The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has always been ahead of her time. Her seminal book In the Age of the Smart Machine foresaw the consequences of a then-unfolding era of computer technology. Now, three decades later she asks why the once-celebrated miracle of digital is turning into a nightmare. Zuboff tackles the social, political, business, personal, and technological meaning of "surveillance capitalism" as an unprecedented new market form. It is not simply about tracking us and selling ads, it is the business model for an ominous new marketplace that aims at nothing less than predicting and modifying our everyday behavior--where we go, what we do, what we say, how we feel, who we're with. The consequences of surveillance capitalism for us as individuals and as a society vividly come to life in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism's pathbreaking analysis of power. The threat has shifted from a totalitarian "big brother" state to a universal global architecture of automatic sensors and smart capabilities: A "big other" that imposes a fundamentally new form of power and unprecedented concentrations of knowledge in private companies--free from democratic oversight and control"-- "In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism.
Stats for nerds
47recommend
133mentions
81people
2018–2026years
58% recommend42% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think the most charitable explanation for this is that it's because polarizing content (aka ragebait) gets views/plays, which the ranking algorithms directly optimize for.
Also, this isn't a new phenomenon. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Shoshana Zuboff's 2018 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff. Can't recommend it enough
- It is the fact that the data are used to influence the behavior of customers.
There is a big step between “we observe the behavior of user segments and predict that the company will sell x units at this time and place” and “these individual users behavior is such that we can influence them to purchase what they otherwise might have not purchased if we perform the following actions.” That is behavior modification on a large scale.
If you’re interested in developing a more robust view of this topic, I highly recommend “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshanna Zuboff and “We Have Been Harmonized” by Kai Strittmatter. They go into detail about what these systems are designed to achieve on a population scale.
- You're just now learning this? There are whole books about it (check out "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff)
- If anyone's interested in this the book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is rather revealing of the sheer scale of this.
- There’s a few books I recommend for you, if you’re open to learning more about this subject.
The first is “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas” by Natasha Dow Schüll. The second, and arguably more direct and fascinating, is “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshanna Zuboff. Both are incredibly eye-opening in their treatment of technology and how it is designed to influence behavior.
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