Should we think of Big Tech as Big Brother?
Are tech companies manipulating data to control human behaviour — or are their leaders simply naive?

John Thornhill

January 4, 2019

Many adjectives could be used to describe Shoshana Zuboff’s latest book: groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming, alarmist, preposterous. One will do: unmissable.

As we grope around in the darkness trying to grasp the contours of our digital era, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines a searing light on how this latest revolution is transforming our economy, politics, society — and lives. As the inventor of the concept of “surveillance capitalism”, Zuboff fulfils a persuasive role in explaining the ways in which this “voracious and utterly novel commercial project” is radically rewriting the rules of the economic game, creating extraordinary new asymmetries of knowledge and power. By tracking our every click, our every digital expression of interest, ambition, longing and desire, the surveillance capitalists can climb inside our heads and sell those behavioural insights on to their real customers, the advertisers.

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continua qui: https://www.ft.com/content/43980f9c-0f5b-11e9-a3aa-118c761d2745