Phil Windley                                                             //  Tue May 18 14:36:00 2021

Can the Digital Future Be Our Home?

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2021-05-26 16:30:06

Phil Windley // Tue May 18 14:36:00 2021 // decentralization identity surveillance+capitalism

This post features three fantastic books from three great, but quite different, authors on the subject of Big Tech, surveillance capitalism, and what's to be done about it.

I recently read Shoshana Zuboff's book on surveillance capitalism. Not only is the book thought provoking, but Zuboff's writing verges on the poetic at times, making it a delightful read. In her opening chapter she asks the question "Can the digital future be our home?"

This question is perhaps one of the most important of our age. More and more of our lives are being intermediated by digital systems. And yet those systems are not ours, but rather belong to the companies that provide them. And our experience on them is predicated on the goals, desires, and needs of those companies, not ours. I call these systems "administrative" because they are built to administer our experience in a particular domain for the administrator's specific purposes.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

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