Professor Zuboff, do you know of Deoxys, mewtwo, or Simsala?
no.
So monsters are called in the cell phone game Pokémon Go.
Oh. No, the name I don’t know. But I know what these monsters do: they entice players to reveal private data. When are you going to where? And you control the players, because the purposefully go to places where there are monsters. Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, deserves your money. They sold so-called Pokéstops to shops, a McDonald’s or a Pizzeria – and get the walk-in customers. The game is part of a economic system, I call that surveillance capitalism.
Karl Marx wrote: “capital is dead labour, which lives only vampire moderately revived by the absorption of living labor, and the more, the more it sucks.” What, exactly, suck monitoring a capitalist?
you open the door to our lives, to come in and suck our private experiences from us. This raw material they have to translate into zeroes and ones, without asking, and then to win with sophisticated computer technologies to predict our behavior. Pokémon Go knows where we will go, because it takes us to get there, this will say new before-and-sale in the markets.
Google is the cradle of surveillance capitalism. And Sheryl Sandberg, now Facebook’s number two, a kind of UrÜberwachungskapitalistin. They call her “typhoid Mary”. What do typhoid fever?
“typhoid Mary” was a cook in the late 19th century. Century from Ireland to New York City emigrated. She carried the Typhoid fever germ, infected other and triggered an outbreak of the disease. It is a metaphor for the origin of something that is spreading – and not necessarily good. Sandberg has introduced the business model of the Single-tuned advertising at Google, the principle of surveillance capitalism. Then she switched to Facebook to do the Same thing. That’s why I call you “typhoid Mary”.
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for Seven years, Zuboff worked, Emeritus Professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, in her new book.
©Philipp von Ditfurth/star
What you put in with an infectious disease, call other simple data of the economy – and consider it a blessing, for a growth engine. The management consultants of McKinsey believe that the combination of large data quantities, and artificial intelligence, the economy worldwide by 2030 by 16 percent in addition to grow. Actually, it was super.
If McKinsey or others claim something like that, then that is either ideologically naive, or you deliberately ignore what the society is on the game. We’ll pay you with information about our life. Monitoring capitalists to explain our whole man be one-sided to your freely available raw material.
your products can benefit us. Self-driving cars will make our roads safer, artificial intelligence will help us to discover diseases– cancer – earlier. And Amazon’s Alexa plays my favorite music.
you equate the technology with the logic of surveillance capitalism. Sure, you can make use of large amounts of data – Big Data – to help the society to fight cancer, or the climate crisis. But we do not need a surveillance capitalism. The monitoring capitalists do not use their secret worlds, in order to solve such problems. You use them to earn money.
An Amazon Manager told me: Future generations will not be able to imagine, to live in houses with which you are not able to speak, no ears and no eyes. He keeps digital servant like Alexa for progress.
This is one of the great lies of the surveillance capitalists. Are we to believe that you have to Do is the inevitable result of digital technology that the digital world must be a world of Surveillance. In truth, the Digital is without Monitoring conceivable digital-equipped homes without the outflow of data. Only the monitoring capitalist can not exist without the Digital.
So, my Alexa is just …
… a part of the data supply chain, disguised as a friendly assistant who takes care of your concerns.
But I know that she is not listening.
But you don’t know, when you listen to them, and what do Alexa with your data. Just as surveillance capitalism works: as a one-way mirror. They see us, but we can’t see them. They know everything about us, but we know little about you and your methods, your equipment, your Algorithms.
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What does this mean for the company?
It comes to an extreme elite education. Because uneven distribution of Knowledge in the history of mankind. This creates a new Dimension of social inequality and a vast power differential. My observations are similar to what the French economist Thomas Piketty in his book “capital in the 21st century. Century,” has noted: Only a few benefit from the growth. We will be catapulted into a feudal age. It is similar to the surveillance capitalism. He is in control of Knowledge and Power, as we know it from pre-modern societies.
Why are we allowing this?
There are many reasons why the surveillance capitalists in the past two decades, quite freely do and what they wanted. One of them is the secrecy. You have done everything to keep us unaware, and then in a rhetorical fog of euphemisms and obfuscations to thrive.
The founders of Google and Facebook have set us up?
have done so, as if they were our friends and not profit-oriented firms, as they would make us strong, free us. I have read for a long time of teaching books of great magicians. Misdirection is the core of any magic tricks. The audience does not notice what is really happening, because the magician draws attention to something else. Eric Schmidt of Google once said: “In reality, search engines information store for a while.” Search engines! What a brilliant prank in the matter of misdirection. Because it’s not search engines that hoarding private data. It is monitoring are capitalists.
Schmidt also said something interesting about privacy. “If you don’t want anyone to know what you are doing, then you should not do it.” This is a well-known Argument: If you have nothing to hide, you need not to worry.
The remark was obscene, and foolish. She has revealed what Monitoring capitalists want: a totally transparent humanity. In truth, it is, however, If you have nothing to hide, you’re a Nothing. Unfortunately, too many people have accepted the point of view of the surveillance capitalists. You are like the frog that remains in water sitting, this starts to cook slowly.
Because it is long so nice and comfortable?
Because the monitoring capitalists with their services deep-seated needs in our societies to satisfy. Our lives are highly individualized, marked by constant economic competition – we need help to cope with this complexity.
Formerly could afford only the Rich servant. Now there’s a personal, digital servants for each, for the mass. This is progress.
The Rich never had to pay for what will have to pay the masses for the Illusion of help. Her private life was never hollowed out, sucked dry, their decision-making powers never run in this way, the Foundation of their human autonomy.
