
The privacy paradox: why do people keep using tech firms that abuse their data? - hhs
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/05/privacy-paradox-why-do-people-keep-using-tech-firms-data-facebook-scandal
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oil25
Tech firms engage in capitalist logic to achieve it: wherein the true costs of
production are externalized and obscured from public view (or worse, portrayed
as being virtuous and of benefit to the user). Willing or not, we are in their
employ when we engage in their services, much in the same way we contribute to
climate change merely by participating in industrialized Western society. We
are both the victims and perpetrators, because even individual moral
responsibility has been externalized, seemingly to the point of irrelevance.
And as the complex systems (e.g., near-omnipotent global surveillance,
totalitarian fiat currency, Bernays' propaganda) we've designed and
implemented to run our world are beyond the comprehension, let alone control,
of any single mind, how could it be any other way?

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hhs
Interesting points. You write about externalities, which touch on an economist
view. And you also note Ed Bernay and his work on human psychology/propaganda.

Is there empirical literature that further explains this paradox? I wonder if
there’s anything in anthropology that describes this.

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jdillaaa
The paradox here is pretty difficult to break down because it its function and
causes are so intertwined with everything in "industrialized Western society"
as the above comment makes note of.

The book "24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep" captures many social
phenomenon and mechanisms of the neoliberal/"late capitalism" moment.

Here is an excerpt from a book review: "the emergence, rationalization, and
normalization of the “observing subject” across the 19th century, revealing
new techniques of discipline, such as the regulation of attention in
industrial labour and later the pathologization of deviant forms of perception
and attentiveness" from
[https://muse.jhu.edu/article/580561](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/580561)

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hhs
This is neat, I'll check out Jonathan Crary's writing, thank you!

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bwang29
The article is so confusing. I'm hooked when it started at "The point of the
experiment, one imagines, was to prompt the question: “How do they know this?”
in the target’s mind." and then it just ends without answering anything.

