In the public interest.
The video below is essential viewing. It is entitled Age of Surveillance Capitalism: “We Thought We Were Searching Google, But Google Was Searching Us”. Author Shoshana Zuboff worked on the book for 7 years. The biggest revelation is to understand we are entering the 21st century with a new domain of social inequality.
Author Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, discusses her new book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”. She points out that capitalism has historically been based on labor as the key economic driver. Now the marketplace is mining data derived from our personal experiences. High tech firms such as Amazon, Facebook and Google then sell it to third parties without regard to our wellbeing. She argues that our democracy is at risk.
“We are told that if we have nothing to hide then we have nothing to fear. The fact is ,what they don’t tell us is and what we are forgetting is that if we have nothing to hide then we are nothing… Because everything about us that makes us our unique identities that gives us…our sense of freedom of will and action and right to our own futures…is our private realm and is intended to be private..and turns us into people who assert moral autonomy, an essential element of a democratic society.”
5G will greatly expand surveillance and privacy threats as our every move will be digitized. (refer link below video)
Note: I do not give permission for my data to be gathered, my private life to be profiled or using data to create predictive products. I am concerned about the asymmetries and inequality in this type of knowledge. In the wrong hands I believe we are looking at totalitarianism full spectrum dominance. This video has confirmed my instincts and inner feeling was correct.
- Facebook is referred to as digital gangsters and there is a concern given the lack of regulation. Some notes have been produced below from the author’s comments.
- Surveillance Capitalism requires a social response to interrupt this economic logic globally. It has been put it on a collision course with democracy. It is not the same as technology. It is about predicting our behaviour and influencing behaviour towards commercial outcomes.
- The digital media; devices, phones, laptops, sensors, facial recognition, smart dishwater, smart tv set, smart car, smart city – all of this digital infrastructure now has been taken by surveillance capitalism as a way to nudge, tune and herd our behaviour towards its guaranteed outcomes. It does it this with subliminal cues. It is highly scientific process. It does in ways it is outside of our awareness, no right of come back, we cannot resist, we cannot say no and we cannot exit. This is what the author calls a global means of behavioural modification.
- This great digital architecture that we built in order to be emancipatory and life giving process for us, help us in our lives has how now become commandeered by surveillance capitalism, as a means to modify our behaviour towards its commercial ends, which is a direct assault on: human autonomy, our decision rights and notion of individual sovereignty.
- She states, back in the 1970s a senate committee including Edward Kennedy and Sam Rubin they met for months, they decided that behavioural modification was a pernicious action, it was a complete was a defiance of democratic principles. They decided that no federal money would fund any program based on behavioural modification in schools, prisons and hospitals.
- Today, 2019 we have spent the last 2 decades, as democracy slept the private sector under the aegis of surveillance capitalism, has been able to command the digital to create a literally ubiquitous means of behavioural modification, without anyone saying no, without most of us noticing or understanding what has occurred.
- We have been fed a lot of lies, euphemism and misdirection, these are the strategies that allowed surveillance capitalism. We are in the regime of a economic logic. We going backwards through the looking glass and come out in a place called reality where we start to see clearly...
- The services are not free. We think the services are free, they think we are free, we are not the product, they understand that we are not the product we are the free source of raw material like elephant tusks (poachers). Everything about us, what our problems are, real needs are, our real concerns, everything about us is ignored. They have no interest in us, doesn’t matter if we are happy or sad. It only matters that we do things so they can scape the experience and turn into data…
- Few other interesting lies she says…We think we are searching Google, Google is searching us. We think the companies have privacy policies those policies are surveillance policies. We are told if we have nothing to hide we have nothing to fear. The fact is – what they don’t tell us, what we are forgetting that if you have nothing to hide then you are nothing. Everything about us that makes us our unique identities, gives us our individual spirit, our personality our sense of freedom of will, freedom action, sense of a right to our own futures, comes from WITHIN. inner resources, that is our private realms… people who assert moral autonomy, essential element of a flourishing democratic society.
- We are further informed about apps and how they use our data.
This is recommended viewing IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST.
Another important link in the public interest from Physicians for safe technology.