance Capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff on Behavioral Futures Markets, Collusion between Big Tech and Intelligence, the Weaponization and Commodification of "Metadata"

Come join my Patreon!

https://patreon.com/HemlockPatreon

“Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities, and surveillance capitalism lays its claims to the stuff of human nature for a new commodity invention. Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project. It is obscene to suppose that this harm can be reduced to the obvious fact that users receive no fee for the raw material they supply. That critique is a feat of misdirection that would use a pricing mechanism to institutionalize and therefore legitimate the extraction of human behavior for manufacturing and sale. It ignores the key point that the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us. The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us.”

-Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

-//-

Art Credit Rose Dixon-Campbell:https://www.woroni.com.au/words/male-gaze-as-panopticon/Original YouTube (Dartmouth, 2024):https://youtu.be/afOWUuimwOI?si=dvmLMDBWpaPlGyqq