"There is much to admire in Zuboff’s work, particularly the mass of evidence she assembles. However, her single-minded obsession leads to a common pitfall in literature of this kind. It is one thing to identify a central feature of contemporary capitalism, quite another to announce a new paradigm — the “new economic order” of surveillance capitalism — that shades all other aspects of the system.

Such an approach involves minimising criticisms of earlier phases of capitalism and downplaying the extent to which the tech giants are simply outgrowths of capitalist logic."

jc

The logic of capital online

June 2019
(447)

By Joseph Choonara

Shoshana Zuboff’s new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, explores the world of the giant tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. We all know they collect our data for profitable uses; how deeply does this affect capitalist relations, asks Joseph Choonara.

I was part of the last generation in Britain to experience childhood before the Internet. It still seemed miraculous when, in the mid-1990s, it became possible to browse the Web, using search engines such as Altavista and Lycos — Google being as yet neither a search engine nor a verb.

The Internet had none of the pervasiveness it has today. Mobile phones, for those who had them, were mostly used for phone calls. Beyond my university computer room, going online meant using a dial-up modem with speeds one thousandth of my current connection.

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continua qui: http://socialistreview.org.uk/447/logic-capital-online