Surveillance Capitalism

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Sean Hayden
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Surveillance Capitalism

Post by Sean Hayden » Sat Apr 07, 2018 4:12 pm

Surveillance capitalism is a term first introduced by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney in Monthly Review in 2014 and later popularized by academic Shoshana Zuboff that denotes a new genus of capitalism that monetizes data acquired through surveillance.[1][2][3][4]

According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism emerged due to the "coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies"[3] and depends on the global architecture of computer mediation which produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power she calls 'Big Other'.[5]

She states it was first discovered and consolidated at Google, being to surveillance capitalism what Ford and General Motors were to mass-production and managerial capitalism a century ago, and later adopted by Facebook and others[3] and that it uses illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control of behavior to produce new markets of behavioral prediction and modification.[5]

Zuboff states that "the online world, which used to be kind of our world, is now where capitalism is developing in new ways"[6] by data extraction rather than the production of new goods, thus generating intense concentrations of power over extraction and threatening core values such as freedom[7] and privacy.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

I ran into this term the other day while looking into privacy online. Have you ever heard of it? It really seems to touch on a lot of our fears about being exposed online, and what may be happening behind the curtain. :nervous:

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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by cronus » Sat Apr 07, 2018 4:51 pm

Paranoid Capitalism - should be a thing, must be a thing.
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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by Sean Hayden » Sat Apr 07, 2018 5:06 pm

Try again you lazy bastid!

It does sound paranoid, and vague. I'm sure a lot of bullshit can be smuggled into a conversation about this topic because of that. But the fact remains that data is being collected and sold and used to manipulate, and consumers are not yet fully aware of the scale of either today's problems or what could be coming.

I'd like to see where any previous guesswork regarding what motivates people and how to manipulate them has been verified thanks to access to enormous amounts of data. That would be neat.

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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by cronus » Sat Apr 07, 2018 5:20 pm

Advertising is hype. I'm not worried. In a close vote where margins matter....big data can be influential, corrupt and worrisome. Not for everyday purposes. The most I worry about is being trapped in a bubble of my own making. Most people on the other hand are quite happy with that....and so be it. (for them). No change really, except the algorithm rather than the news-paper they read is king.
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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by Brian Peacock » Sat Apr 07, 2018 5:26 pm

I recently used Google to find a replacement toilet seat - the studs on the old one having disintegrated from the last 10 years of heavy shitting. Now Google thinks I'm some kind of weird collector of bog seats, offering me ads and top-loaded results for bog seats and other bog-related products.

30% OFF all toilet seats until Wednesday with customer code PLOPS13
TOP 10 toilet seats for under $50
24 TOILETS SEATS for sale in your area. 21 NEW, 3 USED
BUY 6 Air Fresheners for a chance to win FREE toilet roll for 1 year
5 HIS AND HERS toilet seat gift ideas

:roll:
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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by Sean Hayden » Sat Apr 07, 2018 6:23 pm

cronus wrote:Advertising is hype. I'm not worried. In a close vote where margins matter....big data can be influential, corrupt and worrisome. Not for everyday purposes. The most I worry about is being trapped in a bubble of my own making. Most people on the other hand are quite happy with that....and so be it. (for them). No change really, except the algorithm rather than the news-paper they read is king.
I tend to have the same attitude. But I do wonder about the possibility of a 'black swan' of sorts discovery regarding manipulation on a grand-scale. I really do believe our lack of imagination could get us into serious trouble here.
The most I worry about is being trapped in a bubble of my own making.

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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by cronus » Sat Apr 07, 2018 6:28 pm

The worse that could happen is naive people will realize being on everybody's case is not a great idea, as the folks with pitchforks wade up the ivory steeple they thought themselves safe within.... :read:
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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by Brian Peacock » Sat Apr 07, 2018 6:51 pm

Capitalism will not be satisfied until it has converted every thing and idea into property and exploited it as a commodity. :read:
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Clinton Huxley » 21 Jun 2012 » 14:10:36 GMT
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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by Rum » Sat Apr 07, 2018 7:23 pm

My take on it is this. We aren't talking about Capitalism here. Capitalism is classically an economic system whereby large amount of capital and the means of production (the factories, farms and so on) are accumulated into the hands of a small number of people. Crucially they use this power to exploit labour and again crucially in order to 'profit' from this set of arrangements. We are manipulated and controlled by the power that the capitalists have over us - classically. Personally I think the slow decline of 'work' is going to change those relationships and Capital will struggle - in liberal democracies anyway.

The accumulation of data is another matter it seems to me. The companies that hold this data are not capitalist in the usual sense of the word. Currently they are not much more than pimps, selling their info to often small companies one way and another in order to enable those companies to make a profit in an increasingly tough market. And as Crumple says as things stand we can ignore the 'message', hide our identities on line and elsewhere or just not give a shit and let them get on with it.

I would see the real danger lying in the fusion of a market economy (state capitalism counts here!), combined with government - a new kind of corporate government where our consumption, identities and behaviour are all tied together with our digital lives and the data that they produce.

Conformity will be easy to monitor as will dissent and difference. I see the seeds of this in China as it happens. And if they pull it off the word 'totalitarian' won't even begin to describe it.

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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by pErvinalia » Sun Apr 08, 2018 2:17 am

Fascism?
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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by laklak » Sun Apr 08, 2018 2:37 am

Facebookism?
Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by cronus » Sun Apr 08, 2018 6:53 am

Always the chance of a Rupert Murdoch in cyberspace developing. Nothing unusual for single mega-twat empires. The entire history of the human race involves turning every potential utopia into a real dystopia. Could say that's what humans do best? Shitting in the nest...
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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by Rum » Sun Apr 08, 2018 8:01 am

No it isn't.

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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by Scot Dutchy » Sun Apr 08, 2018 2:34 pm

laklak wrote:Facebookism?
That is not so far off as you think.

The total exploitation of the human race is not that far away.
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Re: Surveillance Capitalism

Post by laklak » Sun Apr 08, 2018 2:49 pm

The exploitation of the rest of the human race. I'll be in an African game park half the year and on a boat the rest. They can all go fuck themselves.
Yeah well that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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