Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance Capitalism and Our Democracy

Surveillance capitalism is the foundation of a new economic order. Firms compete on the manufacture of "prediction products" traded in lucrative new "behavioral futures markets." Surveillance capitalism's proprietary digital architectures -- what Shoshana Zuboff calls "Big Other" -- are designed to capture and control human behavior for competitive advantage in these new markets, as the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification" that favors private market outcomes free of democratic oversight or control.
Acclaimed scholar and author Shoshana Zuboff, Ph.D., Harvard Business School professor emerita speaks on the publication of her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. The event is moderated by Christopher Lydon, radio host of Open Source.
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[@pinkpearl1967]

Shoshana, I would TOTALLY listen to a "This Week in Surveillance Capitalism" podcast!!!!

[@sistersoldier3063]

Ditto! A course in how to help lol!

[@filmerd]

Jaron Lanier and this woman need to have a conversation ASAP. Brilliant human

[@shyamchaudhri]

I have just started reading the book. I was daunted by the size, but realised that about 170 pages were just index etc. Its a fascinating subject!

[@JamesTRyder]

I am glad to see someone standing up to Google, Facebook, KZbin and the like for the Surveillance that those Capitalists are doing

[@lorenzskyburn2861]

Thank you Shoshana, amazing work, a vital research.

[@Emma-qg1wr]

i'm doing my under grad dissertation on this book

[@user-ch6ox4gi4o]

Good luck to you!

[@cnaude100]

I'd seriously like to read it. What are you studying?

[@davedsilva]

Emma, I subscribed to your channel in the hope you will vblog about your work, the highs and the lows. I hope to offer feedback and support.

[@repealthepatriotactindecem8151]

@@davedsilva The holy grail is heterodyning... If i were you. I'd fight like my mind depends on it. BTW, when she says 2001, and 9/11 legislation. She's talking about The Patriot Act.

[@keepcreationprocess]

good choice.

[@ppaulinka]

Fascinating subject. There are so many important points in this lecture! plus the Q&A - excellent work. thank you!

[@PLOttawa]

This book is revolutionary.

[@deljay1840]

57:20 "It's post-democratic. Technocrats rule, surveillance capitalism owns and operates. Status in social networks replace class."

[@templeknight9338]

Read this comment right when she said it

[@recordsare]

Thank you bless you

[@infinitecuriosity9210]

Thank you Shoshone for this work, I knew something nafarious was at foot and a sense of the manipulation of us all. Spread the word most people are totally asleep and well manipulated to be ingnorant.

[@keepcreationprocess]

She is soo strong and energetic at her age......fully operational.

[@williamf.buckleyjr3227]

Not only is this EXTREMELY interesting, this chick's voice is also one hell of an ASMR trigger!! I'm in L❤VE!!

[@listen2meokidoki264]

I absolutely hate her. I mean ASMR.

[@keepcreationprocess]

She is so educated...and I sleep with her voice.

[@michaelcuoco3204]

Hi Shoshana, I love to listen to you and I know your are a Beautiful Woman inside and out, I love your voice and can and do listen to you for hours, and I can understand everything you teach, Thank you 🌿⚘🌿~~x0~~

[@neverendingjourneystilllea5271]

Thanks

[@blakewoodcrest4403]

With the assistance and/or persuasion of the Engineering of Consent...

[@larrysmith2636]

is there a condensed version?

[@jgwizo]

I think colonialism is very much rooted in capitalism ethics - colonise and reap the benefits to colonizer rather than colonised. Have education that rationalise that they remain mersimerized to accept foreign corporations can benefit them as if they are internally based rather external. Win-win would accept technology transfer, joint ventures and limit profits to half to both and stop nations - end of pushing poverty across all colonized

[@stephena.sheehan9959]

"Psychic numbing" is Mcluhan. The techniques of archetypal marketing (Dr. Clotaire Rapaille and others), by design, bypass the rational mind. The solution to the unethical surveillance capitalism is not more capitalism. Capitalism itself designed, generates and supports its on-going development. It will do all it can to maintain its power and it will most likely "win" until the forces of extinction take over. As Jaron Lanier discusses this is exploitation of learned helplessness. What a horrible mess.

[@Lindenlc10]

“The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.” Walter Benjamin .............. Forget their information, we'll keep telling our stories and not believing theirs.

[@anthonymanzalji]

I love how the creator of pokemon go used the information that was stored on his other game "Ingress" to create all the locations to capture pokemon. In ingress, the creator allowed users to create landmarks or "portals" via gps that could be captured if you were physically at the location long enough. Once enough users created enough data, the creator made pokemon which would go on to make billions. If the creator had to pay each user to develope pokemon the game would have been a great game but not a capitalist success. If our information is worth money we should be given a credit for the use of such data.

[@suminshizzles6951]

Up until the last talk by her i was under the impression that the game was just a game. Turns out that google had its fingers in there and the ulterior motive was the get foot traffic in certain places. E.g. stores where you would spend money. Sinister indeed.

[@ianjara33]

Starts at 6:16

[@mattgraham296]

IOTA is a developing protocol that could allow users control over their data. Let’s hope they pull it off. The IOTA Foundation and community led me here. The common thread is a belief in a humanist approach to these digital dilemmas.

[@jabbyjabocs]

The first two speakers seem to stand in complete contradiction to the premise of the book.

[@whoamInonsense]

will technical revolution change the concept of labour introduced by industrial revolution ?

[@benhurn8277]

It already has. Labour is something a robot can do. Only those who have skills to support surveillance capitalism will be given good pay. Everyone else will be relegated to poverty, slavery or used for organ donation.

[@suminshizzles6951]

Web bugs. The one pixel colored gifs hidden in the page. If we dont start reining in these people soon its going to get ugly.

[@randomshiz1386]

listen carefully around 29:47, can you hear the "siren" SOUND IN THE BACKGROUND

[@Nejila4u]

💕💕💕

[@princeandrey]

The only thing we "have" that is fully our own is our subjectivity. But we don't "have" it any more if it's for sale. Religious right, take heed. When you speak of the human soul, you are talking about this subjectivity. When you sell it, you are inviting the money-changers back into the temple.

[@cheikantadiop]

I think you mean , " the individual's soul, is being mined " as it were.

[@CriticalThoughtCritique]

The hour of the Corporate Singularity is at hand..

[@user-ib2qd1ig6z]

Shoshana is the only person that is not sleeping. Notice how her content is silenced on youtube, hence low views, that’s not at random.

[@ataattosbt]

And it is to be realized that the price you pay for any products or services marketed and sold with these methods, you the consumer are paying for it to be done to you.

[@suminshizzles6951]

Only if you use these "services". Use an ad blocker....nobody pushes anything. Dont allow java to be run. Nobody can cross server script your own machine or run code to install who knows what. Dont use FB or google. Or only use them sparingly.

[@rmcd823]

There is nobody to call.

[@user-nc7px1kc9h]

"starts" at 13:06

[@BakedUp]

The gent was quite undesirable in that sitting.

[@CalmAbidingx]

haha agreed this is all i can think about watching it! just let her talk dang

[@inderjitsinghdhillon]

Reinventing the collapse

[@PeterMaranci]

I would have watched this, but Christopher Lydon is a deal-breaker. Couldn't you have literally stuffed a shirt and used that instead? It would have been a big improvement.

[@jabbyjabocs]

And the guy before Lydon was intolerable as well. He came out and talked about how he was putting up for an award a person who is the villain of Surveillance Capitalism.

[@kellybennett8011]

How you like me now that you know everything about me....

[@TatooedDoc]

The interviewer is annoying. He loves to hear himself speak

[@seamuswarren]

My one word would be “disgust”.

[@Ozblu3y]

disgust for what?

[@windsofchange3099]

"Slavery"

[@moonglow6639]

I know what she means. Humanity has lost the fight on this earth. She seems very suicidal. I can understand this.

[@BakedUp]

Wake up and smell your hope.

[@moonglow6639]

@@BakedUp what hope?

[@cjboyle1927]

The successful patio scientifically burn because scent biologically obey unlike a aloof sailboat. mysterious, educated night

[@hildablanco1591]

That old guy needs too pay equal property taxes as today's young citizens knock down prop 13 of real estate tax code so he will feel better of democracy

[@suzannehartmann946]

I feel like the world is being held hostage by a lynch mob.

[@suzannehartmann946]

BTW Google will always steer you to Walmart as one choice to buy from. They work with the government to turn their stores in every town in the USA into cages for children or others at the beck and call of the government.

[@IIVVBlues]

She's misusing the word Capitalism which is "an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market. " Merriam-Webster The key concept is private vs. public or state ownership. What she's describing is the entrepreneurial data gathering of industrialized marketing entities mining and refining information as a commodity. People volunteer more than what is stolen. How do you escape the cell phone? Don't carry it and turn it off when not in use. Don't sign surveillance agreements that come with devices unless you agree to be surveilled. To be online and use a browser, I am willing to be surveilled, but I'd be damned before I signed surveillance agreements for a TV, a thermostat or a mattress! In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy they named the most powerful computer in the universe, "Deep Thought". When it finally computed the answer to the meaning of life and everything as 42, they didn't understand the answer. The problem was you had to have the understanding capabilities of the most powerful computer in the universe in order to comprehend the answer. Catch 22. This is the fallacy of statistics as a predictive tool. Nonlinear events can't be predicted with any degree of accuracy. Despite her claims that surveillance is free, it is not. At a certain point you come up against the law of diminishing returns for surveillance. Fads come and fads go. This ubiquitous surveillance is just another fad.

[@invictusdomini8624]

Trouble is, there will come a day where the no-surveillance TV or thermostat will not exist as an option on the market. Troublesome is there isn't a "smart"-phone available lacking surveillance (without root and/or custom ROM). The PC platform itself (Windows) has been turned into a surveillance platform.

[@Blubberbeest]

You can't accurately describe something like capitalism in any single definition. Zuboff is pointing at one aspect of it, namely that as a rule it claims things that are outside of it and absorbs it into itself. Things that were simply not understood by people as being part of a market exchange before, like nature or what people do in their private lives, are pulled into a market logic, meaning that people come to see these things as commodities, as things that have more or less value. This is in no way contradictory to the definition you cited, it is just adding to it an insight into one of capitalism's inherent tendencies. Like you say, and as Zuboff describes, this has now happened to information - but not just information, it's information about our very private life's experiences. It is about gathering information about our thoughts and feelings. As more and more data becomes available about these things, the more those data can be used in order to control human bodies by predicting their future behaviour. In the video, they also go into the question of why people so readily submit to these surveillance mechanisms. You're right to say that we could opt for not using a smartphone; but as they point out in the video, this is not a viable option unless we are ready to seclude ourselves from a big part of the human world. Ok, we could turn it off when not in use - but for a majority of people that situation doesn't even really exist anymore, we look at our phone every few minutes, so our phone is pretty much always 'in use'. The problem is also more ubiquitous than just the smartphone, as Zuboff shows. More and more companies turn products that should have nothing to do with all of this - fridges, microwaves, children's dolls, TVs, thermostats, and even mattresses - into surveillance machines. Isn't saying that this is just a fad very naive? Is this not a fundamental issue, which started off not even two decades ago on the basis of the US government's wish for security (control everything that people do so we can keep them safe), and has since grown into a global-wide battle of private organisations over who can control people most efficiently? Rather than surveillance hitting diminishing returns, it seems more likely to me that it will become a basic fact of life, unquestioned because it is everywhere and the world will become unimaginable without it. She says that this is not 1984, but I still wonder about the doublethink that people will have to learn to apply in a situation where everything about them, including their emotions, is monitored and assessed. I'm sincerely worried about putting into place a system which would make it possible to monitor everything we do. As long as such a system is used for advertisement, it's not so bad. But now that, for example, it has been shown to be used to manipulate elections, it is shown to be ad odds with democracy itself. Looking at what China is doing with its social credit system and the role surveillance plays in that system, I fear even more for the future of our individual freedoms.

[@teacake6941]

If this surveillance thing is a "fad" then why has the concept and the deliberate act of surveillance been a prime component for empires... the idea that you have to know your enemy in order to know yourself has been around too long for your gaslighting to have any effect... your ignorance is their bliss

[@suminshizzles6951]

The point in time is getting near where you cant buy products without these installed tracking devices. Be it a coffee machine, mattress or fridge.