
‘Radical Indifference’: How Surveillance Capitalism Conquered Our Lives - JesseJon
https://www.coindesk.com/radical-indifference-how-surveillance-capitalism-conquered-our-lives
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lioeters
A few choice snippets:

> [a world in which] technology users are neither customers, employees, nor
> products. Instead they are the raw material for new procedures of
> manufacturing and sales that define an entirely new economic order: a
> surveillance economy.

> Surveillance capitalism was invented at Google between 2000 and 2001 as a
> response to the financial emergency during the dot-com bust.

> This is an economic logic that was so successful at Google that within just
> a few years, it became the default model throughout the tech sector and then
> spread through the normal economy and has become the dominant economic logic
> in our time.

> Between 2001, when this logic first started being systematically applied,
> and 2004, when Google went public (the first time we got to see any of their
> numbers) their revenue increased by 3,590%. That exponential increase
> represents what I call the surveillance dividend.

> At that point, they had cracked the code and many companies found a path to
> monetization. Now everybody from your TV manufacturer to Ford Motor Company
> started to say “to heck with the product, we want the data.” Everyone in
> every sector is chasing the surveillance dividend.

> ..if Google had a business, it would be personal information. People are
> going to produce so much data. There will be cheap cameras and sensors
> everywhere. There will be so much data about people’s lives that all of
> human experience will be searchable and indexable.

> [Larry Page] had the vision that personal information was the game.
> Surveillance capitalism is an economic logic founded on the unilateral,
> secret theft of private experience as a limitless source of free raw
> material, and that free raw material becomes the zero-cost asset [meaning
> that, after set-up costs, it is free to produce]. It can be translated into
> behavioral data. That behavioral data is now claimed as proprietary and it’s
> gathered into new complex supply chain ecosystems.

> Everything feeds the supply chain. Not only what you do online, but
> everything on your phone, all the apps on your phone, and as Page predicted,
> all the cameras and sensors are gathering data. All of behavioral data is
> now claimed as proprietary and flows into complex ecosystems before being
> conveyed to surveillance capitalism’s computational factories, called
> artificial intelligence. The [output] is computational products that predict
> human behavior that are sold in markets, just like we have markets for pork
> belly futures or oil futures.

