VPRO International's interview of Shoshona Zubroff on surveillance capitalism.
In this documentary, Zuboff takes the lid off Google and Facebook and reveals a merciless form of capitalism in which no natural resources, but citizens themselves, serve as a raw material.
It is 2000, and the dot.com crisis has caused deep wounds. How will startup Google survive the bursting of the Internet bubble? Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin don't know anymore how to turn the tide. By chance, Google discovers that the "residual data" that people leave behind in their searches on the Internet are very precious and tradable.
These residual data can be used to predict the behavior of the Internet user. Internet advertisements can, therefore, be used in a very targeted and effective way. A completely new business model is born: "surveillance capitalism."
Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff wrote a monumental book about the new economic order that is alarming. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power reveals how the biggest tech companies deal with our data. How can we regain control of our data? What is surveillance capitalism?
Related reading:
World of Books: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
3rd Quarter 2020 Wrap Up: Visions of Freedom (104 pages) 
Working Successfully with State Leaders Who Will Take Responsibility (20 pages) 
Financial Transaction Freedom (14 pages) 
In spite of an overly academic and theoretical first 60 pages, Zuboff gets down to business in Chapter three of her book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” to provide an avalanche of facts AND to weave them into a shocking must-read story for all who want understand how systemically our identities have been invaded and extracted during the last 20 years.
HOWEVER, she misses that Google’s and Facebook’s intents go far beyond commercial greed; rather, early on, they were weaponized by defense and intelligence agencies — or worse, appear to have been conceived of and launched by those same agencies, as detailed by journalist Nafeez Ahmed in a lengthy but remarkable article that Zuboff herself references: “Why Google made the NSA” https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-nsa-2a80584c9c1
In spite of a that critical oversight, Zuboff brilliantly chronicles the commercial nightmare we now live in. Somehow, though, she has ignored the greater horror of internet-based surveillance systems, which constitute the cynical, intentional and systematic destruction of democracy by power structures that believe future civilization requires increasingly centralized technocratic control, leveraged in entirely new ways by alliances between government and corporations.
The book’s examples compellingly demonstrate how the alliances go far beyond commercialism; she just doesn’t enlarge her damning conclusions to help us see the political intentionality operating behind the reworking of society and our government. Try Nafeez Ahmed for that.
For more on Nafeez Ahmed, check out Catherine’s marvelous 2015 interview with him at https://library.solari.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/sr20150212_InterviewHQ.mp3
Jason and I were both planning on reviewing her book. Never finished. Deeply disappointing.
Fabulous book and this clip is a great cliff note, a must watch.
Got the book. Found the first 100 pages a bit abstract. Have to go back and finish.