
Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and Prospects of an Information Civilization - DyslexicAtheist
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754
======
nabla9
The author, Shoshana Zuboff, is one of the pioneers of the information age.
Her book 1988 book "In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and
Power" is a classic.

Zuboff's Laws:

1\. Everything that can be automated will be automated.

2\. Everything that can be informated will be informated.

3\. In the absence of countervailing restrictions and sanctions, every digital
application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for
surveillance and control, irrespective of its originating intention.

The Surveillance Paradigm : Be the friction - Our Response to the New Lords of
the Ring, Von Shoshana Zuboff 2013
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16642643](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16642643)

[http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/the-surveillance-
parad...](http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/the-surveillance-paradigm-be-
the-friction-our-response-to-the-new-lords-of-the-
ring-12241996.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_0)

~~~
dredmorbius
Thank you, yes, Zuboff is an absolutely underappreciated star.

I only ran across _Smart Machine_ some months back, via a review in a _Whole
Earth_ special issue (online at the Internet Archive), edited by Kevin Kelly
(he went on to edit _Wired_ ).

She was absolutely prescient then. And is very much still alive, if retired.

------
confounded
The conclusion of the paper is well worth a read if you don't have time for
the whole thing.

On the inadequacy of the current political class to create meaningful
policies:

> _" Google and other actors learned to obscure their operations, choosing to
> invade undefended individual and social territory until opposition is
> encountered, at which point they can use their substantial resources to
> defend at low cost wht had already been taken. In this way, surveillance
> assets are accumulated and attract significant surveillance capital while
> producing their own surprising new politics and social relations"._

> _" These new institutional facts have been allowed to stand for a variety of
> reasons: they were constructed at high velocity and designed to be
> undetectable. Outside a narrow realm of experts, few people understood their
> meaning. Structural asymmetries of knowledge and rights made it impossible
> for people to learn about these practices."_

The general thrust:

> _" Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian celebrates such possibilities as new
> forms of contract, when in fact they represent the end of contracts.
> Google’s rendering of information civilization replaces the rule of law and
> the necessity of social trust as the basis for human communities with a new
> life-world of rewards and punishments, stimulus and response. Surveillance
> capitalism offers a new regime of comprehensive facts and compliance with
> facts. It is, I have suggested, a coup from above – the installation of a
> new kind of sovereign power."_

~~~
MichaelMoser123
now what about the imperative to push adds and exert 'soft' political control?
Some fifty years ago everyone was watching the same TV stations and reading
the same newspapers (that's when media companies had a lot of influence) -
nowadays you have two thousand TV stations and two thousand newspapers, so
that the problem of exerting 'soft' control has become much harder.

What alternatives levers of control over the public are there? (short of
coercion by force)

~~~
denom
Just look at the work of Cambridge Analytica. Soft control is in the hands of
bit players now. Surely large players (google, governments) can be more deft
with how they ply the waters.

Two thousand tv stations? How about 20 million (Youtube)? In an information
theoretic context, scale is irrelevant.

Individuals are categorized, personalities are inventoried, and experiments
are run. Maybe google doesn't do it, maybe they provide the conjugate
interface to companies that actually do the inventory, the effect is the same.
Havoc on an open society.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
> Two thousand tv stations? How about 20 million (Youtube)? In an information
> theoretic context, scale is irrelevant.

You can't determine the public agenda by owning a single news outlet out of 20
millions, you could however do that by owning a major newspaper back in 1970.

~~~
908087
But you can certainly determine it if you happen to control the algorithm that
decides which of those 20 million people actually see.

------
clumsysmurf
The author of the paper, Shoshana Zuboff, is also coming out with a book soon:

"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New
Frontier of Power"

[https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-
Fr...](https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-
Frontier/dp/1610395697)

------
yuhong
Good time to mention my essay: [http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/03/google-
doubleclick-essa...](http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/03/google-doubleclick-
essay-first-draft.html)

~~~
dredmorbius
You'll want to consider:

[http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

~~~
yuhong
This mostly has nothing to do with how Google was originally started.

~~~
dredmorbius
It is materially relevant to yor caims and argument. And appears not to have
been considered in your present essay.

Your call.

------
confounded
P.S. (2015)

