surveillance capitalism

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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Classification: LCC HF5415.32 (ebook) | LCC HF5415.32 .Z83 2018 (print) | DDC 306.3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003901 ISBNs: 978-1-61039-569-4 (hardcover), 978-1-61039-570-0 (ebook) E3-20181129-JV-NF-ORI CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication The Definition INTRODUCTION 1 Home or Exile in the Digital Future PART I THE FOUNDATIONS OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM 2 August 9, 2011: Setting the Stage for Surveillance Capitalism 3 The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus 4 The Moat Around the Castle 5 The Elaboration of Surveillance Capitalism: Kidnap, Corner, Compete 6 Hijacked: The Division of Learning in Society PART II THE ADVANCE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM 7 The Reality Business 8 Rendition: From Experience to Data 9 Rendition from the Depths 10 Make Them Dance 11 The Right to the Future Tense PART III INSTRUMENTARIAN POWER FOR A THIRD MODERNITY 12 Two Species of Power 13 Big Other and the Rise of Instrumentarian Power 14 A Utopia of Certainty 15 The Instrumentarian Collective 16 Of Life in the Hive 17 The Right to Sanctuary CONCLUSION 18 A Coup from Above Acknowledgments About the Author Praise for The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Detailed Table of Contents Notes Index This book is dedicated to the past and the future: In memory of my Beloved, Jim Maxmin.

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It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience. Google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in much the same way that a century ago General Motors invented and perfected managerial capitalism. Google was the pioneer of surveillance capitalism in thought and practice, the deep pocket for research and development, and the trailblazer in experimentation and implementation, but it is no longer the only actor on this path. Surveillance capitalism quickly spread to Facebook and later to Microsoft. Evidence suggests that Amazon has veered in this direction, and it is a constant challenge to Apple, both as an external threat and as a source of internal debate and conflict.

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The test of my efficacy will be in how well this map and its concepts illuminate the unprecedented and empower us with a more cogent and comprehensive understanding of the rapid flow of events that boil around us as surveillance capitalism pursues its long game of economic and social domination. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has four parts. Each presents four to five chapters as well as a final chapter intended as a coda that reflects on and conceptualizes the meaning of what has gone before. Part I addresses the foundations of surveillance capitalism: its origins and early elaboration. We begin in Chapter 2 by setting the stage upon which surveillance capitalism made its debut and achieved success. This stage setting is important because I fear that we have contented ourselves for too long with superficial explanations of the rapid rise and general acceptance of the practices associated with surveillance capitalism.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

But the model that Zuboff memorably helped christen “surveillance capitalism” would spread like wildfire to encompass and eventually dominate the entire global economy. At the core of surveillance capitalism is a relatively simple concept: in exchange for services given to consumers (mostly for free), industries monitor users’ behaviour in order to tailor advertisements to match their interests. “This new form of information capitalism,” Zuboff explains, “aims to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to produce revenue and market control.”33 Surveillance capitalism did not emerge out of nowhere, and it certainly did not just spring from the minds of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Page and Brin.

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It is the latter that makes surveillance capitalism distinct from prior forms of capitalism, according to Zuboff. The novelty is to see our private human experiences as free raw material that can be endlessly mined. On one level, it is the perfect sustainable resource: our habits, preferences, relationships, moods, and private thoughts are like constantly replenishing wells. On another level, as we shall see in chapter 4, it is entirely unsustainable, dependent as it is on toxic mining of raw materials, rising energy consumption, and non-recyclable waste. Under surveillance capitalism, social media drill into personal human experiences by whatever ingenious means may be derived from their proliferating sensors, and then turn them into what Zuboff calls “behavioral surplus” — proprietary data that is used for predictive signalling.

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In other words, all the sensors that envelop and monitor you are so blended into the taken-for-granted reality, the unquestioned environment that surrounds you, that they become, in effect, invisible. The less we question this environment, the more platforms can undertake extensive surveillance of our behaviour with as little friction as possible. Under surveillance capitalism, says Zuboff, our ignorance is their bliss.36 * * * There is an inertia, an inexorable logic, to surveillance capitalism. This logic, manifest in each and every new social media innovation, compels platforms to acquire data about consumers from ever more fine-grained, distributed, and overlapping sources of information. These sources dig deeper into our habits, our social relationships, our tastes, our thoughts, our heartbeats, our energy consumption, our sleep patterns, and so on.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff and other scholars have decried the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” which is, as Zuboff defines it, “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales,” as well as “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification” via digital surveillance technologies.18 She believes (and I would agree) that surveillance capitalism represents a significant threat to our economic and political systems, as well as a potential instrument for social control.19 I’ve also come to believe that curbing Silicon Valley’s nefarious side effects will become “the signature economic issue [for lawmakers] over the next five years, especially as automation increases and they make investments into other areas of the economy,” as one staffer for an influential senior Democratic senator has put it to me.

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Harter says that Google could “easily see, looking at the litigation over Napster, that they needed a growth map in Washington to get ahead of any opposition.”9 Harter understood that Google needed to devalue intellectual property and prioritize access to user data in order to ensure its supremacy—and by all accounts, the Googlers understood that, too. In fact, that was one of their major competitive advantages. As Shoshana Zuboff lays out in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Page, Brin, and Schmidt (along with Hal Varian) were the first in Silicon Valley to fully understand the concept of “behavioral surplus,” in which “human experience is subjugated to surveillance capitalism’s market mechanisms and reborn as ‘behavior.’ ”10 What she’s saying, in simple terms, is that everything we do, say, and think—online and in many cases offline—has the potential to be monetized by platform tech firms.

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Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold, “Google, Once Disdainful of Lobbying, Now a Master of Washington,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2014. 17. Rana Foroohar, “Silicon Valley Has Too Much Power,” Financial Times, May 14, 2017; Foroohar, “Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s Grip.” 18. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), introductory page. 19. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology, April 17, 2015. 20. Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (New York: Penguin, 2018).

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

Felten, “No Silver Bullet: De-identification Still Doesn’t Work,” July 9, 2014, Arvind Narayanan—Princeton (personal website), http://randomwalker.info/publications/no-silver-bullet-de-identification.pdf, as cited in Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 245. 3.Jennifer Valentino-deVries et al., “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret,” New York Times, December 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html. 4.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 8 (emphases in original). 5.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, pp. 217–218. 6.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 238. 7.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 201. 8.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 240. 9.Monte Zweben, “Life-Pattern Marketing: Intercept People in Their Daily Routines,” SeeSaw Networks, March 2009, as cited in Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 243. 10.Dyani Sabin, “The Secret History of ‘Pokémon GO,’ as Told by Creator John Hanke,” Inverse, February 28, 2017, https://www.inverse.com/article/28485-pokemon-go-secret-history-google-maps-ingress-john-hanke-updates. 11.See Natasha Dow Schull, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), and the chapter “Autism as a Design Principle” in my The World Beyond Your Head. 12.Various journalists took it upon themselves to actually read the pages-long privacy policy and data-collection practices of the Pokémon Go!

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“Location information can reveal some of the most intimate details of a person’s life—whether you’ve visited a psychiatrist, whether you went to an A.A. meeting, who you might date,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon . . . .3 Like many interested citizens, I have been reading analyses and critiques of Silicon Valley for the last twenty-five years, and even contributed a few of my own. But it was only upon reading Shoshana Zuboff’s masterwork The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published in 2019, that the big picture came into view. What follows is heavily indebted to her work, both the details and the larger frame. Let’s start with the big picture of surveillance capitalism and some definitions, and work our way to the implications for internet-mediated mobility. Zuboff is emerita professor at Harvard Business School. She writes: Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.

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STREET VIEW: SEEING LIKE GOOGLE 1.Alistair Jamieson, “Google Will Carry On with Camera Cars Despite Privacy Complaints over Street Views,” Telegraph, April 9, 2009 (reporting an interview in the Times), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/5130068/Google-will-carry-on-with-camera-cars-despite-privacy-complaints-over-street-views.html. 2.Shoshanna Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2018), p. 44. 3.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 48. 4.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, pp. 146–50. 5.James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 53. 6.Scott gives some historical examples of geographic inscrutability (to outsiders) playing this defensive role.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

But these same guardrails also guided users to ads they were more likely to click on, which pleased advertisers. Money poured in and the investors were happy. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes this moment as a turning point not only in the history of Google but in the history of capitalism. In her view, the discovery of “behavioral surplus”—a trove of user data so rich and plentiful that it could be put to work selling ads and not just improving search—gave birth to a new economic logic called “surveillance capitalism.” “Google had discovered a way to translate its nonmarket interactions with users into surplus raw material for the fabrication of products aimed at genuine market transactions with its real customers: advertisers,” she writes.

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See also New Brandeisians Brin, Sergey, 88, 89, 91 Brown, Chris, 105 Bush, George, 27 capitalism and accumulation, 35–36, 147, 154, 177 and coal as fuel, 87 competitive markets under, 63, 103, 176 Karl Marx on, 78 and Luddite movement, 174, 175 and subsumption of labor, 78, 84 and surveillance capitalism, 92, 94, 96 in the US, 125 and venture capital, 119–22 See also The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, (Zuboff); Bezos, Jeff CenturyLink, 59–60 Cerf, Vinton, 11, 19–20, 113, 114 Chattanooga, TN, 38–39, 46, 49, 55 Clinton, Bill, 18, 20, 21, 22 Comcast and broadband internet, 25, 29, 53 and digital divide, 59 and end of net neutrality, 28 and enrichment of CEO and shareholders, 31 lawsuits of, 46 and the profit motive, 127–28 proposed taxes on, 61 and US government, 52 and Washington, DC’s neighborhoods, 49 worth of, 67 common carriage regulations, 26, 27, 28 Communications Act of 1934, 26 Communications Decency Act of 1996, 95–6 community networks, 42–56, 61–63, 154–55, 169, 170, 176 Computer Science Research Network (CSNET), 21–22 Cottom, Tressie McMillan, 132 Danton’s Death (Bűchner), 57 Davis, Angela, 156, 157 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) ARPANET network of, 8–9, 10, 12, 13, 114 email study of, 79 and internet’s mobility, 113, 114–15 and investment in computing, 7–8, 89 and linking of networks, 11, 114 technical expertise of, 15 democracy and Clintonian neoliberalism, 26 and collective ownership of economy, 52 and Homo politicus, 64 importance of resources to, 34–35, 36 and inclusive government, 66–67 and the internet, 158 monopolies as a threat to, 150 and self-rule, 33–35, 36 Dewey, John, 33–34, 35 Donovan, Joan, 143, 161 Duke, David, 134, 139–40 eBay as AuctionWeb, 73–74, 80, 81–82 CEO Meg Whitman of, 99 and community as market, 80–84 and e-commerce, 75, 76, 80–84, 86, 98, 99, 100, 103 on the Nasdaq, 88 network effects on, 82, 83 user participation on, 79, 82, 83, 94 Electric Power Board (EPB), 38–39, 40 Equitable Internet Initiative (EII), 43–46 Facebook antitrust suit against, 151 and content moderation, 152–54 data of, ix, 29–30, 96, 101, 116, 165, 173 and e-commerce, 98 and election of 2016, 148–49 Fox News on, 142 and Instagram, 150, 159 and interoperability scenarios, 170 investigation into, 150–51 Joel Kaplan of, 146 and library funding, 160 and MAREA, x market capitalization of, 97 and Mark Zuckerberg, 94, 96–97, 146, 154, 166 online advertising of, 60–61, 94, 112, 124, 137–38, 146, 150, 165, 170, 173 and online malls, 115, 119, 129, 147, 155, 158 and politics, 141, 143–49, 150 and the profit motive, 127, 147 and purchase of startup companies, 124 QAnon movement on, 145–46 Schifter’s post on, 126–27, 131 and Sheryl Sandberg, 94 WhatsApp of, 150 Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 26, 27–28, 41, 48, 59, 60 Fourcade, Marion, 109 Fox News, 142, 161 Friere, Paulo, 44 Gates, Bill, 71–72, 81 Google and capitalism, 92 and data generation, 89–90, 92–93, 112, 124 and e-commerce, 98, 124 founding of, 88 and Google Fiber, 29 investigation into, 150–51 and large amounts of data, 91–93, 96, 101, 116 and library funding, 160 online advertising of, 60–61, 90–93, 94, 112, 124, 136, 173 as an online mall, 93, 115, 119, 129, 138 and parent company Alphabet, 97, 124 and platforms, xv, 75 and purchase of startup companies, 94, 124 and radicalization by Council of Conservative Citizens, 138–39 search technology of, 90, 133–39, 144 software of, 173 and submarine fiber-optic cables, 29–30 worth of, 67, 124 Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, 4 Gore, Al, 19–20 Gruen, Victor, 85, 86 Grundner, Tom, 23 Guattari, Felix, 145 Hanna, Thomas M., 50, 66 Healy, Kieran, 109 High-Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991, 20 Inouye, Daniel, 21, 22 internet access to, xv, 10, 13, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 31–35, 40–41, 44, 46, 50, 51, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 77, 127, 163, 76 and algorithmic management, 114–15, 116, 118, 119, 121 ARPANET network of, 12, 18, 24, 79, 104, 114 and broadband internet, xv, 27–29, 31, 32–33, 35, 39, 40, 41, 43, 46, 48–49, 50, 53, 55–56, 59–61, 176 buying and selling on, 71, 73–74, 81–82, 124 and the cloud, 103–9, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 123, 128, 131, 163 common language of, 9, 10–11, 14, 79, 110, 113, 177 and communications networks, x–xi, 5, 8, 27, 123, 128, 148, 170 and competition among providers, 61–64 and connectivity, xi, xii, 29, 30, 33, 35, 41, 43, 44, 59, 60, 127 and consumer costs, 23, 30–31, 40, 43, 44–45, 49, 50, 52, 60, 61–64 and content, xvii, 29, 152–54 creation of, xiii, 6–12, 13, 88, 104, 113 and data generation, 88–89, 92–93, 101, 108–9, 121, 123, 129, 149–50, 158, 165–66 and data’s value, 86–87, 92, 109, 121, 122, 165 and data transmission, 3–6, 8, 10, 14–15, 25, 28–29, 39, 55, 103–4, 159 and data trusts, 165–66 and democratic internet, xvi, 37, 42–43, 47–48, 50, 55, 56–57, 58, 66–67, 155, 175–76 and deprivatization, xvi, 51, 56, 59, 153, 154–55, 157, 169–70, 175, 176 and dial-up modems, 23, 27, 28 different scales of, 54–55, 168 and dot.com bubble, 72, 76–79, 80, 83, 90, 93, 94, 98, 102, 106, 109, 123, 124 and email, xiv, 12, 15–16, 79–80, 159 and fiber to the home (FTTH) networks, 39, 40, 41, 51 and founding of startups, 76, 119–20, 123–24 and infrastructure, xiii, xiv, 7, 15, 17, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 41, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 56, 61–62, 65, 85, 106–9, 127, 160, 164, 176 and internet service providers, 15, 17, 24–26, 27–31, 38, 39–41, 46, 49, 51–53, 59–63, 65, 72, 77, 95, 127–8 and market-dominated internet, 22, 35, 42, 46–47, 119, 122, 152–54 and the military, 9–10, 11, 12, 79, 113–15, 177, xiii and online classes, 32, 34, 132–33 and online malls, 86–87, 93, 103, 108, 109, 112, 115, 121, 123, 128, 129, 131–33, 135, 137–40, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154–58, 160, 163, 165, 166, 168, 169, 170–73, 176 and organizing, xv, 37, 43–46, 50, 58 and Pets.com, 77, 82 and platforms, xiv–xv, 67, 75, 84, 98, 127, 158, 164, 166, 176 and politics, xi, xii, 18, 28, 46, 47–49, 54, 80, 139–49, 171, 174, 177 privatization of, xiii, xiv–xv, 14, 16–20, 23–25, 27–30, 36–37, 44, 45, 47, 56, 58, 65, 67, 72, 76–79, 84, 93, 98, 109, 119, 120, 123–25, 127, 135, 147, 148, 154, 159, 172, 174–75 and profit motive, xi, xii, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, 9, 26, 31, 33, 35–36, 37, 45, 47, 52–53, 55, 87, 127–28, 147, 152, 174–75, 176 public funding for, 6–8, 14, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 23, 41–42, 48–51, 59, 60, 160, 164–65, 176 public or cooperative ownership of, xvi, 8, 40–46, 48–49, 51–52, 60, 62, 65, 71, 155, 163–65, 168, 169, 176 and racism, xvii, 31, 43, 134, 137–40, 153 regulation of, xii, 17, 22, 28, 147, 149–53 and rise of search engines, 72, 136–37 and selling ads, 93–94, 96–97, 146 and shopping malls, 84–86 and “smartness,” 110–13, 118 and smartphones, 6, 31–32, 110, 112, 115, 119, 123, 128 social aspect of, 79–80, 81, 86, 94–95 state surveillance of, 64–65, 66 and submarine fiber-optic cables, ix–x, xii, xiv, 29–30, 56, 65, 113 and the techlash, 149, 152, xii, xiii, xv universal protocol for, 9, 11–12, 19, 88, 110, 113, 159, 172 and universities, 52, 88, 109, 169 and US government, xiii, xiv, 7, 13–14, 17–20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 48–49, 59–60, 64–67, 113–15, 170 and web applications, 103, 170, 171, 176 wide area networks (WANs) of, 117–19 and the World Wide Web, 15–16, 72, 76, 80, 89 and Yahoo!

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In the case of Facebook, the line of transmission was direct: in 2008, Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg, who had over-seen Google’s transformation into an advertising company, as his chief operating officer. Sandberg thus became, in Shoshana Zuboff’s memorable phrase, “the ‘Typhoid Mary’ of surveillance capitalism.” The online mall of social media would look a bit different than the online mall of search. The goal would be to keep users locked inside of it as long as possible: to maximize “engagement,” as executives would tell their engineers. Engagement might take many forms—a like, a retweet, a view, a share, a comment, a post—and these forms needed to be, on the one hand, flexible enough to accommodate a satisfying range of expression—for social media to work, it must feel genuinely social—but structured enough to be easily interpretable by software.

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

Microsoft assures users that no personally identifiable data is gathered from Skype and that the data is not used for advertising. “Skype Translator Privacy FAQ,” Skype, available at link #126. 96.Andrew C. Oliver, “In Memory of Aaron Swartz: Stealing Is Not Stealing,” InfoWorld, January 17, 2013, available at link #127. 97.Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 521. 98.Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 92. 99.Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 339–40. 100.Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 451. 101.Chris Nodder, Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us into Temptation (Indianapolis, IN: John Wiley, 2013). 102.Steve Henn, “Online Marketers Take Note of Brains Wired for Rewards,” NPR, July 24, 2013, available at link #128. 103.Hayley Tsukayama, “Video Game Addiction Is a Real Condition, WHO Says.

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While they conclude that consumer surplus from the platform is, on balance, positive, they found that deactivating users reduced online activity generally, were less informed and less polarized about news, were happier, and demonstrated a large persistent reduction in Facebook use after the experiment. 109.See Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Welfare, and Happiness (New York: Penguin, 2009). 110.Mark Zuckerberg, “The Facts About Facebook,” Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2019, available at link #133. 111.Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 310. 112.Dirk Bergemann and Alessandro Bonatti, “The Economics of Social Data” (working paper, January 15, 2019). 113.This example is purely hypothetical, although in 2016, Microsoft received a patent for “User Behavior Monitoring on a Computerized Device.” The patent envisions a device monitoring behavior, and then alerting different groups, including, Zuboff reports, “insurance companies.” See Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 411–12. 114.McNamee, Zucked, 101. 115.Zeynep Tufekci, “How Social Media Took Us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump,” MIT Technology Review (August 14, 2018), available at link #134.

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But when the tech companies tripped onto the gold that was flowing across the wires, they realized that this was the enormous surplus—the “behavioral surplus”—that would make Silicon Valley rich. All of that is insanely great. Indeed, I want to exaggerate here so you don’t miss my point. My argument is fundamentally different from the work of surveillance skeptics, like Shoshana Zuboff. Her magisterial book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, tells a terrifying story of the emergence of a new form of capitalism that trades fundamentally on surveillance. There is tons to learn from her analysis, and much to be anxious about. We do not begin to understand the scope of this surveillance, or how it is changing, fundamentally, our relation to each other.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa

2021 United States Capitol attack, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Big Tech, Brexit referendum, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, colonial rule, commoditize, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, future of journalism, iterative process, James Bridle, Kevin Roose, lockdown, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, performance metric, QAnon, recommendation engine, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Twitter Arab Spring, work culture

“Duterte Declares State of Lawlessness in PH,” Rappler, September 3, 2016, https://www.rappler.com/nation/145043-duterte-declares-state-of-lawlessness-ph/. 36.Editha Caduaya, “Man with Bomb Nabbed at Davao Checkpoint,” Rappler, March 26, 2016, https://www.rappler.com/nation/127132-man-bomb-nabbed-davao-checkpoint/. 37.These were the specific stories on the websites that had the misleadingly repurposed Rappler story: http://ww1.pinoytribune.com/2016/09/man-with-high-quality-of-bomb-nabbed-at.html; http://www.socialnewsph.com/2016/09/look-man-with-high-quality-of-bomb.html; http://www.newstrendph.com/2016/09/man-with-high-quality-of-bomb-nabbed-at.html. 38.Rappler Research, “Davao Bombing,” Flourish, July 8, 2019, https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/230850/. 39.Ralf Rivas, “Gambling-Dependent Philippines Allows POGOs to Resume Operations,” Rappler, May 1, 2020, https://www.rappler.com/business/259599-gambling-dependent-philippines-allows-pogos-resume-operations-coronavirus/. 40.This is the now-nonexistent link to the Rappler Facebook post that was taken down: https://www.facebook.com/rapplerdotcom/posts/1312782435409203. 41.John Naughton, “The Goal Is to Automate Us: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Guardian, January 20, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook. 42.There are four books about Facebook that I would recommend: David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010) traces the beginning and the development of Mark Zuckerberg. Published in 2010, it came out at a time of wonder. On the business model, Shoshana Zuboff coined the term surveillance capitalism in 2019; see The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).

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On the business model, Shoshana Zuboff coined the term surveillance capitalism in 2019; see The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). Steven Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2020) chronicled the company’s fall. And finally, Sinan Aral’s The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt (New York: Currency, 2020) details some of the dangers but remains a favorable view of the giant, providing the possibility of redemption. 43.Naughton, “The Goal Is to Automate Us.” 44.James Bridle, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff Review—We Are the Pawns,” Guardian, February 2, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review. 45.Shoshana Zuboff wants the market in our behavioral data, like the slave trade, abolished.

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I believe that Facebook represents one of the gravest threats to democracies around the world, and I am amazed that we have allowed our freedoms to be taken away by technology companies’ greed for growth and revenues. Tech sucked up our personal experiences and data, organized it with artificial intelligence, manipulated us with it, and created behavior at a scale that brought out the worst in humanity. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff called this exploitative business model “surveillance capitalism.”41 We all let it happen.42 Facebook today favors moneymaking over public safety. Its company lobbying efforts enable it to bend and break the often lax content rules it sets itself. It rarely prioritizes safeguards for the nearly 3 billion users on its platform, which in 2020 had revenues of $85.9 billion.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The dynamics of all of this are complicated, so we’ll take it a step at a time. SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM CONTINUES TO DRIVE THE INTERNET Corporations want your data. The websites you visit are trying to figure out who you are and what you want, and they’re selling that information. The apps on your smartphone are collecting and selling your data. The social networking sites you frequent are either selling your data, or selling access to you based on your data. Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff calls this “surveillance capitalism,” and it’s the business model of the Internet. Companies build systems that spy on people in exchange for services.

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EVERYONE FAVORS INSECURITY 56The FBI wants you to have security: I’ll talk about this in Chapter 11, but here’s just one recent example: Cyrus Farivar (7 Mar 2018), “FBI again calls for magical solution to break into encrypted phones,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/fbi-again-calls-for-magical-solution-to-break-into-encrypted-phones. 57“surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff (17 Apr 2015), “Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754. 57Companies are trying to figure out: Aaron Taube (24 Jan 2014), “Apple wants to use your heart rate and facial expressions to figure out what mood you’re in,” Business Insider, http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-mood-based-ad-targeting-patent-2014-1.

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In Chapter 2, I discuss the primary way we maintain security in our systems—patching vulnerabilities when they’re discovered—and why that will fail on the Internet+. Chapter 3 talks about how we prove who we are on the Internet, and how we can hide who we are. In Chapter 4, I explain the political and economic forces that favor insecurity: surveillance capitalism, cybercrime, cyberwar—and the more invasive corporate and government practices that feed off insecurity. Finally, in Chapter 5, I describe why the risks are increasing, and how they will become catastrophic. “Click here to kill everybody” is hyperbole, but we’re already living in a world where computer attacks can crash cars and disable power plants—both actions that can easily result in catastrophic deaths if done at scale.

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

“The real aim of the Internet of Things,” believes digital economy researcher Miranda Hall, “is to suck up as much data as possible [and] then work out what to do with it at a later point.”61 In her landmark book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff launches a scathing attack on some of the Big Five internet companies (notably Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Amazon) for their unilateral claims to human experience “as free raw materials for translation into behavioral data.” Surveillance capitalism, writes Zuboff, is “parasitic and self-referential”—like a “vampire,” it feeds on the human experience, and packages these up as commodities for third parties and “means to others’ ends.”

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This corresponds with the findings in International Risk Governance Council, IRGC Guidelines for Emerging Risk Governance (Lausanne, Switzerland: International Risk Governance Council, 2015), https://www.irgc.org/risk-governance/emerging-risk/a-protocol-for-dealing-with-emerging-risks/. 61. Miranda Hall, “Beware the Smart Home,” Autonomy, November 2018, http://autonomy.work/portfolio/beware-the-smart-home/. 62. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 8, 9–10 (emphasis in original). 63. Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 21. 64. Maggie Astor, “Your Roomba May Be Mapping Your Home, Collecting Data That Could Be Shared,” New York Times, July 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/technology/roomba-irobot-data-privacy.html. 65.

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The aim “is no longer to automate information flows about us,” asserts Zuboff. “The goal now is to automate us.”62 In the future, then, we may become the smart wives. Zuboff has many concerns about these startling developments, notably the threat that they pose to people’s “right to sanctuary” as surveillance capital creates “a world of ‘no exit’ with profound implications for the human future at this new frontier of power.”63 Look and Hunches—two smart wife add-ons that are following us into the most intimate parts of our lives—provide telling examples, as we have already discussed. Even our friendly Rosie-inspired robovac was caught up in a surveillance dispute in 2017, when the CEO of iRobot—the company that makes Roombas—suggested selling the maps of his customers’ living rooms to Google, Apple, or Alphabet in the next few years without their explicit consent.64 It came almost as an afterthought, once the company realized the collective value of holding these plans.

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

ZDNet, 23 February. http://www.zdnet.com/article/germanys-vision-for-industrie-4-0-the-revolutionwill-be-digitised (accessed 10 June 2016). Zuboff, Shoshana. 2015. ‘Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization’. Journal of Information Technology, 30 (1): 75–89. doi: 10.1057/jit.2015.5. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2016. ‘Google as a Fortune Teller: The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism’. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 March. http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616.html (accessed 12 June 2016). Zucman, Gabriel. 2015. The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan.

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The more users interact with a site, the more information can be collected and used. Equally, as users wander around the internet, they are tracked via cookies and other means, and these data become ever more extensive and valuable to advertisers. There is a convergence of surveillance and profit making in the digital economy, which leads some to speak of ‘surveillance capitalism’.27 Key to revenues, however, is not just the collection of data, but also the analysis of data. Advertisers are interested less in unorganised data and more in data that give them insights or match them to likely consumers. These are data that have been worked on.28 They have had some process applied to them, whether through the skilled labour of a data scientist or the automated labour of a machine-learning algorithm.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

The global antisurveillance protests catalyzed by Snowden’s disclosures foretold the downfall of Silicon Valley’s “big data” doctrine: the idea that having more data collected by the likes of Google is universally beneficial. Scholars and media commentators began referring to Silicon Valley’s agenda as “surveillance capitalism,” arguing that Google’s practices exemplify the term.7 That platform companies were exploiting their users’ data for profit and political gain became commonsense. The proliferation of narratives about “Russian interference” in the U.S. presidential election of 2016—which identified Facebook and Twitter as major culprits—only reinforced this notion.8 Once viewed as somewhere between democratizing forces and benign entities, platform companies were now seen as potentially dangerous political actors.

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As Nick Srnicek writes, “Platforms became an efficient way to monopolise, extract, analyse, and use the increasingly large amounts of data that were being recorded.” Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2017), 42–43.     6.   Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State (New York: Macmillan, 2014).     7.   Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89.     8.   See the controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica as reported, for instance, in “Cambridge Analytica Files,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files.     9.   

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As Shoshana Zuboff has argued, the behaviorist frame aligns closely with the ideology of the major platform companies. These platforms are used to delegate “rewards and punishments of a new kind of invisible hand,” making it possible to modify “the behaviors of persons and things for profit and control.” Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89.   52.   For examples of the fascination with “explainable AI,” see Weinberger, “Our Machines Now Have Knowledge”; Finale Doshi-Velez et al., Accountability of AI Under the Law: The Role of Explanation (Cambridge, Mass.: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Publication, 2017); David Weinberger, “Don’t Make AI Stupid in the Name of Transparency,” Wired, January 28, 2018.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

p. 99 number of voice-activated assistants could rival earth’s human population: Judith Shulevitz, “Alexa, Should We Trust You?,” Atlantic, November 2018; Ronan De Renesse, “Digital Assistant and Voice AI–Capable Device Forecast: 2016–21,” Ovum, April 28, 2017, ovum.informa.com. p. 99 surveillance capitalism: Shoshona Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019). p. 101 Amazon technology analyzes human voice to determine ethnic origin, gender, age, health, and mental state: Madison Malone Kircher, “I Don’t Want My Echo Dot to Be Able to Tell When I’m Sick,” New York, October 15, 2018; Belle Lin, “Amazon’s Accent Recognition Technology Could Tell the Government Where You’re From,” Intercept, November 15, 2018; Jon Brodkin, “Amazon Patents Alexa Tech to Tell if You’re Sick, Depressed and Sell You Meds,” Ars Technica, October 11, 2018, arstechnica.com.

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As Amazon saturates the market with new smart speakers, it also works to expand the capabilities of those it has already sold via software updates. The “smarter” they get, the better such devices become at extracting continuous — and ever-greater — profits from users worldwide. The writer Shoshana Zuboff has referred to this model as “surveillance capitalism,’’ and most ordinary folk have more to fear from it than they do from the NSA. A panopticon in every parlor, after all, is good for business. Amazon’s patents offer what could be a sneak preview of the future. They include technologies to mine ambient speech for keywords and share them with advertisers, even in the absence of a “wake” command.

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“Independent” is the most important word in the preceding sentence. If the United States were to create such an entity, its mission would be twofold: protecting citizens from both the corporations that monetize our data and the law enforcement agencies they collude with under the banner of surveillance capitalism. This may sound like a terribly remote hope. Given the state of political turmoil in the United States, it’s a dream that could easily sound naive. But we refuse to submit to cynicism. If a ragtag band of concerned citizens could shepherd Snowden’s secrets from the darkness onto the front pages of international newspapers, it’s worth asking yourself: what can I do?

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Sociologist Chris Rojek says our mediated exchanges—FaceTiming with friends, for example—“are not natural.”32 Bernard Harcourt, a critical theorist at Columbia Law School, is one of many skeptics who say our smartphone addiction has left us vulnerable to giant corporations such as Google and Facebook who capitalize on and reinforce our attachment to our hand machines to steal our data, spy on our every blink and whisper, and manipulate our beliefs and ideas with fake news and rigged news feeds.33 These developments, argues Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, are part of a new mutant form of capitalism called “surveillance capitalism.”34 Worse, critics say we’ve allowed our phones to victimize our children. Catherine Price, in a piece for the New York Times, confessed, “I recently had a baby and was feeding her in a darkened room. It was an intimate, tender moment—except for one detail. She was gazing at me . . . and I was on eBay, scrolling through listings for Victorian-era doorknobs.”35 Cyberbullying, predators, porn: Child psychologist Richard Freed’s take is similar to the message of a famous antidrug PSA from the 1980s showing Dad cracking an egg into a sizzling frying pan, his gruff voice declaring, “This is your brain on drugs.”

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Her observations about the “machine zone” are developed in Schüll, Addiction by Design. 30. Thomas, “Digitally Weary Users Switch to ‘Dumb’ Phones.” 31. For more about Klemens Schillinger’s Substitute Phone, see his website: https://klemensschillinger.com/projects/substitutephone. 32. Rojek, Presumed Intimacy, 8–9. 33. Harcourt, Exposed. 34. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff presents a rich, thoughtful account that should be read by everyone. 35. Price, “How to Break Up with Your Phone.” 36. Freed, Wired Child, 95. Freed is a practicing psychologist in California. Wired Child is his self-published book detailing his clinical cases with teenage technology addiction. 37.

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See “Six Takeaways from the Author’s Guild 2018 Author Income Survey,” www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/six-takeaways-from-the-authorsguild-2018-authors-income-survey. 41. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, cited in McChesney, Digital Disconnect, 66. 42. Bell, “Facebook Is Eating the World.” 43. For a detailed analysis of this transition see Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, chapter 3. 44. The Financial Times has followed these cases closely. See, for example, Toplensky, “EU Fines Google €2.4bn over Abuse of Search Dominance”; Waters, Toplensky, and Ram, “Brussels’ €2.4bn Fine Could Lead to Damages Cases and Probes in Other Areas of Search;” Barker and Khan, “EU Fines Google Record €4.3bn over Android.” 45.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Liability As Shoshana Zuboff has argued, we live in the age of “surveillance capitalism.” Entire industries exist for the sole purpose of harvesting consumer information and selling it to advertisers. Google, Facebook, and Twitter want consumers to use their platforms so they can collect reams of personal information. Even companies such as Amazon, Best Buy, and Target, which sell actual things like books, televisions, and socks, relentlessly surveil and amass data on their customers. That information is then used to personalize promotions for return business. It’s called behavioral targeting. In the age of surveillance capitalism, the hacking of firms that collect our personal information is a constant threat.

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Bitcoin: For the original white paper, see the (pseudonymous) Satoshi Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. “over-the-counter brokers: Connor Dempsey, “How Does Crypto OTC Actually Work?,” Circle Research, Medium, March 25, 2019, https://medium.com/circle-research/how-does-crypto-otc-actually-work-e2215c4bb13. “surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). failed to patch: Dan Goodin, “Failure to Patch Two-Month-Old Bug Led to Massive Equifax Breach,” September 13, 2017, arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/massive-equifax-breach-caused-by-failure-to-patch-two-month-old-bug.

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In 2019, Equifax agreed to pay at least $575 million, and potentially up to $700 million, as part of a global settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and fifty U.S. states, for failing to take reasonable steps to prevent the data breach that affected approximately 147 million people. This mammoth fine isn’t the only example of legal action related to surveillance capitalism, nor is it the biggest. In the same year, Facebook agreed to pay a $5 billion penalty to settle charges after the company violated a 2012 FTC order by deceiving users about its ability to control the privacy of their personal information. Accountability is materializing, but in a chaotic, rather than systematic, fashion.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Every time we fill in a Captcha, where we are asked to transcribe some letters and numbers to ‘prove we are human’ and get access to our emails, we may be helping a commercial firm digitize an archive.53 In the emerging world, free labour is extracted from customers under the guise of ‘participation’ and ‘feedback’. From the point of view of freedom, says Shoshana Zuboff, this new ‘surveillance capitalism’ is worse than the panopticon.54 The panopticon teaches us to conform with dominant norms. But that sort of power at least acknowledges that we might not conform. In surveillance capitalism, by contrast, the mechanisms of observation and manipulation are designed without any assumption of psychological self-determination. Conformity disappears into the machinery, an order of stimulus–response, cause and effect.

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Every time we fill . . . Moshe Z. Marvit, ‘How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine’, The Nation, 5 February 2014. 54. From the point of view of freedom, says Shoshana Zuboff . . . Shoshana Zuboff, ‘Big Other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilisation’, Journal of Information Technology, 2015, No. 30, pp. 75–89; Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019. 55. Ludwig Börne . . . Quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA: 1999, p. 514. 56.

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Marcus Gilroy-Ware, Filling the Void: Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media, Repeater Books: London, 2017, Kindle loc. 288. 6. As William Davies has argued . . . William Davies, ‘Neoliberalism and the revenge of the “social”’, openDemocracy, 16 July 2013. 7. Our lives have become . . . Shoshana Zuboff, ‘Big Other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilisation’, Journal of Information Technology, 2015, No 30, pp. 75–89. 8. . . . redolent of the ‘Skinner Box’ . . . B. F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis, B. F. Skinner Foundation: Cambridge, MA, 1991. 9. . . . according to former editor-in-chief . . .

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

See also Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 1–15, http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf. billionaire John Catsimatidis: Kashmir Hill, “Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich,” New York Times, March 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/technology/clearview-investors.html. “surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). $130 billion in advertising revenue: J. Clement, “Google: Ad Revenue 2001–2018,” Statista, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/.

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In 1996, the top five companies by market capitalization were General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell, Coca-Cola, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, and ExxonMobil; in 2020, the top five were Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, and Facebook. The utopian notions of technology as a great equalizer have given way to dystopian stories of data breaches, surveillance capitalism, biased algorithms, and rampant misinformation. So how did we end up here? It’s a far cry from the free and decentralized internet that the early pioneers imagined. To understand the forces at play, we need to examine the evolution of the personal computing industry from its roots in the counterculture of the 1960s to its current role as the powerhouse of the global economy.

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Governments and citizens have been in a constant tug-of-war over data since the very inception of what we think of today as a “state.” What’s new is that we’ve willingly handed over to private companies the permission to collect our personal data almost without constraint, creating an entire political economy aptly labeled by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff “surveillance capitalism.” By contrast, democratic governments are far more protective of personal privacy because they value individual liberty and therefore impose limitations on their own ability to collect and use data. Taylor Swift didn’t ask the police to set up a facial recognition system for fans at her concerts; she asked a private company to do it because there were far fewer restrictions on what kind of data it could collect and what it could do with it.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

Heartwarming images of ten-year-old girls learning Python could temporarily overshadow other issues that Silicon Valley was increasingly held accountable for, like the vast and growing economic inequality in the Bay Area, the omnisurveillance that Edward Snowden’s disclosures brought to public attention, surveillance capitalism, and how the tech industry exacerbated lack of public trust in institutions. Capitalizing on intersectionality isn’t an altogether bad thing. It’s just complicated. It is wonderful, for example, that Google provides pads and tampons in men’s rooms of some of its offices. Google also lets people announce their pronouns with stickers at tech conference check-ins, but meanwhile Google donates money to anti-LGBTQ politicians.

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Contrast that with Yelp and TripAdvisor listings, which also have only one page for each subject, but host consumer reviews, and can get overwhelmed with positive or negative fake reviews, such as the comments that piled up on user-review sites for the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, after the restaurant refused service to White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in 2018. In addition to its eschewal of surveillance capitalism and tracking, another aspect that distinguishes Wikipedia from other internet platforms with traffic at its scale is its accountability mechanisms. Again, all of this is imperfect—bad at times, terrible even, and an object lesson in transparency as tumult—but the mechanisms exist. There are rules, and these rules are easy to find.

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Goodreads and Twitch, the livestreaming video platform, are Amazon subsidiaries, but their social media operations are small in comparison to services like cloud computing, logistics, and retail. A good explanation of the difference between users and customers can be found in “The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus,” in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs, 2019): “There is no economic exchange, no price, and no profit. Nor do users function in the role of workers … Users are not paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of production.” 1. SEARCH In 2015, Google restructured itself and renamed its holding company “Alphabet,” but no one seems to actually call it that other than its shareholders.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Andrew Brooks, “The Hidden Trade in Our Second-Hand Clothes Given to Charity,” Guardian, February 13, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/sustainable-fashion-blog/2015/feb/13/second-hand-clothes-charity-donations-africa. 72. Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism,” Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, March 5, 2016, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of-surveillance-capitalism-14103616-p2.html. 73. Steven Rosenfeld, “Online Public Schools Are a Disaster, Admits Billionaire, Charter School-Promoter Walton Family Foundation,” AlterNet, February 6, 2016, http://www.alternet.org/education/online-public-schools-are-disaster-admits-billionaire-charter-school-promoter-walton; Credo Center for Research on Education Outcomes, Online Charter School Study 2015 (Stanford, CA: Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2015), https://credo.stanford.edu/pdfs/OnlineCharterStudyFinal2015.pdf. 74.

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Alternately, students may try to instrumentalize their reactions so completely that there is no space between their own desires and responses and those expected from increasingly computerized authorities. However great the merit of social harmony and cohesion, such frozen order is an affront to freedom and judgment. POSITIVE OPTIONS FOR ROBOTIC HELPERS If regulators can tame surveillance capitalism’s omnivorous appetite for data and control, robotic assistance could play a positive role in many classrooms. Shifting the frame from students controlled by technology to students themselves controlling and playing with it is critical. Rather than simply herding students from one digital environment to another, inspiring educators show them how to influence and even create such environments.

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This cynical pair of rationales for laissez-faire is particularly dangerous in data regulation, since norms can change quickly as people jostle for advantage.63 Uncoordinated, we rapidly reach an equilibrium that forces everyone to reveal more to avoid disadvantages. Cooperating to put together some enforceable rules, we can protect ourselves from a boundless surveillance capitalism.64 For example, some jurisdictions are beginning to pass laws against firms micro-chipping workers by subcutaneously injecting a rice-sized sensor underneath their skin.65 That project of self-protection is urgent, because subordinating inclusion is bound to become more popular over time.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

In the advertising world, this is known as “behavioral advertising”—in which personal and behavioral data mined from online activities are used to match ads to the interests of the target audience. The Fun Kid Racing app’s marketing of its users’ data through the Google ecosystem is one small instance of the phenomenon Harvard Business School Professor Emerita Shoshana Zuboff has defined as “surveillance capitalism.” Surveillance capitalism “operates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge. Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us . . . for the sake of others’ gain, not ours.”8 By piecing together information gleaned from multiple sources, including the 2018 lawsuit brought by New Mexico’s attorney general against Tiny Lab, Google, and others,9 and recent reports from the United Kingdom,10 French,11 Australian,12 and German13 antitrust agencies, we can get a few glimpses of how this environment is designed by the likes of Google and Facebook.

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Alyssa Newcomb, “Google Hit with FTC Complaint over ‘Inappropriate’ Kids Apps,” NBC News, December 19, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-hit-ftc-complaint-over-inappropriate-kids-apps-n949666; Google Play Developer Policy Center, “Families,” accessed April 30, 2019, https://play.google.com/about/families/. 5.Tiny Lab, “Tiny Lab Kids,” accessed April 30, 2019, https://www.tinylabkids.com. 6.Scott Goodson, “If You’re Not Paying for It, You Become the Product,” Forbes, March 5, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/03/05/if-youre-not-paying-for-it-you-become-the-product. 7.NM AG Complaint ¶ 3. 8.Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 11. 9.NM AG Complaint. 10.Unlocking Digital Competition: Report of the Digital Competition Expert Panel (London: March 2019), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/785547/unlocking_digital_competition_furman_review_web.pdf (the “Furman Report”). 11.Autorité de la Concurrence, Opinion no. 18-A-03 of 6 March 2018 on Data Processing in the Online Advertising Sector, http://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/doc/avis18a03_en_.pdf (“Autorité Report”). 12.Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), Digital Platforms Inquiry: Preliminary Report (December 2018), https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/inquiries/digital-platforms-inquiry/preliminary-report (“ACCC Preliminary Report”). 13.Bundeskartellamt, “Bundeskartellamt Prohibits Facebook from Combining User Data from Different Sources,” news release, February 7, 2019, https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/EN/Pressemitteilungen/2019/07_02_2019_Facebook.html; Bundeskartellamt, “Preliminary Assessment in Facebook Proceeding: Facebook’s Collection and Use of Data from Third-Party Sources Is Abusive,” news release, December 19, 2017, https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Meldung/EN/Pressemitteilungen/2017/19_12_2017_Facebook.html. 14.James B.

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See Federal Trade Commission fuel shortage incidents on airlines, 56–58, 61 Fun Kid Racing app (Tiny Lab), 194–95, 199, 202–3 Gallup, 277 Gamemakers, 192–224 overview, xiii, 192, 195–96 addictive qualities built into apps, 196–203 advertisers bidding on targets, 208–9 attracting bidders, 207–9 benefits of their technology, 221 business models, 198, 220 children’s data gleaned for advertisers, 193–95 controlling what we see or don’t see, 218–22 creating an illusion of choice and control, 211–15 extracting our personal data, 203–7 Google and FB dominance, 208, 210, 213–15 identifying consumers’ weaknesses for advertisers, 199–201 lack of transparency, 209–10 media and traffic from Google and FB, 210 offering developers a helping hand, 198, 204 payment for free services, 216–18 privacy assurance and policies, 194, 206–7, 211, 212, 217–18 profit from auctions, 209–11 surveillance capitalism, 195 targeting consumers, 204–5 toxic competition, 192–93, 203, 206–7, 220–22, 223 tracking software, 204–7, 217, 222 See also Facebook; Google gaming disorder, 202 Gates, Dominic, 265 gazelles with trackers metaphor, 92–93 General Data Protection Regulation, Europe, 287 General Mills, 64 GEO Group, 167, 172, 173, 175, 176 German printing industry, 244 Germany’s antitrust authority and Facebook, 222 Glass-Steagall Act (1933), 127–28 global economic crisis, causes of, 130 Goldberg, Shmuli, 103–4 Goldman Sachs, 274–76 Google auction of user data to advertisers, 208–9 Fun Kid Racing app, 193–95, 199 initial creation of, 282–83 Location History feature, 212–13 time spent on, 196 YouTube, 196, 208–9, 210, 215 See also Gamemakers Google Books Ngram Viewer, 131, 131–32, 132 government’s role in promoting healthy competition, 260–72 failure of, leading to financial crisis of 2008, 261–64 preventing exploitation of human weaknesses, 267–69 providing a safety net, 269–72 regulation of the market, 260 regulatory guides for the competition machine, 264–67 See also policy makers greed-inspired competition, 235–36, 237, 240.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

one of the leading states … vaccine passports were akin: Craig Mauger, “Michigan Leads the Nation in New COVID Cases, According to CDC Data,” Detroit News, November 16, 2021; Bruce Walker, “Michigan House Oversight Committee Considers Legislation to Ban Vaccine Passports,” Center Square, May 6, 2021; Dave Boucher, “Michigan Lawmakers Invite COVID-19 Conspiracy Theorist to Testify on Bill to Ban Vaccine Passports,” PolitiFact, May 6, 2021. “the infrastructure, globally”: Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Is Done Wrecking the American Establishment. Now He Wants to Destroy Europe’s,” New York Times, March 9, 2018. “good enough”: Jennifer Senior, “American Rasputin,” The Atlantic, June 6, 2022. “surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019). Israeli-designed spyware: Stephanie Kirchgaessner et al., “Revealed: Leak Uncovers Global Abuse of Cyber-surveillance Weapon,” The Guardian, July 18, 2021. “nanny cams” … Ring doorbell footage … “God View” … personal photos … period-tracking apps: Allyson Chiu, “She Installed a Ring Camera in Her Children’s Room for ‘Peace of Mind.’

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They just don’t know what to do about cell phones (or smart speakers or search histories or shadow banning or email and social media metadata…). And neither, it seems, does anyone else, including those in power, who are patently unwilling to rein in what the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism.” And Wolf, with her “Five Freedoms” campaign and her calls for anti-vax civil disobedience, is giving her followers something to do. She is telling them that it’s not too late to get their privacy, and their freedoms, back. Of course this is an appealing message. The past two decades have been a nonstop drip of shocking revelations about the myriad ways in which the record of our daily and intimate lives has somehow become the property of others.

…

Artificial intelligence is, after all, a mirroring and mimicry machine: we feed in the cumulative words, ideas, and images that our species has managed to amass (and digitize) over its history and these programs mirror back to us something that feels uncannily lifelike. A golem world. “I’d rather see an ad for cute shoes that I am going to like than see ads for a bunch of ugly stuff I don’t want,” one student said in an early class. In our discussions, we came to call this the “cute shoes problem” because it encapsulates one of the main reasons why surveillance capitalism and the AI revolution were able to sneak up on us with so little debate. Many of us do appreciate a certain level of automated customization, especially algorithms that suggest music, books, and people who might interest us. And at first, the stakes seemed low: Is it really a big deal if we see ads and suggestions based on our interests and tastes?

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Data, identity, and reputation are critical in the platform economy. Silicon Valley aspires to turn data into a new asset class—a commodity to be sold and traded in financial markets, with property regimes surrounding it. Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School calls this new reality “surveillance capitalism.” We have to move from surveillance capitalism to a system that is able to socialize data—such as with new forms of cooperativism and democratic social innovation. Cities, for instance, should be able to run distributed common data infrastructure on their own, with systems that ensure the security, privacy, and sovereignty of citizens’ data.

…

Unchecked, they could pose grave dangers. Platform co-ops can succeed at building privacy-positivity and basic decency into products and sell this as a competitive advantage against venture capitalist-backed tech companies that lack such qualities because they practice what is increasingly recognized as surveillance capitalism, the extraction of our data to modify our behaviors at scale. Learn from those who are succeeding already. Stocksy United is winning by being a design-led co-op that serves its design-oriented customers through co-ownership. Loconomics is gaining traction in the micro-labor market by solving pain-points of customers that VC-backed startups don’t even touch, such as certifying the safety credentials of service providers.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

This amounts to what I’ve termed the ‘disenchantment of politics by economics’.11 It also generates an attitude in which the purpose of social relations is to provide data and revenue to some third party. Threaded through the technologies of the credit derivative and the platform is a neoliberal rationality which expands the reach of financial calculation into areas previously governed by social norms. The rise of so-called surveillance capital in the twenty-first century was preordained by an economic and political rationality that dates back to the mid-twentieth century.12 This is disastrous for political liberalism. Dating back to the mid-seventeenth century, and the work of Thomas Hobbes in particular, liberalism’s key concern has been how to artificially manufacture trust.

…

As neoliberal reforms have sought to elevate financial mechanisms and metrics above legal ones, the defence of rights and due process has frequently become an anti-capitalist one. See, for instance, how liberal norms around privacy are an essential tool of resistance to the mission creep of ‘surveillance capital’. And as neoconservatives have sought to elevate executive decisions above legal and judicial authority, it has frequently been those on the left who are found deploying liberal–legal arguments against the state. On issues such as deportations, legal aid, detention without trial and ‘extraordinary rendition’, it has repeatedly been the left (and not the neoliberal centre) that has done the job of defending the rule of law and judicial process.

…

Milonakis, From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries Between Economics and Other Social Sciences, Routledge, 2009. 10 See N. Maclean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Penguin, 2016. 11 W. Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, Sage, 2014. 12 S. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019. 13 See J. Vogl, The Ascendency of Finance, John Wiley, 2017. 14 See W. Streeck, How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System, Verso, 2017. 15 D. Harvey, ‘The “New” Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession’, Socialist Register 40. 16 As Jean-François Lyotard wrote in his 1979 The Postmodern Condition (Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 4–5): ‘The relationships of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume – that is, the form of value.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Alexandra Alter, “Best Sellers Sell the Best Because They’re Best Sellers,” New York Times, September 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/19/books/penguin-random-house-madeline-mcintosh.html. 47. Alter, “Best Sellers Sell the Best Because They’re Best Sellers.” 48. Packer, “Cheap Words.” 49. For more on this, see Cory’s 2020 monograph, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, from OneZero/Medium, available at https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59. 50. Tim Wu, “What Years of Emails and Texts Reveal About Your Friendly Tech Companies,” New York Times, Aug. 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/opinion/amazon-facebook-congressional-hearings.html. 51. Tepper and Hearn, The Myth of Capitalism, 108–9. 52.

…

This “actionable market intelligence” allows it to poach authors, market its own titles to readers, and cross-sell non-book items to readers. The combination of surveillance and vertical integration means that Amazon vastly outpowers both publishers and other retailers, cementing its dominance, and giving it more opportunities to spy on readers. This is the true heart of “surveillance capitalism”—not the idea that Big Tech uses data-mining and machine learning to create mind-control systems that bypass our critical faculties and trick us into buying whatever they want to sell us. Rather, Big Tech abuses monopoly power to deprive us of choice by limiting what we can buy, redirecting our searches to hide rivals’ products, and locking us into its ecosystem with technologies we can’t alter without risking a lengthy prison sentence.49 Amazon tracks the phrases we highlight, the words we look up, who else is reading from the same address.

…

Google, 200 O’Reilly, 27 Oremus, Will, 236 organizing, 178–79, 248–49 Oron, Gadi, 67 orphan works, 189, 192–94 OverDrive, 241, 242 Pandora, 217 Pascal, Francine, 187 payola, 82 PCs (personal computers), 201 Pelly, Liz, 67, 80, 81, 241, 244 Penderecki, Kyzysztof, 66 Penguin, 35 Penguin Random House, 2, 34–35 The People’s Platform (Taylor), 14 Perry, Katy, 64 Peters, Marybeth, 185 Phoenix Computers, 201 Platform Capitalism (Srnicek), 230 Platform Cooperativism Consortium, 229 platforms, 14–15 playlists, music streaming, 78–84, 143–44 podcasting, 84–88 policy, corporate influence on, 94 Polone, Gavin, 107 Postmates, 166–67 poultry processing, 96 press publishers’ right, 233–34 Prince, 52, 62, 187 print-on-demand, 181 privacy, 137 private equity, 91–93, 249–50 producer cartels, 173 productivity gains, 253–54 Proposition 22, 249 Public Enemy, 62 public interest, 14 public ownership models, 242–44 Rabble, 240–41 radio broadcast industry: about, 89; local content, 90; ownership concentration, 90; private equity and leveraged buyouts, 91–93; regulation, 93–95; revenues, 90–91, 93 Random House, 32, 33, 34, 35 RapCaviar, 78 RealMedia, 26 reciprocity, 93 Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 55, 64, 185–86 recoupment, 53, 59, 69, 163, 169, 219, 221–22 regulation: antitrust, 146–51; costs, 137, 144; decline of systems of, 145–46; EU mandates, 257–58 regulatory capture, 92–93 remote work, 15 rentiers, 118–21 rent-seeking, 119 residual remuneration rights, 173–77, 214–16 Resonate, 237–38 Reuters Institute, 236 reversion rights, copyright, 183–95 right-wing radio culture, 94–95 Rimes, LeAnn, 55 Robinson, Joan, 10, 173 Robinson, Nathan, 233 Rodgers, Nile, 54, 164 Rolling Stone, 47 Rosen, Hilary, 185–86 Ross, Orna, 157 Rowdy (Joshua Rowsey), 241 royalties, streaming, 66, 68–69, 221–28 RSS, 86, 122 safe harbor laws, 125–27, 134 sampling, music, 61–63 Sanctuary, 57 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 163 Sargent, John, 30 Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, 185 Saudi royal family, 102 Scheiner, Bruce, 122 Scholz, Trebor, 237 Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 161–62, 212–13 Science Fiction Writers of America, 159 Screen Actors Guild, 16 self-publishing, 32–33, 215–16 Shatzkin, Mike, 35 Shazam, 73 Sheeran, Ed, 64 Sherman, Cary, 55 Shirky, Clay, 44–45 Shockley, William, 165–66 Shuster, Joe, 180 Siegel, Jerry, 180 Simon & Schuster, 34–35 Simson, John, 71, 93, 225–26 SiriusXM, 56 Slack, David, 108 Smashwords, 22 social media, and music industry, 56 Social Security Act, 150 Softbank, 102 songwriting, 69–70 Sony Music Entertainment: and artist mistreatment, 79, 221; and copyright, 188; dominating position of, 56; and recoupment, 59; and Spotify, 73, 75, 161; Spotify contract, 70–73 SoundCloud, 72–73 SoundExchange, 71 South Africa, 189 Spotify: about, 2, 11, 12, 18, 56; and Epidemic Sound, 81–82; and major labels, 73–75, 181; market share and profit, 83; Marquee initiative, 82; model, 67; and music licensing, 218; playlist culture, 79–84, 143–44; podcasting, 86–88; Sony contract, 70–73 Srinivasan, Dina, 43 Srnicek, Nick, 230 Stafford, Bill, 62 Statute of Anne (1710), 182–83 statutory licensing, 220–28 Stiehm, Meredith, 105 Stocksy, 229–30 Stoller, Matt, 34–35, 46 Stone, Brad, 21 streambait, 80 Stringer, Rob, 79 Stross, Charlie, 28 structural remedies, 148–49 StubHub, 101 Superman, 180 surveillance capitalism, 36 Swift, Taylor, 76, 169–70 switching costs, 7, 18, 26, 28, 31, 92, 119, 144, 249–50 synchronization rights, 219 tacit collusion, 31 talent agents and agencies, 104–9, 175–76 Taylor, Astra, 14, 229 Teachout, Zephyr, 149 Telecommunications Act (1996), 90 television media, back end financials, 109–11 Tencent Music Entertainment, 83, 84 Thicke, Robin, 63–64 third-party cookies, 231–32 This Is Spinal Tap (film), 188 Ticketmaster, 98, 100, 101 Tidal, 160, 239 TikTok, 136 Timberg, Scott, 47, 110–11 TLC, 55 Towse, Ruth, 16 Tracks, 240–41 transparency rights: Audible, 154–59; audit power, 164–65; data disclosure, 161–63; enforceability of regulatory transparency, 163–67; Kindle Unlimited, 159–60; music streaming, 160–61; Netflix, 160; normalization of, 164 Turner, David, 67, 68, 80, 164, 224 21st Century Fox, 2 Uber, 48–49, 102, 166–67, 171, 249 UK Competition and Markets Authority, 43, 45, 50 UK Musicians’ Union, 68 unions, 173–74, 248–49 United Talent Agency, 104, 106 universality, 198–99.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

‘I just think people are weak,’ an account manager at a Gibraltar-based gambling company told Cassidy. ‘If you get addicted it’s because you are weak, you have no willpower. Maybe I’m harsh. I see everything in black and white. I am addicted to cars because I want to be.’ But that is not what is happening. Bookmakers have learned all the tricks of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, the system invented in Silicon Valley which monetises customers’ data to get ever better at predicting what they will want and then selling it to them. The computer learns your habits and how to indulge you to keep you playing: notifications come at the right time to encourage you to have a bet at the weekend.

…

For the modern history of Gibraltar, I relied on Fortress to Democracy, The Political Biography of Sir Joshua Hassan by Sir William Jackson and Francis Cantos, Rock of Contention by George Hills and Gibraltar: a Modern History, by Chris Grocott and Gareth Stockey. For issues around gambling, I relied on Better Betting with a Decent Feller by Carl Chinn and Vicious Games by Rebecca Cassidy, which is superb. Thanks to James Noyes for talking me through the issues. I found the insights in Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism very important for understanding how online gambling sucks people in. I also very much appreciated the many parliamentary reports into the betting industries, which provided useful statistics, insights and transcripts. I really like parliamentary reports, and if I was in charge I’d make sure there were more of them.

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INDEX A accountants regulators 185, 186 Suspicious Activity Reports 189 Acheson, Dean 58 Action Fraud 214, 218 Aliyev family 191–3 Aliyev, Nurali 199, 200, 202 Aliyev, Rakhat 198, 199, 200 Allard Prize 145 Aloi, Tony 229–30, 231 Altman, Oscar 52 Angola 155 Anguilla 198, 235, 243 Apple 223 Archbishop of Canterbury’s Faculty Office 186–8 Asquith, Lord Julian 234 Asquith, Raymond 159, 169, 173 Assad, Hafez al- 159 Assange, Julian 171 Assets Recovery Agency 204 Association of Accounting Technicians 135 Australia 19 visas 244 Austria 166, 170, 171 autonomy 31, 38, 57 Azerbaijan 191–3, 197 B BAE Systems 85–9 Ballester, Freddie 98–100, 104, 105, 114, 121 Bank of England 36–40 cultural uniformity 45–6 Eurodollars 45–7, 49, 50–1, 54–5, 58–9, 232 governors 32, 33, 36 and Midland Bank 42 Suez Crisis 44 banknotes 8 banks and money laundering 194 Suspicious Activity Reports 189–90 Baring, Evelyn, first Earl of Cromer 16, 32 Baring, George Rowland Stanley, third Earl of Cromer 32–3, 36, 39, 55, 232 Baring, Rowland, second Earl of Cromer 32 Barings Bank 57 Barker, Alison 183 Barkshire, John 34, 40, 229–31 BBC, Orwell statue 8 Bean, David 88 Bell, Geoffrey 45–6, 51 Bell, Lord 171 Bercow, John 163 Berry, Elspeth 138, 146–7 Betfair 115 Better Regulation Task Force 111 betting see gambling Betting and Gambling Council 119 Billion Bright Trading Limited 213 billionaires, and COVID-19 pandemic 58 Birnbaum, Eugene 54 Blair, Tony 109 blockchain 242, 243 Boeing 170 BOLSA (Bank of London and South America) 50, 57 Bolton, George 43, 50 Bossano, Joe 95, 96–7, 123, 124 Bretton Woods 30, 31 Brexit 12–13, 140, 142, 144, 248, 249 Bridgen, Andrew 140–1 British empire 18–20, 58 and City of London 30 British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association 142 British Syrian Society 159–60 British Ukrainian Society (BUS) 159–60, 172–3, 174 British Virgin Islands (BVI) 68–71, 74, 79–81, 91, 227 Firtash 161 Khassenov 209 shell companies 72–9, 81–5, 86–9, 90, 123, 124, 235, 238, 239, 240 Brompton Road Tube station 151–3, 164–5, 170, 172, 174, 176–7 Brown, Gordon 132 Brown, John 108, 109–10 Budapest Project 167–8, 169 Burma 20 Butler, Paul 71, 72–3, 75–6 butlers 4–6 Jeeves 6–7, 10–11 C Callaghan, James 36 Cambridge University 160–1, 162, 163, 169, 171–2, 237 Canada 19 visas 244 capital flows 31–2, 50, 51, 55, 59 Eurodollars 40–2, 44–57, 58–9, 232, 238 funk money 64–6, 78–9, 82, 208 capitalism 35 Cassidy, Rebecca 111–12, 113, 116–17, 119 Cayman Islands 233–5, 241, 243, 247 Ceylon 20 Chambers, Ajit 149–50, 151, 152, 153, 165, 176–7 Chandler, Victor 104–7, 108 Child & Child 192–3 China British investment in 19 cultural revolution 66 and Hong Kong 78, 82 money laundering 1–4 socialism 123 and Tanganyika 63 Church of England 186–8 Churchill, Winston 7, 21 City of London 29–30, 32, 57–8 Big Bang 56 cultural uniformity 32–4, 35–6 deregulation 56–7 Eurodollars 44–57, 58–9 financial innovation 48 and funk money 64, 65 Midland Bank 40–2 money laundering 182, 184 offshore finance 249 regulation 39–40 Scottish limited partnerships 137–9, 141, 142–3 and Suez Crisis 42–4 Clarke, Kenneth 240 Clinton, Bill 109, 121, 236 Cobbold, Cameron 33 Colston, Edward 7 Columbus, Christopher 69 communism 35 Tanganyika 62, 63 Coomes, Mr and Mrs 101 Coral 103, 107 Countrywide 193 COVID-19 pandemic 13, 15 and billionaires 58 Crimea 164 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, first Earl of 16, 32 Cromer, George Rowland Stanley Baring, third Earl of 32–3, 36, 39, 55, 232 Cromer, Rowland Baring, second Earl of 32 Crown Prosecution Service 204, 218 Cuban Missile Crisis 52 Curaçao 71–2, 198 Cyprus 19 Firtash 166 D Daily Telegraph 108 Danske Bank 144–5 Davies, Philip 115 defence against money laundering (DAML) SARs 195 Department for Culture, Media and Sport 110 Deripaska, Oleg 226 DF Foundation 161 dirty money see money laundering dollars 41–2, 44, 48 see also Eurodollars double taxation treaties 72, 75 E The Economist 151–2 Eden, Anthony 23, 24, 26 Edmonds, Tamlyn 219–20, 221, 222 Edmonds Marshall McMahon (EMM) 219–20, 225 Egypt, Suez Crisis 15–19, 20–7 Eisenhower, President 24 ELMER 195, 205 Envers 87, 88 estate agents 193 Suspicious Activity Reports 189 Eurobonds 45 Eurodollars 40–2, 44–57, 58–9, 232, 238 exchange rates 31–2, 38 F Fawcett, Millicent 8 FBI Budapest Project 168 Firtash 168–71, 200, 202 Federal Reserve 46, 48 Eurodollars 51, 53–4 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 182–4 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) 183, 185, 186 financial innovation 48 see also Eurodollars Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) 190, 195 Financial Security Index (Tax Justice Network) 235 Financial Times 38 Firtash, Dmitry 157–66, 171–6, 177, 181, 219, 227 Brompton Road Tube station 164–5, 170, 172, 174, 177 Cambridge University 160–1, 162, 163, 169, 171–2, 237 FBI case 168–71, 200, 202 Firtash, Lada 163, 172 fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) 112 Fonseca, Ramon 78 Foreign Affairs Committee 166, 179–81, 248 Fortuna United LP 128–30 France Eurodollars 49 overseas territories 243 prosecutions 216 Suez Crisis 23–4 Franco, Francisco 93, 95 Franklin, Professor Simon 161 Fraser, Ian 128–9 Freud, Jane McAdam 165 Fry, Richard 29–30, 57 funk money 64–6 Hong Kong 78–9, 82 Kazakhstan 208 G gambling 10, 102–5 deregulation 107–14, 236–7 gambling addiction 111, 116– 20, 121, 124 Gibraltar 98–102, 104, 105–7, 113, 114–17, 122–4, 242–3 Gambling Commission 118, 119, 185 Gambling with Lives 118 Gamesys 120 Garcia, Joe 122–3 Gartcosh 125–6 gas 153–5, 168 Gazprom 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161 Gazprombank 161 Germany, Eurodollars 49 ghost stations 149–53, 164–5 Gibraltar 91–8, 114–15, 122, 227, 235, 238, 241–3, 245 blockchain 242, 243 gambling 10, 98–102, 104, 105–7, 109, 110, 113, 114– 17, 119–20, 121–4, 242–3, 245 smuggling 92, 97 Global Witness 157–8, 169, 196, 198, 200, 205 golden visas 244–5 Goodman, Helen 172–3 Granovski, Vladimir 159 Greece financial crisis 31 visas 244 Green, Jeremy 57 Greenspan, Alan 46 Grogan, John 159, 160 Group DF 161 Grundy, Milton 233–4, 235–6 Guernsey 235 Guyana 19 H Hambro, Charles 49 Hambros Bank 57, 65 Hayek, Friedrich 35 Hayward, Mark 188 hedge funds Cayman Islands 234 and limited partnerships 138 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs 185 Herald 125, 147 Hitler, Adolf 21 Hodge, Margaret 239–40, 241, 247–8 Hodivala, Jama 223 Home Office, UWOs 197 Hong Kong and British Virgin Islands 78–9, 82 Khassenov 208–9, 211–12, 213, 220 Horrocks, Ian 210, 214–15, 218, 219, 220, 221 HSBC 189, 193 Hungary 166, 167–8, 169 Hunte, Lewis 76, 77 Huntington, Earl of 107 I India 19, 20 Institute of Chartered Accountants 194–5 Intelligence and Security Committee 175–6, 201 international business companies (IBCs) 77–8, 83–4 International Centres Forum 90 Ireland betting duty 106 petrol taxes 47, 54, 56, 236 Isle of Man 235, 243 Isola, Albert 241–2 Israel, Suez Crisis 23–4 Italy, visas 244 J Jaspert, Augustus James Ulysses 80–1 Jeeves, Reginald 6–7, 9, 11, 59, 101, 110–11, 232, 246 Jersey 235 Johnson, Boris Brexit campaign 225 London Underground 149–50, 151 and Russian influence in UK 175 Jowell, Tessa 110 Justice Committee 225 K Kazakhstan 198–201, 207, 208 Kennedy, John F. 63 Kenya 19, 61 Keynes, John Maynard 35 Khassenov, Argyn 207–15 private prosecution 215, 219– 23, 226 Kleinwort Benson 64 Kroll 126, 127, 128 Kulich, Aleksandr 209, 213 Kulich, Andrey 208–9, 210, 211, 213–14, 220, 221–3, 226 L Ladbrokes 103, 104, 107, 115 Laird, Judge Francis 220, 221 Lancet 124 Lasser Bros 229 Law Commission 190–1 Law Society of Scotland 136–7 lawyers 11–12 private prosecutions 223–4 regulators 185 Suspicious Activity Reports 188–9 Leask, David 125–6, 128, 131, 134, 135, 136, 144, 147 Lebedev, Yevgeny 248 legislative reform orders (LROs) 139–40 Levin, Carl 247 Li Ka-Shing 78–9 limited partnerships (LPs) 138, 143–4, 146–7 Northern Ireland 146 private fund limited partnerships 142, 145–6 Scottish limited partnerships 128–45, 227, 245, 246 London Kleptocracy Tours 162–3, 196 London Underground 149–51 Brompton Road Tube station 151–3, 164–5, 170, 172, 174, 176–7 M McMafia 179, 196, 214 Macmillan, Harold 20, 23 Malaya 19, 20 Malone, Jeff 17–18, 25–6, 34–5 Malta 242 Marx, Karl 35 May, Theresa 182 Mercantile House 229 merchant banks 36, 44 Metcalf, David 244 Micky Blue Eyes 230–1 Midland Bank 40–2, 44, 45, 51–2, 57 Migration Advisory Committee 244 Mills, Nigel 203 Ministry of Defence Brompton Road Tube station 152, 164–5, 172 Gibraltar 94–5, 114–15 Mishcon de Reya 199, 201 Mitchell, Andrew 239–40, 241, 247–8 Mkapa, Benjamin 89 Mogilevich, Semyon 157, 158, 167–8, 169 Moldova 126–7, 128, 129, 131, 132, 142, 143, 147 money laundering 1–4, 9, 179– 82, 196–8, 203–6, 246 Aliyev family 191–3 Cayman Islands 247 Financial Action Task Force 182–4 limited partnerships 128–45, 146, 245 Mogilevich 167–8 Nazarbayeva case 198–203 Panama Papers 191–2 UK regulation 184–96 Moneyland (Bullough) 30, 45, 130 Montado, Ernest 94, 95 Montegriffo, Peter 114 Moscow Narodny Bank (MNB) 41 Mossack Fonseca 78, 83, 191 Mullin, Roger 132, 134–6, 138– 42, 143–4 Mynors, Humphrey 39 N Nasser, Gamal Abdel 22, 23 National Crime Agency (NCA) 197, 201–4, 241 and Khassenov 214 Nazarbayeva case 199–201, 202, 203 National Lottery 103–4 Nazarbayev family 208 Nazarbayev, Nursultan 198, 201 Nazarbayeva, Dariga 198, 199, 200, 202 Ndibe, Okey 10 Netherlands 190 New Deal 31, 56 New York 229–31 New York Times 53, 89–90 New Zealand 19 Nigeria 155 healthcare 9–10 Nixon, Richard 55 Noriega, Manuel 78 Northern Ireland limited partnerships 146 petrol taxes 47, 54, 56, 236 notaries 187–8 Noyes, James 120 Nurse, Gwyneth 141–2, 143 Nyerere, Julius 62–3, 85, 89–90 O O’Brien, Leslie 54 Ogle, Vanessa 64 online gambling 114–17, 119– 20, 124 Only When I Larf 212 Orange Revolution 155–7, 159 Orban, Victor 169 Ormerod, David 191 Orwell, George 8 overseas territories 235, 239–41, 243, 245 see also British Virgin Islands; Cayman Islands; Gibraltar Owens, Lynne 201 P Panama 78, 82, 240 Panama Papers 83, 191–2 partnerships 132 see also limited partnerships Party Gaming 114, 121–2 Patel, Priti 181 Peel, Robert 7–8 Petfre 120 Philip, Prince 61, 161, 162, 169 police 216–17 and financial crime 218, 219– 20, 246 funding 224 Gartcosh 125–6 Hungary 168 and Khassenov 214, 219–20 and London Kleptocracy Tours 163 and private sector 202 and Scottish limited partnerships 126, 144, 146, 246 Portugal, visas 244 private equity, and limited partnerships 137–9, 142 private fund limited partnerships (PFLPs) 142, 145–6 private prosecutions 215–19, 223–8 Khassenov 215, 219–23, 226 problem gamblers 111, 116–20, 121, 124 Pryor, Henry 195 Public Accounts Committee 248 Purplebricks 193 Putin, Vladimir 155 and Ukraine 156, 164, 166 R Racing Post 106 Rankin, Ian 125, 134 Reagan, Ronald 56 Red Diamond Trading Limited 86, 88 Regulatory Reform Committee 139, 141–2 Rhodes, Cecil 7, 18–19 Riegels, Colin 71 Riegels, Michael in British Virgin Islands 68, 71, 73–4, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 83–5 in Tanzania 61–2, 63, 65–7, 85 and Tanzania radar contract 89 Riegels, Norma 67, 68, 73, 75, 84–5 Risby, Lord 159–60, 163–4, 173 Rock Turf Accountants 98, 100–1 RosUkrEnergo (RUE) 155, 156–7, 158, 169 Rothermere, Viscount 32 Royal Navy, Gibraltar 92, 93, 94–5 Russia money in UK 175–6, 179, 182, 222 organised crime 167 and Ukraine 154, 155, 164 S Saudi Arabia, and BAE Systems 87, 90 Scotland, police force 246 Scotsman 125 Scottish limited partnerships (SLPs) 128–45, 227, 245, 246 Scottish National Party 131–2 Scottish private fund limited partnerships 146 Scottish Property Federation 136, 142 Serious Fraud Office (SFO) 206 and BAE Systems 88–9, 90 Seychelles 128–9 Sharif, Khalid Mohammed 192–3 Shaw, David 84 shell companies 72–84, 86–9, 90, 123, 124, 130–1, 196, 237, 239–40 Scottish limited partnerships 128–32 Shetler-Jones, Robert 159, 171, 175 Shonfield, Andrew 37–9, 59 Shor, Ilan 127, 128 Short, Clare 86 Skripal, Sergei 179 Smith, Richard 128–9, 133–4 Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) 192–3 Soviet Union 153 see also Kazakhstan; Russia; Ukraine Spain, and Gibraltar 93, 95, 97–8, 124 Spink, Mike 162, 165 sportsbook.com 114 Spring, Richard (Lord Risby) 159–60, 163–4, 173 Standard Chartered 209, 210, 211–12, 220 Stark, Pete 75 sterling 30, 42–3 The Sting 212 Stoutt, Lavity 75, 76 Suez Crisis 15–19, 20–7, 34–5, 42–4, 58, 249 Suez Veterans’ Association (SVA) 15, 16–18, 22, 24, 25–6 suicides, and gambling addiction 118 surveillance capitalism 117 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) 2–4, 187–91, 192, 193, 194 ELMER 195, 205 Switzerland Eurodollars 49 Firtash 166 T Tanchel, Vivienne 225–6 Tanganyika 61–3 Tanzania 63, 65–7, 85 corruption 89–90 radar contract 85–9 tax havens 72, 84 see also British Virgin Islands; Cayman Islands; Curaçao Tax Justice Network (TJN) 235 taxation treaties 71–2, 75 Thank You, Jeeves (Wodehouse) 110–11 Thatcher, Margaret 56 Thompson, Mark 181, 206 The Times 131, 140 Tortola 69 Trainspotting 128 Transparency International 185, 194, 196 Transport for London (TfL) 149 Traynor, Brian 99–100 Treasury and Bank of England 37–8 limited partnerships 136, 139, 141–2, 143 Treaty of Utrecht 93 Tube see London Underground Turpin, Neil 187, 188 U UK Finance 190 Ukraine 131, 170, 174–5 British Ukrainian Society 159–60 corruption 155, 164 gas 153–5, 156–7, 158, 168 Orange Revolution 155–7, 159 unexplained wealth orders (UWOs) 196–202, 203–4 United Nations General Assembly, Suez Crisis 43 United States and BAE Systems 87 and British Virgin Islands 78, 82 and Cayman Islands 247 Eurodollars 51, 52, 55 financial deregulation 56–7 and Firtash 166, 168–71, 176, 177 gambling 102, 120–2, 236 and Gibraltar 96 and money laundering 189, 191, 193 New Deal 31, 56 offshore business 71–2, 73, 74–5 and organised crime 166–71 and Panama 78 Regulation Q 41, 56 Suez Crisis 24–5, 43–4 and Tanganyika 63 and Ukraine 164 visas 244 United States Virgin Islands (USVI) 70 V Venezuela 155 Vicious Games (Cassidy) 111– 12, 113, 116–17, 119 Virgin Islands 69, 70 see also British Virgin Islands visas 244–5 Vithlani, Shailesh 85–8 Volcker, Paul 46 W Walker, David 50–1 Wall Street Journal 168–9 Wallace, Ben 194, 196 Washington, George 63 welfare state 31, 56 Westwood, Neville 71, 73 Wheatley, Sowande 240 whistle-blowers 246–7 Whittingdale, John 173–4 Wilkinson, Howard 145 William Hill 103, 107, 108, 115 Without the Option (Wodehouse) 6–7 Wodehouse, P.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Unfortunately, as the discussion below will illustrate, there are many uses of Big Data that disadvantage consumers as a whole, and especially informationally disadvantaged consumers. Some have referred to the market economy that is evolving using Big Data as surveillance capitalism. See, for instance, John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Surveillance Capitalism,” Monthly Review, July 1, 2014; Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89; and Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). 17.“Perfect” price discrimination is the practice of trying to charge each consumer the maximum he is willing to pay for a good or service.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

Even before the coronavirus struck, over half of global companies with more than 1,000 employees were using ‘non-traditional techniques to monitor staff, including tracking keystrokes, monitoring email conversations and even monitoring conversations between staff’.23 ‘User-activity monitoring’ – UAM, as this new world of workplace surveillance is known – was on track to be a $3.3 billion industry by 2023.24 Now, with a rapid rise in remote working as a result of the pandemic, as well as increased emphasis on productivity, worker surveillance has significantly ramped up. We are living in an age that Shoshana Zuboff has called the ‘Age of Surveillance Capitalism’.25 An age in which for increasing numbers of people your employer is not only constantly watching you, but constantly using AI, Big Data and a whole host of ever more intrusive and granular measuring devices to draw all kinds of conclusions about you. Such conclusions can determine your career trajectory including whether you will be promoted or fired, yet they are all too often based on data that is absent of context and doesn’t take into account extenuating circumstances.

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Twenge, Jean M. iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017). Yang, Keming. Loneliness: A Social Problem (London; New York: Routledge, 2019). Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). Notes CHAPTER ONE: This is the Lonely Century 1 ‘Covid-19: One Third of Humanity under Virus Lockdown’, The Economic Times, 25 March 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/covid-19-one-third-of-humanity-under-virus-lockdown/articleshow/74807030.cms?

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Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2019). 91 Sebastian Deri, Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich, ‘Home alone: why people believe others’ social lives are richer than their own’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 6 (December 2017), 858–77. 92 ‘Childline: More children seeking help for loneliness’, BBC News, 3 July 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44692344. 93 J. Clement, ‘U.S. group chat frequency 2017, by age group’. Statista, 5 November 2018, https://www.statista.com/statistics/800650/group-chat-functions-age-use-text-online-messaging-apps/. 94 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs, 2019); see also John Harris, ‘Death of the private self: how fifteen years of Facebook changed the human condition’, Guardian, 31 January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/31/how-facebook-robbed-us-of-our-sense-of-self. 95 Josh Constine, ‘Now Facebook says it may remove Like counts’, TechCrunch.com, 2 September 2019. https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/02/facebook-hidden-likes/; Greg Kumparak, ‘Instagram will now hide likes in 6 more countries’, TechCrunch.com, 17 July 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/17/instagram-will-now-hide-likes-in-6-more-countries/. 96 Amy Chozick, ‘This Is the Guy Who’s Taking Away the Likes’, New York Times, 17 January 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/business/instagram-likes.html. 97 ‘Over Three Quarters of Brits Say Their Social Media Page is a Lie’, Custard Media, 6 April 2016, https://www.custard.co.uk/over-three-quarters-of-brits-say-their-social-media-page-is-a-lie/. 98 Sirin Kale, ‘Logged off: meet the teens who refuse to use social media’, Guardian, 29 August 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/aug/29/teens-desert-social-media. 99 Harris, ‘Death of the private self’. 100 Rebecca Jennings, ‘Facetune and the internet’s endless pursuit of physical perfection’, Vox, 25 July 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/16/20689832/instagram-photo-editing-app-facetune. 101 Chris Velazco, ‘Apple highlights some of the best (and most popular) apps of 2019’, Engadget, 3 December 2019, https://www.engadget.com/2019/12/03/apple-best-apps-of-2019-iphone-ipad-mac/. 102 Elle Hunt, ‘Faking it: how selfie dysmorphia is driving people to seek surgery’, Guardian, 23 January 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/23/faking-it-how-selfie-dysmorphia-is-driving-people-to-seek-surgery. 103 Jessica Baron, ‘Does Editing Your Selfies Make You More Likely to Want Plastic Surgery?’

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

It can even know where we are at a given time, what we sound like, and how we look.33 Because they know what we need and want, these companies have tremendous power that can benefit or harm us depending on how it is used and by whom. The temptation to use control over highly valued resources for less than virtuous purposes is ever-present. In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff meticulously documented how companies profit from using and selling our personal data.34 Initially, tech companies captured users’ data to improve the services they offered. Then, in the 1990s, some began using this information to generate revenue by targeting us with ads they knew we were likely to respond to.

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See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 31 Yuval Noah Harari, “Why Technology Favors Tyranny,” The Atlantic, September 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/. 32 Adam Satariano, “How My Boss Monitors Me While I Work From Home,” New York Times, May 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/technology/employee-monitoring-work-from-home-virus.html. 33 Amy Webb, The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020). 34 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020). 35 Tobias Rose-Stockwell, “This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit,” Medium, August 12, 2019, https://medium.com/@tobiasrose/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de. See also Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get inside Our Heads (Vancouver, B.C.: Langara College, 2020). 36 Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb, Prediction Machines, 43. 37 Open Hearing on Foreign Influence Operations’ Use of Social Media Platforms (Company Witnesses), Before the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, 115th Cong. (2018) (statement of Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter). 38 Jerrold Nadler and David N.

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For a comprehensive list of locations of any word or phrase, use your reading system’s search function. 2008 financial crisis, 118, 126 48 Laws of Power, The (Greene), 19 Aakash’s story, 82–84 abuse of power, 21, 37, 43, 110–13 access to valued resources changing power balance, 8–13, 194 collective choices, 195 expanding networks for, 194 Ning’s story, 61, 63–64 personal data surveillance, 151–54 purposeful use of technology and, 148, 150 reclaiming democratic power, 197 Adbusters, 118 Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The (Zuboff), 152 agitation, 118–20, 137, 154, 195, 196, 238n7 agricultural revolution, 142 AI Now Institute, 160 Aladdin, x algorithms, 148–51, 153, 158–60 Alighieri, Dante, 41 Alinsky, Saul D., 20 Allegory of Good and Bad Government, The (Lorenzetti), 165 Allen, Danielle, 186 Alphabet Workers Union, 157–58 altruism, 26, 30–31, 36–38, 55, 196 Amazon, 112, 152, 153, 157, 159 Amnesty International, 156 Andersen, Lene Rachel, 187, 188, 258n83 Anderson, Cameron, 211n25, 212n10, 212n13, 230n12, 250n3 Anderson, Elizabeth, 177 antitrust legislation, 11, 159 apartheid, 117 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 218n18, 220n34 Apple, 113, 151, 153, 157, 158 Arab Spring, 109, 117, 118 Ardern, Jacinda, 53–54 Arendt, Hannah, 96 Argentina’s marriage equality story, 131–37, 242n34 Argentine LGBT Federation, 133–37, 242n34 Aristotle, 55, 57 artificial intelligence (AI), 148–49 Associação Saúde Criança (Instituto DARA), 28 attention economy, 152–53 attraction strategy, 8–11, 9, 12, 194 Austen, Jane, 46 authoritarianism, xvii, 36–38, 43, 122, 152, 185 authority-power relationship, 66–68, 69–70, 73 #BalanceTonPorc, 137 Banaji, Mahzarin R., 231n19, 231n20, 233n48 Banerjee, Abhijit V., 114 Barefoot College’s innovation, 144–46, 148, 161 Bastida, Xiye, 121–24 Beard, Mary, 101 Beauvoir, Simone de, 102 belonging, 2, 7, 58, 82, 105, 118, 133, 168, 187, 194, 221n40 See also valued resources: affiliation benefit corporations (B-Corps), 176 Bentham, Jeremy, 151, 245n30 Berners-Lee, Tim, 147, 148 betweenness, 79–81, 79, 153 Bhatia, Karan, 157 bias algorithmic, 150–51 fundamental attribution error, 16 negativity bias, 19 status quo bias, 74 confirmation bias, 88 See also stereotypes, racism, gender inequality BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), 88, 117, 151, 196 Björkman, Tomas, 187, 188, 258n83 Black Lives Matter movement, 117, 139, 141, 147–48 Black Voters Matter Fund, 190 Blau, Peter M., 261n4 Bloomberg, Michael, 130 Boards of Directors, 66, 86–89, 91–92, 128–130, 157, 169, 174–177, 188 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 47 Bourdieu, Pierre, 231n26, 232n34 Brass, Daniel J., 226n12 Brave New World (Huxley), 164 Brock, Timothy, 135 Brodsky, Greg, 162–63 Brown, LaTosha, 190–91 Browner, Carol, 80, 81, 84 Buddhism, 32–33 Buffett, Warren, 114 Buolamwini, Joy, 150 Burke, Tarana, 137 Burt, Ronald S., 227n25, 228n36, 236n66 Business Roundtable, 175–76 Caesar, Julius, 101 Cailliau, Robert, 147, 148 Capital (Marx), 110 Carnegie, Andrew, 110–11 Caro, Robert A., 14–15 Carus, Titus Lucretius, 41 caste system, 91–92 Castells, Manuel, 199, 231n26, 239n2, 261n9 Catholic Church, 131, 135 certified coaches, 5, 209n4 change-makers, 74, 78 Channapatna artisans, 47, 50 chattel slavery, 91–92 checks on power, 165–92 collective responsibility, 189–92 employee representation, 177–82 organizational power sharing, 167–73, 191–92 oversight and accountability, 173–77 societal power sharing, 182–84, 192, 256n63 structural limits, 165–66 See also civic education and engagement, civic vigilance Chenoweth, Erica, 124 Chomsky, Noam, 219n25, 257n77 Cialdini, Robert B., 210n15, 227n23 Citizens United, 118 civic education and engagement, 184–88 civic vigilance, 184–86, 192, 257n74, 257n79 Civil Rights Act, 14 Clegg, Stewart, 236n64, 262n22 Cleisthenes, 182, 256n63 climate science, 45–46 Clinton, Bill, 80 Coats, Michael, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171 Code of Hammurabi, 100–01 codetermination, 181 Cohen, Joshua, 257n75, 259n96 collective action consolidation strategy, 11–12, 111, 112 Google employees story, 154–58 keeping power in check, 192 power distribution responsibility, 195 shifting power balance and, 115, 178–79 collective movements, 117–39 agitation, 118–20, 137, 154, 195, 196, 239n6 digital technology and, xvii, 137–39, 154–58, 242n40 innovation, 119–20, 125–30, 147–49, 154, 195, 196 orchestration, 119–20, 131–37, 154, 195, 196 public agenda and, 120–25 shifting power balance, 115 collective orientation, 32, 36, 195 collective responsibility, 189–92 Community Interest Companies, 176 concentration of wealth, 162, 175–76, 189–90 confirmation bias, 88 Confucius, 55 consolidation strategy, 8, 9, 11–12, 111, 112, 142, 194 Contract with America (Gingrich), 80 Cook, Tim, 158 cooperatives, 162–63, 179–81 Cordeiro, Vera, 27–29, 33, 38–39, 166 Courpasson, David, 247n57, 262n22 COVID-19, 38, 49, 176 Creighton, Mandell, 24 CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), 162, 164, 249n79 Crozier, Michel, 225n6 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 42 Cuddy, Amy J.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

What separated Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Discord, and the other new platforms of the social media age from earlier communities like Metafilter and The WELL wasn’t simply their scale, features, or topics. It was the business model that underpinned them, a potent version of economic and ideological libertarianism that saw conversation as a natural resource to be exploited for commercial gain. In her groundbreaking 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, academic and writer Shoshana Zuboff thoroughly dissects the effects of surveillance capitalism’s unchecked rise on individuals and our broader society. “Innocent hangouts and conversations are embedded in a behavioral engineering project of planetary scope and ambitions,” Zuboff writes. “Everything depends upon feeding the algorithms that can effectively and precisely bite on him and bite on her and not let go.

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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. New York: Henry Holt, 2018. Headlee, Celeste. We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. New York: HarperCollins, 2017. Odell, Jenny. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2019. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. Chapter 7 Reedy, Christianna. “Kurzweil Claims That the Singularity Will Happen by 2045.” Futurism. May 10, 2017. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1958. Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future by Margaret Heffernan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, clean water, complexity theory, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, driverless car, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, George Santayana, gig economy, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, index card, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, liberation theology, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megaproject, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rosa Parks, Sam Altman, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, twin studies, University of East Anglia

Wolmar, Christian, Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere, London Publishing Partnership, 2018 19 For examples here, see Eubanks, Virginia, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor, St Martin’s Press, New York, 2017, as well as O’Neill, Cathy, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, Allen Lane, London, 2016, and reports from the AI Now Institute: ainowinstitute.org 20 ‘Overcoming Speed Bumps on the Road to Telematics’, www2.deloitte.com/­content/­dam/­insights/us/­articles/­telematics-in-auto-insurance/­DUP-695_Telematics-in-the-Insurance-Industry_vFINAL.pdf, accessed 20 August 2019. Also quoted in Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Public Affairs, New York, 2019 21 ‘Good Judgment Project research found that super-forecasters can anticipate events 400 days ahead that other forecasters can only see 150 days ahead’, www.goodjudgment.com, accessed 29 January 2019 22 www.youtube.com/­watch?

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guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6Ly93­d3cuZWN­vc2lhLm­9yZy9zZWFyY2g_cT1hbWF6b24rYW50aWNpcGF0b3J5K3­Nob3BwaW5­nJmFkZG9uPXNhZmFya­Q&­guce_referrer_cs=tQBTN1R67wK4N8­Ucod2ewA, accessed 21 August 2019 44 Of course, the company might make the wrong choices (it forever sends me emails recommending that I buy books I’ve written), but that’s okay, because the first few I’ll be allowed to keep as a gesture of goodwill 45 Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, op. cit. 46 Strangely this comment appears to have been made without irony or any awareness that our financial systems are imperfect. Pentland, Alex, ‘Society’s Nervous System: Building Effective Government, Energy, and Public Health Systems’, hd.media.mit.edu/­tech-reports/­TR-664.pdf, accessed 20 August 2019 4 NO AVAILABLE DATASETS 1 For more detail, see Kania, John and Kramer, Mark, ‘Embracing Emergence: How Collective Impact Addresses Complexity’, Stanford Social Innovation Review, 21 January 2013.

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When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors and identify good and bad [ones]. Then we develop “treatments” and “data pellets” that select good behaviors. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us.’ Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, op. cit. The book is replete with jaw-dropping interviews with Silicon Valley leaders proudly discussing the efficiency of inevitability when it can be forced. INDEX A note about the index: The pages referenced in this index refer to the page numbers in the print edition. Clicking on a page number will take you to the ebook location that corresponds to the beginning of that page in the print edition.

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives by Michael A. Heller, James Salzman

23andMe, Airbnb, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, endowment effect, estate planning, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, land tenure, Mason jar, Neil Armstrong, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil rush, planetary scale, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, rent control, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, you are the product, Zipcar

In 2018, insights: Steve Lohr, “Calls Mount to Ease Big Tech’s Grip on Your Data,” New York Times, July 25, 2019. If you want a sense of what companies know about you, see Thorin Klosowski, “Big Companies Harvest Our Data. This Is Who They Think I Am,” New York Times, May 28, 2020. “surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). “Imagine if General Motors”: Lohr, “Calls Mount.” Chapter 4: My Home Is Not My Castle “Dad, there’s a drone”: “Hillview Man Arrested for Shooting Down Drone; Cites Right to Privacy,” WDRB, July 28, 2015.

…

Collecting, analyzing, and selling this data is truly what drives the Internet economy. In 2018, insights into American’s desires, attitudes, and activities online were worth an estimated $76 billion—if just half of that revenue were shared with individuals, each would receive a check for $122. Shoshana Zuboff has named this business model “surveillance capitalism.” As one economist puts it bluntly: “Imagine if General Motors did not pay for its steel, rubber or glass—its inputs. That’s what it’s like for the big internet companies. It’s a sweet deal.” This is why so many apps are free. But as tech articles repeat: when the app is free, you are the product.

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

What if you have a knee replacement that failed and you sue the manufacturer and the manufacturer goes to Acxiom and subpoenas your behavioral history to show you viewed ads about canoeing? Does that mean you went canoeing? It means you’re interested in canoeing.” Advertisers would be keen on having access to medical records so they could market pharmaceutical products. The accumulation of data to predict future behavior has been labeled surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Its pioneers have been digital companies like Google and Facebook that derive their marketing power from shadowing citizens and using data to become fortune-tellers. “The game,” Zuboff wrote, “is no longer about sending you a mail-order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising.

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See mobile phones/smartphones Smith, Adam, 10 Smith, Brett Kassan, 68 Smith, Shane, 125, 235 Snapchat, 137–38 advertising revenues of, 23 Snaptivity, 287 SocialCode, 161–63 socially conscious advertising, 220, 307–9 Unilever and, 217 Weed on, 254–56 Sorrell, Jack, 101–2, 107 Sorrell, Martin, 10, 13, 15, 23, 79, 101–17, 139, 273, 282, 297 on Amazon as threat to ad agencies, 262, 300 on ANA’s choice of Ebiquity to investigate kickback allegations, 18 on Cannes Lions Festival, 257, 336, 338 as CFO at Saatchi & Saatchi, 104, 105–7 childhood of, 101–2 compensation of, 112 on consulting companies as competitive threat, 208–9 disparagement of creatives by, 112–13 on disruption threat, 30–31, 82, 117 education of, 102–4 on Facebook and Google, 101, 117, 123–24, 127 as financial adviser at James Gulliver Associates, 104 at IMG, 103–4 intensity and persistence of, 114–15 Levy and, 113–14, 233, 234 on list of best performing CEOs, 117 management style of, 111–12 on mobile, 178 on new competition agencies face, 101 on public relations firms, 216 reverse takeover of Garland Communications and, 105–6 second marriage of, 114–16 view of Kassan and MediaLink, 31, 101 See also WPP Sorrell, Sally, 101 Sorrell, Sandra Finestone, 104 Spangenberg, Karl, 63 Spiegel, Evan, 137 Spiegel, Matt, 64 Spotify, 313 Starbucks, 304 Starr, Paul, 23–24 State Street Global Advisors’ Fearless Girl statue, 309–10 Steinberg, Jeremy, 212 Stengel, Jim, 250, 256, 290–91 Stevenson, Adlai, 41 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 47 Steyer, James, 183 StrawberryFrog, 308 Streets Were Paved with Gold, The (Auletta), 2 subscription model, 311–15 subtle ad pitches, 96–97 Sullivan, Margaret, 177 Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway), 37 Super Bowl 2016 advertising, 184, 185, 187 surveillance capitalism, 164 Taco Bell, 80 targeted advertising, 131–33, 160–61, 197–98 T Brand Studios, 206–8 tech companies, as competitive threat to ad agencies, 213–16 television/television networks CBS (See CBS) Gotlieb on fundamentals impacting, 321 as inflection point for advertising, 28 number of viewers, 2015–2017, 193–196, 200, 320 programmatic advertising and, 198 streaming services offered by, 321–22 targeted ads, inability to offer, 197–98 Upfronts, 198, 199, 200–203 Tencent, 32, 146, 161 Tesla, 305 Tesler, Lenard B., 61 The Betches, 221–22 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 184 Thomas, Philip, 250, 252–53, 337 Thompson, Ben, 331 Thompson, Mark, 206–7, 235, 307 Thomson, Robert, 273 3% Conference, 232 Three Blind Mice (Auletta), 3 Time Inc., 208 Time Warner acquisition of AT&T, 297, 299 tobacco, 42–43 Tobaccowala, Rishad, 10, 31–32, 36–37, 46, 146, 147, 236–37 on agency resilience, 282 on AI, 302 on Amazon as threat to ad agencies, 263 on ANA report, 244–45 on delivering utilities and services, 270–71 empathy in marketing of Bank of America, 95–96 on in-house content creation, 220 on Kassan and MediaLink, 70–71, 318 Toffler, Alvin, 14 “Tradeoff Fallacy, The” (Turow), 168 Transformation 2016, 229–37 transparency guidelines, 229–30 Trump, Donald, 186, 312 Trump administration, 297–99 Trump campaign, 294–97 amount spent on advertising, 295 celebrity endorsements, value of, 296 media coverage and, 295–96 targeting data, use of, 296–97 trust issues, between clients and advertising agencies, 35–36, 48–49, 76, 144, 244, 245 Turow, Joseph, 160, 168 21st Century Fox, 76, 335 24/7 Media, 110, 111, 150 Uber, 47 Underclass, The (Auletta), 2 Unilever, 64, 76, 212 agency fees and ad cutbacks of, 319 Dollar Shave Club and, 285, 297 forms Unilever Studio for creative work, 80 Vaseline ad, 185–86, 217 Vaseline Healing Project, 217 unique selling proposition, 41, 308 unverified ads, 136 Upfronts, 198, 199, 200–203 Uva, JC, 48, 66 VandeHei, Jim, 312 Van Veen, Ricky, 166–67 Vaseline ads, 185–86, 217 Vaynerchuk, Gary, 87–91, 306 VaynerMedia, 88–91 Chase Bank account and, 87, 89–91 revenue of, 87 social media marketing and, 88 Vaynerchuk founds, 88 work with GE, 86, 87 Verizon, 137, 160, 263 Vice, 81, 207, 208 Viv, 262, 268–69 Volvo, 307 von Borries, Philippe, 66, 207–8 Wacksman, Barry, 284, 286 Walgreens, 271 Wall Street Journal, 176–77, 207, 313 Walmart, 272 Washington Post, 314 Watson, 211–12 WCRS Group, 143 Weapons of Math Destruction: How Bid Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (O’Neil), 274–75 Weather Company (weather.com), 210, 211–12 WeChat, 32, 146 Weed, Keith, 46, 47–48, 64, 78, 135, 146, 148, 160–61, 325 on Cannes Lions Festival, 258 at CES, 225 on online advertising directed to bots, 323–24 on socially conscious advertising, 254–56 See also Unilever Weisman, Tony, 249–50 Weitzman, Howard, 61, 73 Western International Media, 143 Wheeler, Tom, 169, 298 Where the Suckers Moon: An Advertising Story (Rothenberg), 40 Whittaker, James, 267, 303 Wieser, Brian, 10, 216, 265, 330 Wildness, 180 Williams, Evan, 311–12 Wind, Jerry, 174 Wire and Plastic Products.

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* Julia Angwin, Terry Parris, Jr., and Surya Mattu, “What Facebook Knows About You,” ProPublica, September 28, 2016. * Sarah Perez, “Google’s New ‘About Me’ Page Lets You Control What Personal Info Others Can See,” TechCrunch.com, November 11, 2015. * Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism,” Frankfurter Allgemeine, March 5, 2016. * Sandy Parakilas, “Facebook Won’t Protect Your Privacy,” New York Times op-ed page, November 20, 2017. * As we see, data on the size of the ad-blocking community vary wildly. * The disparity between Mary Meeker’s figure of 5.2 billion mobile phones and Carolyn Everson’s figure of 7.2 billion is a reminder that gathering global data involves some guesswork

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Today, when parents describe their quandaries about children and commercialism, I find myself thinking about that television executive’s tossed-off comment about capitalism. Children in the United States today are growing up in a culture profoundly shaped by a troubling combination of what psychologist and philosopher Shoshana Zuboff and others have called “surveillance capitalism,” which is fueled by the tech industry’s mining of personal information for profit, and “corporate capitalism,” which is dominated by huge privately owned businesses whose primary obligation is to make money for their shareholders. Today, these forces combine to create what’s best described as “consumer capitalism,” a sociopolitical economic system driven by, and in thrall to, consumption.

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New York: Penguin, 2015. Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Knopf, 2016. Zomorodi, Manoush, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. London: Profile, 2019. Viewing Kantayya, Shalini, dir. Coded Bias. 2020, Brooklyn, NY: 7th Empire Media. Orlowski, Jeff, dir. The Social Dilemma. 2020, Exposure Labs Productions. Rossini, Elena, dir. The Illusionists. 2016, Media Education Foundation (Distributor). Westbrook, Adam, Lucy King, and Jonah M.

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Jude Children’s Research Hospital, 106 Stanford University, 44 Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 84 Star Wars, 141 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, 170–71 Stonewall Uprising (1969), 230 Story of Stuff Project, 38 Strickland, Rachael, 233–34 Student Data Privacy Project, 181, 258 surveillance and online behavior tracking, 47–49, 137, 177–78, 183 surveillance capitalism, 80–81 Target, 19, 59 “target marketing,” 51 tech jargon in lay language, 45–46 “teen tribes,” 62 Television ban on children’s advertising, 113, 140 Channel One News, 182–83 children’s TV watching, 40, 42, 100 deregulation of children’s, 3, 29 host-selling and children’s programming, 140 public (commercial-free), 52–53, 216 racist images and stereotypes, 153, 159–60 story-based programs and films, 216 There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom (Harding), 230 Tijuana, Mexico, 153–54, 156–57 TikTok, 72–73, 152, 202, 219, 238 Today show, 145–46 toilet training, 107 Tony the Tiger (Kellogg’s mascot), 57 tooth-brushing (gamification and rewards), 105–7 touch screens, 40, 215 toy companies, 29–30, 57–60 Hasbro, 4, 57–58, 86, 199 and influencers, 5–6 Lego, 58 Mattel, 36–38, 57–58, 139, 142 and plastic “collectibles,” 83–88 PlayCon 2018 (industry conference), 57–58, 61–62 and Toys “R” Us bankruptcy, 57–61 “unboxing videos,” 5–6, 85, 177, 204, 227 toys brand-licensed, 13–14, 29–30 and children’s creative play, 25–29, 59, 87 electronic, 14, 19, 24 “interactive,” 17, 19 media linked characters and, 27–28, 29–30, 212–13 plastic collectibles, 83–88 racialized and racist, 153–62 recommendations for healthy development of babies and toddlers, 213–14 Toys “R” Us marketing and, 57–61 violent or sexualized, 4, 26, 59, 85, 156 Toys “R” Us, 57–61 Trend Hunter, 61 tribes, 61–65 brand tribes and social media, 63–65 “e-people,” 62–63 Gen Z and, 61–62, 64–65 “teen tribes,” 62 Trolls Hair Huggers, 86–87 Truce, 259 Trump, Donald, xiv, xv, 67, 70–71 Tulsa Race Massacre (1921), 158 Turkle, Sherry, 54–55, 133, 141 Turning Life On, 235, 259 Twenge, Jean M., 43, 235 Twisty Petz, 86–87 Twitchell, James, 60–61 Twitter, 145, 153 Ty Corporation, 84 “unboxing videos,” 5–6, 85, 86–87, 177, 204, 227 UNICEF, 91 Unilever, 64 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 112, 199 United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO), 38–39 University of Michigan, 119, 125, 154 University of Michigan–Dearborn, 186 University of Missouri, 182–83 The Unlucky Adventures of Classroom Thirteen (book series), 139 USA Today, 150 user experience (UX design), 45.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Data colonialism interposes infrastructures of data extraction directly into the texture of human life and so risks deforming human experience in a fundamental way, invading the space of the self on which the values of autonomy and freedom in all their forms depend.130 Our Argument within the Wider Debate about Data and Capitalism Why is it that so far we have talked simply of capitalism and not digital capitalism, informational capitalism, communicative capitalism, platform capitalism, or surveillance capitalism, to name some rival terms?131 The reason is straightforward. No convincing argument has yet been made that capitalism today is anything other than what it has always been: the systematic organization of life so as to maximize value, resulting in the concentration of power and wealth in very few hands.

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Therefore, when we use the term capitalism with a contemporary reference, we mean capitalism as it is now developing in societies in which “the production, accumulation and processing of information” is growing.132 Surveillance is certainly part of this, again as we have emphasized, but not sufficiently to brand today’s capitalism as surveillance capitalism. For, within the longer history of colonialism and capitalism, surveillance has often been the accompaniment to the direct appropriation of laboring bodies for value (think of the slave plantation).133 What is new today is not so much surveillance but rather the networks of social relations in which vastly extended modes of appropriating human life through data work to order economic and social life as a whole.

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Zelizer, Viviana. Economic Lives. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Zittrain, Jonathan. The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2011. Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89. Zuboff, Shoshana. In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Zuckerberg, Ethan. “The Internet’s Original Sin.” The Atlantic, August 14, 2014. Zuckerberg, Mark.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

Bringing in the Kiva robots meant Amazon could “replace all that walking, and instead it’s the shelf that comes to the worker,” says Marc. “You could not have done robotization if you had not first standardized the stowing process.” “Surveillance capitalism” is a term used by social scientist Shoshana Zuboff to describe the business models of companies like Facebook and Google that make money by harvesting our data. But it’s hard not to look at the state of the modern workplace as exemplified by Amazon, where surveillance is far more intrusive, and not see Bezosism as the real surveillance capitalism. Perhaps it’s because surveillance at work has such a long history, and is part of the explicit compact so many of us make with our employers, that it hasn’t earned quite the same level of agita as issues of privacy and personal data have among the chattering classes.

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See also delivery of goods to consumers; management systems; ships and shipping; trucks and truck drivers; warehouses and warehousing surveillance: combined with work intensification, and automation, 113, 157, 174–75, 203, 211–14, 231–32, 234–35; of delivery drivers, 26; of workers for behavior leading to injury, 238, 286 surveillance capitalism, 231 survivalists, 7 swarm robotics, 78 Swift (trucking company), 107, 112 Target, 109 tarmac, invention of, 129 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 87–90, 93–98, 103, 104, 105, 113, 213; The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), 95, 97, 98; Shop Management (1903), 95 Taylor, Robert, 216 Taylorism.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

During a 2019 US measles outbreak, Facebook distributed anti-vaccination ads to pregnant women. “Platforms are . . . incentivized to permit and even to encourage the spread of extreme or controversial harmful speech, as it is likely to directly benefit them financially,” write Jeff Gary and Ashkan Soltani.59 This has been called, among other things, the attention economy and surveillance capitalism, but the effect is the same: user engagement is snared with material that is “likely to be false, demagogic, conspiratorial, and incendiary,” says law professor Jack Balkin, which appeals to the users’ “fear, envy, anger, hatred, and distrust,” and which is then turned to profit through the sale of the data such attention generates.

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See also censorship Curtis, Michael Kent, 155 Cyprian of Antioch, 42–43 Czechoslovakia, 188 Daily Express (publication), 196 Daily Telegraph (publication), 122 damnatio memoriae, 39–40, 41, 44, 77 Dante Alighieri, 61–62, 63 Darnton, Robert, 102, 104, 255 D’Ascoli, Cecco, 62 Das Kapital (Marx), 136 data harvesting, 230, 250. See also surveillance capitalism Daumier, Honoré, 139 David, Jacques-Louis, 107 Davis, Elmer, 195 Death in the Nude (film), 164 Debs, Eugene, 180–81 Declaration of Independence (US), 232 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (France), 89, 106 decorative images. See imagery; paintings, censorship of “Decree on the Press” (Lenin), 206 Defence of the Realm Act (England), 171 Defoe, Daniel, 92 De Morny, Marquise, 161–62 Demosthenes, 21 Denmark, 133, 243–44, 247 Dennis v.

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See also Russia Spain, 121, 133 Spanish conquistadors, 3, 9 Spanish Earth (film), 191 Spinoza, Baruch, 70, 86, 212 The Spirit of ’76 (film), 177 Spock, Benjamin, 210–11 Stabili, Francesco degli (Cecco d’Ascoli), 62 Stalin, Joseph, 41–42, 206 Stamp Acts (England), 92, 112 Stark, Gary, 163 Stationers’ Company, 80–81, 84, 85 statues: in Ancient China, 1; in Afghanistan, 77; in Ancient Greece, 25; in Ancient Rome, 34, 39–41, 50–51; in England, 76–77; in France, 106; in Ukraine, 41–42 Statute of Treasons (1351, England), 67, 97 Steakley, James, 184 Steinbeck, John, 160, 194 Stephen, James, 67 Stephen, Leslie, 132–33 Stephen the Younger (saint), 57 Stokes, Rose, 177 Stone, Geoffrey, 115, 157 Stories of the Intifada (Green), 204–5 Storm of Steel (Jünger), 167 Strachey, Lytton, 192 Stratton Oakmont, 226 Stravinsky, Igor, 186 Stubbs, John, 81 Suetonius, 32, 33, 41 Sunday Express (publication), 193 The Suppression of Poisonous Opinions (Stephen), 132–33 surveillance capitalism, 222–25. See also data harvesting; online speech Sweden, 244 Swift, Jonathan, 92 Symposium (Plato), 27 Syria, 19, 20, 232 Tacitus, 30, 37, 40 Taiwan, 234 Taliban, 77 Talmud, 15–16, 17–20, 58–59, 73 Tarquinius Superbus, Lucius (king), 34 Tatian, 52 Taylor v. Mississippi, 209 Team of Vipers (Sims), 213 Technologies of Freedom (Pool), 220–21 Terence, 58 terrorism, 227, 241.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

air gap, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, cognitive bias, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Joan Didion, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Nelson Mandela, operational security, pre–internet, QAnon, Russian election interference, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, surveillance capitalism, WikiLeaks

In our time many people are vaguely unsettled by these asymmetries, these incursions into intimate conversations and private space, but very few people resist. It is not the incursions that interest me so much as the speed with which we have accepted them, though I don’t know how bad this deal is—convenience for data. Surveillance capitalism doesn’t manage a system of jails. It will not kidnap you from your country of origin, strap you down, and pour water down your throat until you break your ribs trying to free yourself. It will not collect the story of your life as an idiosyncratic veteran and frame you, in court, as a Taliban sympathizer.

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The End of Intelligence: Espionage and State Power in the Information Age. Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2014. United States & Feinstein, D. (2014). Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019. A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kerry Howley is a feature writer at New York magazine and the author of Thrown, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues.

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Some early and influential enthusiasts for Big Data were Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier in Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013); and Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) (New York: Crown, 2014). One of its most influential critics is Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). See also Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016). 14.  Lindsay Poirier, “Reading Datasets: Strategies for Interpreting the Politics of Data Signification,” Big Data and Society (2021): 1–19; Caitlin Rosenthal’s approach to reading the “frame” of the data informs the analysis of chapter 1 and is discussed further there.

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The video is available here: Census Bureau, “2020 Census Apportionment Counts Press Kit,” Census Bureau Website, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-kits/2021/2020-census-apportionment-counts.html. 52.  See Ackermann and Savell, “Count and Increase.” 53.  Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, Big Data; Rudder, Dataclysm. 54.  Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Bibliography Ackermann, Kevin, and Taylor Savell. “Count and Increase.” USApportionment.org. https://usapportionment.org/countandincrease.html. Agar, Jon. The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Aldrich, Mark. “Progressive Economists and Scientific Racism: Walter Willcox and Black Americans, 1895–1910.”

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.: Government Printing Office, 1900. Zotigh, Dennis. “The Treaty That Forced the Cherokee People from Their Homelands Goes on View.” Smithsonian Magazine, April 24, 2019. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/national-museum-american-indian/2019/04/24/treaty-new-echota/. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019. Acknowledgments This book began in 2017 in the reading room of the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C. I went there looking for records pertaining to Elbertie Foudray, hoping to explain the significant role this seldom-discussed woman scientist had played in the development of population research.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

., Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech, Oxford University Press, 2018. Wu, T., The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, Columbia Global Reports, 2018. Zittrain, J., The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It (s.n.), Yale University Press, 2009. Zuboff, S., The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books Ltd, 2019. NOTES INTRODUCTION 1This analysis takes some inspiration and reasoning from Tim Wu’s The Curse of Bigness, cited at greater length in the conclusion. 2https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-countrys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years/?

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aat=1&t=111&dnt=111 15https://www.eff.org/privacybadger 16https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere 17https://certbot.eff.org/ 18This is a pseudonym, but one Kidane uses in real life with his diaspora community too. 19https://uk.kantar.com/tech/social/2018/gen-z-is-the-generation-taking-a-stand-for-privacy-on-social-media/ 20Cohn notes this line of reasoning is central to Cory Doctorow’s online privacy themes in his young adult book, Little Brother. 21https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org 22https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/en.wikipedia.org 23https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics 24https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016-2017_Fundraising_Report 25https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/how-the-conduit-plans-to-change-the-world 26https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomis 27https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_of_Wikipedia_in_Turkey 28https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LE15_Gender_overall_in_2018.png 29https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/how-wikipedia-is-hostile-to-women/411619/ 30https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05947-8 31As highlighted in a Twitter thread from Demos’s Carl Miller here: https://twitter.com/carljackmiller/status/1022055586471534592 32Zittrain is the author of The Future of the Internet – And How To Stop It, which is well worth a read. CONCLUSION 1https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2018/ 2I was at first relatively sure I had coined this term myself, but a Google search throws up a few results, including this from Shoshana Zuboff (author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) article from 2014: https://www.shoshanazuboff.com/new/my-new-article-on-the-weapons-of-mass-detection/ 3http://www.cityam.com/273662/sainsburys-shares-crash-asda-merger-torpedoed 4https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26266689 5https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jan/31/fred-goodwin-stripped-of-knighthood 6The idea that the internet is an essential service may still be contentious to some, but consider this: the idea would have been laughable a decade ago, but now in a country like the UK it is immensely difficult to access information on utility bills and payments, taxation, social housing lists, benefit information and applications, and more, without it.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Similarly, the success of the leading technology companies today—primarily social media platforms and search engines—has brought into question whether it is legitimate for businesses to collate, use, and manipulate individual users’ data to the extent that they do. Outrage on this issue has been vocalized in books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which went as far as to call for breaking up large tech companies and instituting much tighter regulation. From a board perspective, I believe that the question of data privacy is much more complex than these discussions make it out to be. In fact, I see two specific issues that complicate the immediate instinct to pass judgment on matters of data privacy.

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Fortune, May 29, 2019. https://fortune.com/2019/05/29/netflix-abortion-georgia-angela-merkel-2019-ipos-broadsheet-may-29/. . “A VC Community Introduces a Gender Quota: The Broadsheet.” Fortune, July 12, 2019. https://fortune.com/2019/07/12/a-vc-community-introduces-a-gender-quota-the-broadsheet/. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books, 2019. ALSO BY DAMBISA MOYO Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth—and How to Fix It Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly—and the Stark Choices Ahead Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa Praise for How Boards Work “How Boards Work is exactly what any prospective—or sitting—board member needs to understand the true rigors and realities of board life.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

That a person might not be a place at all, but a carrier of history, a second chance at the future, a being capable of love, a moment that is not capturable, an interior force, a private act with public consequences, but not ultimately public – in the way a park or a shopping mall is public – is what? Romantic? Foolish? Wrong? Or a view of the self that is worth sustaining? * * * In her excellent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, makes the case for a different kind of future human – one that is participatory, not behaviourally modified. A future where technology is a tool for the greater good of all, not only for the money-makers and decision-takers.

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Thompson, 1963 Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, Eric Hobsbawm, 1968 Why the West Rules – For Now, Ian Morris, 2010 Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber, 2011 ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (poem), Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1832: ‘Ye are many—they are few’ ‘A Short History of Enclosure in Britain’ (essay), Simon Fairlie, 2009 PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Paul Mason, 2015 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, 2013 Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon have cornered culture and undermined democracy, Jonathan Taplin, 2017 The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot, 1860 From Sci-fi to Wi-fi to My-Wi Rocannon’s World, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1966 The Midwich Cuckoos, John Wyndham, 1957 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932 Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, 1999 ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale’ (short story), Philip K. Dick, 1966 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff, 2018. The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, Scott Galloway, 2017 Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, 2015 How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, 2014 The Art of Electronics, Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill, 1980 (NOTE: I only bought this because I thought it said Winifred Hill – and girls don’t do circuits, do they?

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Advantage,” Slate, June 13, 2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/data-not-new-oil-kai-fu-lee-china-artificial-intelligence.html. 20China is “the Saudi Arabia of data”: “China May Match or Beat America in AI,” The Economist, July 15, 2017, https://www.economist.com/business/2017/07/15/china-may-match-or-beat-america-in-ai; Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston: Mariner Books, September 1, 2018), 55, https://www.amazon.com/AI-Superpowers-China-Silicon-Valley/dp/132854639X. 20data is not a fungible resource: Husanjot Chahal, Ryan Fedasiuk, and Carrick Flynn, Messier Than Oil: Assessing Data Advantage in Military AI (Center for Security and Emerging Technology, July 2020), https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/messier-than-oil-assessing-data-advantage-in-military-ai/. 21surveillance capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, January 15, 2019), https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1610395697. 22900 million internet users as of 2020: “Number of Internet Users in China from 2008 to 2020,” Statista, 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/265140/number-of-internet-users-in-china/. 22750 million internet users in 2020: The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators: April–June, 2020 (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, November 9, 2020), https://trai.gov.in/sites/default/files/Report_09112020_0.pdf. 22400 million users: “Internet access,” in “Digital economy and society statistics—households and individuals,” Eurostat, September 2020, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Digital_economy_and_society_statistics_-_households_and_individuals#Internet_usage. 22290 million internet users: “Digital Population in the United States as of January 2021,” Statista, February 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1044012/usa-digital-platform-audience/. 22Facebook has 2.7 billion users: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2020 Results,” news release, October 29, 2020, https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2020/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2020-Results/default.aspx. 22YouTube over 2 billion: “YouTube for Press,” YouTube Official Blog, n.d., https://blog.youtube/press/. 22WeChat’s 1.2 billion: Monthly active users as of 30 September 2020.

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The United States, China, and Europe operate under vastly different regulatory regimes when it comes to personal data. Europe has leaned the most into regulating data collection, with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The U.S. government, by contrast, has taken a more laissez-faire approach to regulating technology, allowing the growth of “surveillance capitalism” in which big tech companies collect and store massive amounts of personal data. (Although political winds in Washington are starting to shift with a growing “techlash” against big tech firms.) China represents the starkest difference, with the Chinese Communist Party building an intrusive and expansive techno-authoritarian surveillance apparatus, which is imperfect and fragmented for now but will become increasingly capable over time.

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When I asked Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch what the United States could do to combat the spread of China’s digital repression, she pointed to the lack of national data privacy regulation in the United States. “The world is essentially being put forward two fairly bad proposals” for tech governance, she said. “One is the U.S. surveillance capitalism model, driven by big companies and essentially is about us all being herded into particular directions to spend money. Then the other is the Chinese government model of mass surveillance. Neither of those are preferable.” The consequences, of course, of what U.S. tech companies and the Chinese government are doing with their mass data collection are very different.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

COGNITIVE HACKS 181Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister: Jason Stanley (2016), How Propaganda Works, Princeton University Press, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173429/how-propaganda-works. 181Cory Doctorow cautions us: Cory Doctorow (26 Aug 2020), “How to destroy surveillance capitalism,” OneZero, https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59. 44. ATTENTION AND ADDICTION 183Everyone hates pop-up ads: Ethan Zuckerman (14 Aug 2014), “The internet’s original sin,” Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041. 184Jules Chéret invented a new form: Richard H.

Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

I am indebted to Joe Davis of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for this reference. “To understand God’s thoughts”: Eileen Magnello, “Florence Nightingale: The Compassionate Statistician,” Plus, plus.maths.org/content/florence-nightingale-compassionate-statistician. “surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019). 9. RACE, SEX, AND POWER “a wild ‘goat dance’”: “Pavlowa in ‘Goat Dance,’” Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1921, 26. “a smooth son of a bitch”: Sherwood Anderson to Floyd Dell, cited in Malcolm Cowley, introduction to Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio [1919] (Viking Press ed., 1964), 3.

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Nightingale wrote at a time when Providence and Progress moved forward hand in glove; some people think they still do. But if we were to replace Nightingale’s God with the money god of capital, we would have a better sense of where we are today. It is, among other things, a world where quantified information serves the system Shoshana Zuboff has called “surveillance capitalism,” and where human beings have been transformed into human capital—persons without qualities indeed. Irving Fisher is mostly remembered today as the man who, six days before the Great Crash of 1929, announced that the stock market had reached a permanently high plateau. But from our longer-range perspective, surrounded by signs and portents of monetized data, we can draw a different conclusion: Despite his defects as a short-term prognosticator, Irving Fisher had seen the future. 9 Race, Sex, and Power DURING THE DECADE or so following the Armistice, animal spirits virtually disappeared from public discourse, even as vitalist currents coursed through popular culture.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

And, of course, the biggest digital firms increasingly serve as a one-stop-shop for all kinds of personal data: email, browsing history, location data, and increasingly even credit-card purchase data. The temptation for governments to use this data through legal or covert means is strong. Any effective response to “surveillance capitalism”38 must begin with the evolutionary audience dynamics that led us here. User surveillance at firms like Google came first and foremost out of the imperative to grow faster than others. A/B testing and audience data collection were used to improve and personalize recommendations even before they were applied to targeted advertising—indeed, before Google had a clear business model at all.

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Retrieved from http://www.ibtimes.com/bing-vs -google-microsoft%C5%9B-pepsi-challenge-backfires-780715. Zelizer, B. (2009). Journalism and the academy. In K. Wahl-Jorgensen and T. Hanitzsch (eds.), The handbook of journalism studies (pp. 29–41). New York: Routledge. Zuboff, S. (2015). Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), 75–89. INDEX Italic pages refer to figures and tables ABC News, 75 A/B testing: attention economy and, 13; personalization and, 43, 53, 57; nature of the internet and, 170, 174–76; news and, 150–54, 158; recommendation systems and, 43; tilted playing field and, 27–28, 31 Accelerated Mobile Platform (AMP), 80, 144, 179 activism, 48, 103, 169 Adams, William, 65 Adaptive Semantics, 19 advertising: attention economy and, 3–4, 7, 11, 13; branding and, 28–32, 36, 86, 166; click-through rates and, 56–57; cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and, 69; economic geography and, 3–4, 63, 67–69, 80; Google and, 68–69; inversion of, 135, 178; local vs. national per-person rates and, 68; models and, 181–84; nature of internet and, 163–64, 168, 176, 178; new economics of, 67–69; news and, 102, 109, 129, 134–35, 138, 140–46, 163–64, 168, 176, 178; newspapers and, 11, 28, 57, 68–69, 102, 129, 135, 138, 140, 142–44, 164, 178–79; political economy and, 38, 40–41, 48, 56–58, 60; property targeting and, 56–57; remnant, 69; Super Bowl and, 68; television and, 68; tilted playing field and, 15, 17, 25, 28–36, 30 African Americans, 123–25, 126, 191 agglomeration, 9, 63, 82–83 aggregation, 65–67, 76–77 AIG, 86 Ajax, 34 algorithms: black box problem and, 52; deep learning and, 21; filters and, 39, 43, 48, 54, 60; K-nearest neighbor, 44–45, 54; lessons from, 48–53, 59–61; nature of internet and, 178; need for more data and, 50–51, 61; news and, 147, 151–52; personalization and, 39–44, 48–54, 60–61; principle component analysis (PCA) and, 46; Restricted Boltzmann Machine, 46; ridge regression, 46; root mean-squared error (RMSE) and, 43–44, 47–48, 50; Russian hackers and, 178; search costs and, 41–43; singular value decomposition (SVD), 45, 58–59.

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

We agree to constant surveillance in exchange for services. This allows the G-MAFIA to generate revenue so that it can improve and expand its offerings to us, whether we are individual consumers or enterprise customers like companies, universities, nonprofits, or government agencies. It’s a business model predicated on surveillance capitalism. Which, if we’re being completely honest, is a system we’re OK with here in the US—otherwise we’d have long stopped using services like Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, and Facebook. In order to work properly, they must gain access to our data trails, which are mined, refined, and packaged. I’m assuming that you use at least one of the products and services offered by the G-MAFIA.

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See also Dartmouth Workshop Siri, 13, 43, 119 Skype, 215 Smart city pilot programs: in optimistic scenario of future, 168, 176 Smart glasses: Apple, 161; Applezon, 191; in catastrophic scenario of future, 221; Google, 191; in pragmatic scenario of future, 191, 192 Smartphones: Apple, 94; in pragmatic scenario of future, 191 Social Credit Score system, 6, 80, 82, 152, 154, 209; in Rongcheng, 81; tradeoffs for desirable, 211 Socrates, 17 Sorenson, Arne, 75 South China Morning Post, 69–70 Southern, Taryn, 15 SpaceX, 87 Splinternets, 83; pragmatic scenario of future and, 198 Spy birds, 77–78 Stanford, 60, 63; Artificial Intelligence Lab, 65 Stasis: among U.S. policymakers and think tanks, 213; cigarette smoking danger and, 213; climate change and, 213 Step reckoner, 21, 24 Subscription model, smart wearables and tools: in pragmatic scenario of future, 192–193 Suleyman, Mustafa, 43, 117 Summit supercomputer, 146 Sunstein, Cass, 142 Supercomputers, 146 Surveillance capitalism, 95 Sweeney, Latanya, 113–114, 122 Syllogistic logic, Aristotle and, 18 Synthetic data, 182 Tanzania, 83, 200, 210 Taobao, 68–69 Technology, deployment of: need for technical simulations and risk mapping before, 241–242 Tencent, 3, 5, 9, 49, 65, 67, 70–71, 96, 158; cloud service, 71; conversational interfaces, 76; corporate slogan, 70; digital assistant, 71; facial and object recognition lab, 71; healthcare partnerships, 71, 76; management philosophy, 100; market value, 71; mobile payment system, 71, 186; movie studio, 71; original product, 70; pharmaceutical company investments, 71 Tencent Pictures, 71 Tenpay, 71, 186 Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), 91 TensorFlow, 91, 92, 139 TensorFlow Object Detection API, 91 TensorFlow-GAN, 91 Terminator, The: Skynet, 2 Tesla, BAT investment in, 72 Thinking machines, 23, 24, 25, 35, 36, 50–51, 60, 98, 106, 127, 135, 138, 149, 150, 154; ceding control to, 131; computers as, 22; first, 145; generally intelligent, 159, 189 Thousand Talents Plan, 84–85 Tiān Māo, 13 Tianhe-1 supercomputer, 146 Tinsley, Marlon, 39; versus CHINOOK, 39 Transparency: among G-MAFIA in catastrophic scenario of future, 208; G-MAFIA Coalition adoption of as core value in optimistic scenario of future, 157; in pragmatic scenario of future, 188.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In the last economic revolution, industrial capitalism sought to exploit the natural world around us. It is only with the advent of climate change that we are now coming to terms with its ecological externalities. But in this next iteration of capitalism, the raw materials are no longer oil or minerals but rather commodified attention and behavior. In this new economy of surveillance capitalism, we are the raw materials. What this means is that there is a new economic incentive to create substantial informational asymmetries between platforms and users. In order to be able to convert user behavior into profit, platforms need to know everything about their users’ behavior, while their users know nothing of the platform’s behavior.

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Emma Briant (for uncovering critical evidence); Harry Davies, Ann Marlowe, and Wendy Siegelman (for your early investigative work); my former academic supervisor Dr. Carolyn Mair (for reviewing this book and teaching me so much about psychology, data, and culture); and Professor Shoshana Zuboff (whose work on surveillance capitalism helped me refine so many ideas). Perhaps most important, I want to recognize the hundreds of thousands of people who shared this story, called their representatives, marched in protests, held up placards, and sent me encouraging messages—there are so many people I have never even met who have passionately had my back throughout this journey.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

Sandberg’s behavioral advertising prototype treated human data as financial instruments bartered in markets like corn or pork belly futures. Her handiwork was “a contagion,” the official added, echoing the words of academic and activist Shoshana Zuboff, who a year earlier had described Sandberg as playing “the role of Typhoid Mary, bringing surveillance capitalism from Google to Facebook, when she signed on as Mark Zuckerberg’s number two.”3 With scant competition to force the leaders to consider the wellbeing of their customers, there was “a proliferation of misinformation and violent or otherwise objectionable content on Facebook’s properties,” the attorneys general alleged in their complaint.

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., antitrust case filed in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Case 1:20-cv-03589-JEB, Document 4, filed December 9, 2020. https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/state_of_new_york_et_al._v._facebook_inc._-_filed_public_complaint_12.11.2020.pdf. 3. the words of academic and activist Shoshana Zuboff: John Naughton, “‘The Goal is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” Observer, January 20, 2019. 4. Zuckerberg and Sandberg met at a Christmas party: Elise Ackerman, “Facebook Fills No. 2 Post with Former Google Exec,” Mercury News, March 5, 2008. 5. $85.9 billion in revenue in 2020: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2020 Results,” press release, January 27, 2021.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, seventy walls now exist in our barbwired and walled world.17 Securitization has also turned the border into a dystopic testing ground, constituting a five-hundred-billion-dollar border security industry18 that flaunts virtual walling through intrusive electronic surveillance technologies, automated decision-making, predictive data analytics, facial recognition software, and biometric systems tested on migrants and refugees by blood-sucking leeches like Amazon, Palantir, Elbit Systems, and European Dynamics. Migrants and refugees are at the forefront of becoming, as Shoshana Zuboff calls it, “the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation.”19 These physical, digital, and symbolic changes to border security are “the most durable and profound consequence of the global war on terror” and are some of the most expensive projects undertaken by states.20 Cutting through and hurting fragile habitats and armed with surveillance drones hunting humans, border walls are key technologies of state governance.

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Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border,” New York Times, October 1, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/politics/trump-border-wars.html. 13.Ryan Devereaux, “Mining the Future,” The Intercept, October 3, 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/climate-change-migration-militarization-arizona/. 14.Associated Press, “Trump Administration to Expand DNA Collection at Border and Give Data to FBI,” Guardian, October 3, 2019, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/oct/02/us-immigration-border-dna-trump-administration. 15.Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York and Cambridge: Zone Books, 2017), 132. 16.Brown, Walled States, 105. 17.Reece Jones, “Introduction,” in Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement, Reece Jones, ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 3. 18.Todd Miller, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014), 42. 19.Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 10. 20.Reece Jones, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel (London: Zed Books, 2012), 2. 21.Kate Smith, “Immigrant Deportation Filings Hit Record High in 2018, New Report Shows,” CBS News, November 8, 2018, www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-deportations-in-2018-hit-record-high/. 22.Emily Kassie, “Detained: How the US Built the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System,” Guardian, September 24, 2019, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/24/detained-us-largest-immigrant-detention-trump. 23.National Catholic Reporter Editorial Staff, “Editorial: Don’t Look Away from Concentration Camps at the Border,” National Catholic Reporter, June 19, 2019, www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/editorial-dont-look-away-concentration-camps-border. 24.César Cuauhtémoc Garcia Hernández, “Abolishing Immigration Prisons,” Boston University Law Review 97, no. 1 (2017): 245–300. 25.UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Women on the Run: First-Hand Accounts of Refugees Fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, October 26, 2015, www.unhcr.org/5630f24c6.html. 26.Alice Speri, “Detained, Then Violated,” The Intercept, April 11, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/04/11/immigration-detention-sexual-abuse-ice-dhs/. 27.Nicoll Hernández-Polanco quoted in Adam Frankel, “Do You See How Much I’m Suffering Here?

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

Admiral Zheng, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, defund the police, Deng Xiaoping, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, George Floyd, global pandemic, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeremy Corbyn, Jones Act, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, lockdown, McMansion, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parkinson's law, pensions crisis, QR code, rent control, Rishi Sunak, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, trade route, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, Washington Consensus

China’s use of facial recognition technology is designed to make a Panopticon out of the entire country. Is the West slipping into the same trap? Google and Facebook make their money by monitoring their customers, providing them with free and useful services but also raising the specter of what Shoshana Zuboff has called the “Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” The Western state is collecting ever more data on us, somewhat chaotically. Covid has given the state an excuse to create a surveillance society. Israel has even authorized Shin Bet, its domestic security force, to break into people’s mobile phones without their permission. The Panopticon may help keep us alive, but it is also bringing us closer to a future in which we are watched by our smartphones, filmed by cameras on every street corner, and obliged to scan bar codes when we get on the train.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

But it was also a cauldron of misinformation about impending national lockdowns and false cures, nationalistic finger-pointing between the United States and China, and foreign interference designed to fan the flames of our fears. Privacy debates took on new meaning during the COVID crisis as the threat of “surveillance capitalism” morphed into lifesaving “disease surveillance.” Facebook wasn’t surveilling for profit during COVID; it was filling gaps in inadequate national disease surveillance programs with scalable symptom surveys that identified the pandemic’s spread. At the same time, Google, Apple, and MIT developed Bluetooth-based contact tracing systems that would alert users who opted in if they had come in close physical proximity to the Bluetooth-enabled device of a COVID carrier.

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In the end, we’ll get out of this wave of innovation what we put into it. If we use this technology in positive, egalitarian ways, we can promote positive social change and create substantial social and economic value. But if we are not careful, we can also inadvertently create an unequal, authoritarian world in which surveillance capitalism directs our behavior toward corporate and governmental ends, without regard for the social and economic implications. As we influence each other, through word and deed online, we continue to create the digital world we inhabit. And eventually, we’ll reap what we have sown. By studying the laws, we can understand how governments attempt to correct the market failures created by the Hype Machine and examine what effect regulations have on business, politics, and society.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

Doing it through tech allows them to add a glossy veneer of progress on top of some very familiar behaviour. Over the years, the big tech firms have very carefully cultivated the Californian Ideology: even though they are massive multi-billion-dollar corporations with huge PR teams, they pitch themselves as anti-establishment; even though they are built on a model of data extraction and surveillance capitalism, they purport to be promoting exciting and liberating technology; even though they are dominated by rich white guys, they talk of social justice and equality. I sometimes think it must be very confusing to be Mark Zuckerberg. In 2014, only 2 per cent of Facebook staff were black and less than a third were women.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

The book that kicked off the futurist craze, and still one of the best examples of writing about the psychological effects of technological change. The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener (1950). An examination of the morality of machines, written by one of my all-time favorite technological thinkers. In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff (1988). Zuboff is better known these days as the author of Surveillance Capitalism, but her earlier book was a prescient look at the future of work during the first IT boom of the 1980s. Notes Introduction I got my first glimpse Kevin Roose, “The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite,” New York Times, January 25, 2019. Aristotle mused that automated weavers Sean Carroll, “Aristotle on Household Robots,” Discover, September 28, 2010.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

The locations of forward operating bases in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, were there for anyone to observe. Ruser even spotted GPS points in the Antarctic that appeared not to correlate to any known research installation. “Is there a hidden base?” he half-joked. Can we leap over the dichotomy of surveillance capitalism versus surveillance communism? Could a major goods distributor such as Amazon or a social network like Facebook be built as an international nonprofit cooperative, democratically controlled by a society independent of both the market and the state? We admit that these are difficult questions to which we don’t have answers.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

I think of him and his lifelong awareness of being watched. We have a sense of how entangled we are in a culture of surveillance and, especially these days, how that culture proliferates with smart devices like Alexa in our homes, or as we spew clever quips on social media. The awareness of surveillance capitalism grows. Yet as a tactic of policing, surveillance has always been crucial in making criminality throughout history, drawing a line between those on the so-called right and wrong sides of society. And this line drawing is enabled by distilling life into arbitrary parts: class, race, gender, with the line of criminality itself constantly shifting throughout time, serving political-economic crises.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Although the company was wildly successful and profitable simply from putting a few “sponsored links” next to its search results, investors wanted more. Luckily for them, every web search conducted by Google’s billions of users also generates a surplus of “collateral data”—whole histories of searches and clicks and other information the company didn’t care much about. As Shoshana Zuboff chronicled in her book Surveillance Capitalism , instead of simply continuing to deliver search results to users, Google got into the even more profitable business of delivering user data to its real customers—the market researchers seeking to target users and manipulate their behavior. Likewise, Mark Zuckerberg left college to pursue his (probably borrowed ) dream of building an online social network for college students to make friends and get dates.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

Like Vicino’s bunkers, this seemed to me to represent a radical acceleration of the mechanisms by which our civilization was already driven. Thiel, in this sense, loomed particularly large. Through his data analytics company Palantir, he was a presiding presence in the increasingly oppressive, though only fleetingly visible, environment of surveillance capitalism. He was known for his extreme libertarian views. “I no longer believe,” he had once written, “that freedom and democracy are compatible.” His conception of freedom had less to do with existential liberty, with meaningful human lives within flourishing communities, than it had to do with not having to share resources—the freedom of wealthy people from taxation, from any obligation to materially contribute to society.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

ProPublica, December 19. www.propublica.org/article/leaked-documents-show-how-chinas-army-of-paid-internet-trolls-helped-censor-the-coronavirus. Zuboff, Shoshana. 1988. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic Books. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books. Zweig, Stefan. 1943. The World of Yesterday. Translated by Benjamin W. Huebsch and Helmut Ripperger. New York: Viking. Acknowledgments This book builds on two decades of research that we have conducted on technology, inequality, and institutions.

…

Power and Progress is the blueprint we need for the challenges ahead: technology only contributes to shared prosperity when it is tamed by democratic rights, values, principles, and the laws that sustain them in our daily lives.” —Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School, and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Berlin Wall, Black Swan, business process, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, full employment, illegal immigration, index card, information security, Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, McMansion, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, off-the-grid, PageRank, personalized medicine, recommendation engine, RFID, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, workplace surveillance

., [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] BusinessWeek (magazine), [>], [>] "Butterfly" shoppers, [>], [>] BuzzMetrics (company), [>], [>] Cameras (surveillance) at Accenture, [>], [>]–[>] in casinos, [>]–[>] in homes of the elderly, [>]–[>], [>] in public places, [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>] See also Facial recognition; Photos; Surveillance Capital IQ, [>], [>] Capital One, [>] Carbonell, Jaime, [>] Carbon nanotube, [>] Carley, Kathleen, [>]–[>] Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] Casablanca (movie), [>] Casinos, [>]–[>], [>] Cavaretta, Michael, [>] Cell phones Bluetooth technology for, [>]–[>] data produced by, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>] technical issues associated with, [>] tracking use of, [>], [>], [>]–[>] Central Intelligence Agency.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Analog Research Lab: Background comes from personal interviews and David Cohen, “A Look at the Analog Research Lab, the Source of All of Those Posters in Facebook’s Offices,” Adweek, February 6, 2019; “Ben Barry Used to be Called Facebook’s Minister of Propaganda,” Typeroom, June 26, 2015; Steven Heller, “The Art of Facebook,” The Atlantic, May 16, 2013; and Fred Turner, “The Arts at Facebook: An Aesthetic Infrastructure for Surveillance Capitalism,” Poetics, March 16, 2018. in its original sense: I helped circulate this definition by my own book Hackers (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). younger people were . . . smarter: Mark Coker, “Startup Advice for Young Entrepreneurs from Y Combinator,” VentureBeat, March 26, 2007. he gathered the company: Jessica E.

…

US 8,825,764 B2 with Michael Nowak, San Francisco, CA (US); Dean Eckles, Palo Alto, CA (US) as inventors. The date of patent is September 2, 2014. While it’s unclear how this specific technique was employed, a detailed discussion of Facebook’s data mining is found in Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). “Entity Graph”: This was described to me by Cameron Marlow, who was once head of Facebook’s Data Science team. the most controversial study: Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeff T.

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

Connection error. A string of undecipherable numbers and letters. “You make me so fucking angry sometimes. I mean, I fucking get it, you hate Apple, you hate the Internet, you hate fucking everything. You don’t want to put photos on iCloud because it’s not safe, privacy blah fucking blah, surveillance capitalism blah blah, you’re so fucking self-righteous—” “Scott! Listen to me! I didn’t touch the fucking photos! There’s a problem with the server, that’s all. Didn’t you have them backed up locally anyway?” He knows, the second the last word leaves his mouth, that it’s the wrong thing to have said.

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

,” The Economist, May 31, 2018, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/05/31/does-chinas-digital-police-state-have-echoes-in-the-west. 2. “More Data and Surveillance Are Transforming Justice Systems,” The Economist,, June 2, 2018, https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2018-05-02/justice. 3. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 282–290. 4. Surveillance-Video, product catalog, https://www.surveillance-video.com/license-plate-cameras/ (accessed June 27, 2019). 5. Will Oremus, “Forget Security Cameras. Stores Are Using Face Recognition to See If You’re a Shoplifter,” Slate, November 24, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/11/24/stores_are_using_face_recognition_to_catch_shoplifters.html (accessed June 27, 2019). 6.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

At first I was part of a small group of dissenting authors who challenged the conventional wisdom about the internet’s beneficial impact on society. But over the last few years, as the zeitgeist has zigged from optimism to pessimism about our technological future, more and more pundits have joined our ranks. Now everyone, it seems, is penning polemics against surveillance capitalism, big data monopolists, the ignorance of the online crowd, juvenile Silicon Valley billionaires, fake news, antisocial social networks, mass technological unemployment, digital addiction, and the existential risk of smart algorithms. The world has caught up with my arguments. Nobody calls me the Antichrist anymore.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Julia Cartwright, Jean François Millet: His Life and Letters (Swan Sonnenschein, 1902), 177; for an exploration of the economic significance of gleaning in Jewish tradition, see Joseph William Singer, The Edges of the Field: Lessons on the Obligations of Ownership (Beacon Press, 2000). 13. See Anna Bernasek and D. T. Mongan, All You Can Pay: How Companies Use Our Data to Empty Our Wallets (Nation Books, 2015); Nick Couldry, “The Price of Connection: ‘Surveillance Capitalism,’” Conversation (September 22, 2016); Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St. Martin’s Press, 2018); Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015); Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books, 2014); Joseph Turow et al., The Tradeoff Fallacy: How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them Up to Exploitation, report from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (June 2015); James Joyce quoted from Finnegans Wake in Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962), 278. 14.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

., “Pioneering Driverless Electric Vehicles in Europe: The City Automated Transport Systems (CATS),” Transportation Research Procedia 13 (2016): 30–39, https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01357309/document. 103a completely redesigned vehicle: “Sion, CH Is Piloting AVs,” Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles, Bloomberg Philanthropies, accessed February 20, 2019, https://avsincities.bloomberg.org/global-atlas/europe/ch/sion-ch; “Project ‘SmartShuttle,’” PostBus, accessed February 2019, https://www.postauto.ch/en/project-smartshuttle. 103driverless shuttles crawled along: “These 61 Cities Are Piloting AVs for Transit,” Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles, Bloomberg Philanthropies, accessed February 2019, https://avsincities.bloomberg.org/global-atlas/tags/transit. 104ferried more than 1.5 million passengers: National League of Cities, “Sustainability: Weaving a Microtransit Mesh,” Autonomous Vehicles: Future Scenarios, accessed April 12, 2019, http://avfutures.nlc.org/sustainability. 104sold more than 100 Armas and went public: “Navya Updates Its 2018 Revenue Target,” Navya, December 7, 2018, https://navya.tech/en/press/navya-updates-its-2018-revenue-target/. 105cut operating costs by as much as 40 percent: National League of Cities, “Sustainability: Weaving a Microtransit Mesh.” 106a “curb kiss” fee: Michael Cabanatuan and Kurtis Alexander, “Google Bus Backlash: S.F. to Impose Fees on Tech Shuttles,” SFGate, January 21, 2014, https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Google-bus-backlash-S-F-to-impose-fees-on-tech-5163759.php. 107a planned driverless-shuttle network: City of Bellevue, Washington, and City of Kirkland, Washington, “A Flexible, Electric, Autonomous Commutepool System,” Bellevue-Kirkland USDOT (grant proposal, 2018). 108leftover data has value in predicting human behavior: Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). 109launched its own MaaS effort in 2019: Adele Peters, “In Berlin, There’s Now One App to Access Every Mode of Transportation,” Fast Company, February 18, 2019, https://www.fastcompany.com/90308234/in-berlin-theres-now-one-app-to-access-every-mode-of-transportation. 109draws on a highly successful deployment in Vilnius: Douglas Busvine, “From U-Bahn to E-Scooters: Berlin Mobility App Has It All,” Reuters, September 24, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tech-berlin/from-u-bahn-to-e-scooters-berlin-mobility-app-has-it-all-idUSKBN1W90MG. 110the role of mobility-service integrator: Peters, “In Berlin.” 110off to a slow start selling subscriptions: Julia Walmsley, “Watch Out, Uber.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

On the other hand, venture capitalists have a bad history of producing social, economic, and political problems rather than solving them.2 Apple’s iPhone led to factories with appalling work conditions in Shenzhen. Google and Facebook brought us the benefits of social media along with fake news and surveillance capitalism. As Aaron told me more stories—shot through with boundless optimism and promise—I wondered how his venture would actually be different from more established enterprises. Aaron claimed that genetic technology would bring revolutionary changes to medicine, society, and life itself. “Mainstream medicine is nothing more than an enslavement to the chronic management of a disease,” Aaron told me.

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Conley avows that he’s particularly excited about polygenic indices—because including them as control variables in statistical analyses allows one to “obtain better-specified, less-biased parameter estimates for [environmental] variables.”32 While the media discusses behavioral genetic research in terms of designer babies and surveillance capitalism, the researchers who are creating and working with polygenic indices for traits such as education are geeking out about control variables and less-biased parameter estimates. Discussions of control variables don’t have the same dark allure as discussions of designer babies. But much of the potential for genetic research to improve human lives resides here, in thinking about doing better social science research.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Every once in a while you get a message from a company or site saying, “It would be a really good idea if you were to change your password,” and you feel concerned. Also sometimes you might see a news story about a company that you use, like Yahoo, getting hacked. But the repercussions and impact of our data being harvested to this extreme are significantly worse than most people realize. First, it has led to “surveillance capitalism”—a term coined by the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff—in which companies have an incentive to keep feeding us advertisements and keep track of us to the point where our attention is being bought and sold. Our email exchanges, direct messages, likes and clicks, and even phone conversations and voice commands are incorporated into building a profile that is used to target us no matter where we are.

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

They thus fused these pieces of our self-exploration and discovery with their efforts to sell us things. While the self under capitalism has always been influenced by its norms, the internet has taken it to new heights. Largely operating covertly already, the fingerprints of capitalism completely disappeared in the early digital years. However, even in all of this, it’s debatable how much surveillance capitalism actually understands us. The tools that track us base their understanding of us on what we share online, which we’ve been told time and time again is less real or not real. So without the full picture, they continue to nudge us in the direction of the simplified versions of ourselves we sometimes share online.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Both international and internal critics, including the British organizational cyberneticist Stafford Beer, were critical of Soviet management techniques.7 More than a network, the OGAS Project as formulated by Glushkov outlines a daring technocratic economic imagining that was meant to operate in a future Soviet information society by digitizing, supervising, and optimizing the coordination challenges besetting the national command economy. The associated costs and scale of such a supercharged system were accordingly colossal. Glushkov captured the sentiment of network effects, which is still alive in surveillance capitalism’s promotion of big data today, in this phrase: “world practice shows that the larger the object for which an information-management system is created, the greater its economic effect.”8 More than komchamstvo, or Lenin’s term for “Communist boasting,” the basic OGAS blueprint affirms its staggering magnitude.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, disinformation, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, information security, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, peak oil, pre–internet, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, trade route, WikiLeaks, zero day

If most of what people wanted to do online was to be able to tell their family, friends, and strangers what they were up to, and to be told what their family, friends, and strangers were up to in return, then all companies had to do was figure out how to put themselves in the middle of those social exchanges and turn them into profit. This was the beginning of surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it. Now, it was the creative Web that collapsed, as countless beautiful, difficult, individualistic websites were shuttered. The promise of convenience led people to exchange their personal sites—which demanded constant and laborious upkeep—for a Facebook page and a Gmail account.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It by Stuart Maconie

"there is no alternative" (TINA), banking crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, gentrification, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, North Sea oil, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, rent control, retail therapy, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, surveillance capitalism, The Chicago School, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent

By privatising not just industries but all the risks formerly dealt with by a benevolent state – vaccinations, ill health, unemployment or workplace injury – the new system forced everybody to start calculating risks at the front of their minds in a way my parents’ generation never had to. All this leads to a kind of evaporation of consent for democracy as surveillance capitalism and algorithmic control by big corporations grows. Loss of faith in human self. That’s what we’ve got to get back. You can fight it.’ In his book, Clear Bright Future, Mason outlines some of the small but crucial ways you can fight back against the rise of the machines and the tyranny of the algorithm: never use the automated checkouts, always wait for an assistant, look your barista in the eye and engage with them, not your phone.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

For details on Stasi files, see Cullen Murphy, God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). 3. For a thorough analysis of AI surveillance systems, see Jay Stanley, The Dawn of Robot Surveillance (American Civil Liberties Union, 2019). 4. Recent books on surveillance and control include Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019) and Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (Penguin Press, 2019). 5. News article on a blackmail bot: Avivah Litan, “Meet Delilah—the first insider threat Trojan,” Gartner Blog Network, July 14, 2016. 6.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

The Chinese state has developed a social credit system that aims to monitor and evaluate citizens’ behaviour in real time. In America, most schoolchildren use Google’s education apps, which can track everything from how many times they go to the bathroom to how long they spend on specific exercises.1 (And, of course, Google collects all the data.) Moore told me that if democracy is to survive in an age of surveillance capitalism, two very different things need to change: the laws that govern politics, and how we conceive of democracy itself. “Our regulations need to be updated for the digital age,” he said. “But electoral laws are not the only thing. We need to rethink how we do liberal democracy. We need to ask what kind of democracy we want to live in.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

If you learn that rate-rigging and regulatory failures are systemic, but stay quiet, well, perhaps you have shown that you are genuinely reliable and deserve membership of the club.30 Yet it is telling that Google, once the brainchild of a pair of scruffy Stanford geeks whose motto was “Don’t be evil”, is now one of the most terrifying examples of so-called “surveillance capitalism”, seemingly hell-bent on accumulating (and profiting from) all the information it can get its hands on. In 2015 the company finally ditched the original motto since the hypocrisy was just too obvious, and at least, according to one account was actually being taken seriously by some of the company’s staff.31 That these excesses can be reined in by the power of free markets to discipline its worst offenders is undoubtedly one of the most damaging myths peddled by the advocates of laissez-faire.

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel

2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital map, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Grace Hopper, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, iterative process, job automation, Lao Tzu, large language model, lockdown, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, microaggression, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, occupational segregation, old-boy network, OpenAI, openstreetmap, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, randomized controlled trial, remote working, risk tolerance, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social distancing, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, work culture , you are the product

But technological advances can be—and often are—in service of inclusion and empowerment; it’s all about making deliberate choices. We constantly hear horror stories about technology gone wrong, biased AI, and a looming dystopian human-machine future. Bestsellers with titles like Weapons of Math Destruction, Algorithms of Oppression, Automating Inequality, Technically Wrong, Surveillance Capitalism, and Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men all sound the alarm about how new technology can diminish, exclude, and perpetuate inequality. And they aren’t wrong. As we shall see, the reasons for technological inequities are varied, ranging from bad data fed into systems by engineers to autonomous learning and replication by machines of our existing societal disparities to unethical corporate decisions and biased design choices.

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce