The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff Review – We Are the Pawns

It seems people are very willing to give up their private information in return for perceived benefits such as ease of use, navigation and access to friends and information.

As experience has shown, the world – life itself – is cloudy, contingent and defined by change. As horrifying as the surveillance capitalists’ view of a totally controlled, perfectly articulated and error-free future might be, the inevitable failure of its vision, and the resultant violence – already evident in our fractured worldviews, competing f

The players think they are playing one game – collecting Pokémon – while they are in fact playing an entirely different one, in which the board is invisible but they are the pawns.

The belief that human behaviour can be perfectly modelled, predicted and controlled entrains as a consequence the collapse of equitable relations between individuals and trust in institutions, and the substitution of algorithmic certainty for any semblance of participatory, democratic society. There is no appeal to collective, contestable decision-

The extraction is so grotesque, so creepy, that it is almost impossible to see how anyone who really thinks about it lives with it – and yet we do. There’s something about its opacity, its insidiousness, that makes it hard to think about, just as it’s hard to think about climate change, a process that will inevitably undo society as we currently un

the agency we can actively assert over our own futures, which is fundamentally usurped by predictive, data-driven systems