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.
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.
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."
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)
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.
> 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.
Credit card companies also have a lot of data on us - they know what stuff we are buying. Is this industry limited in how it may share this data for fun and profit?
I wonder what has more weight - the purchase history or what one is searching on google? Now I would consider the purchase history of a user to be more conclusive than what he/she has been searching on google. Now go figure what the business minded people have been smoking.
What is next? I would go for an analysis of the composition of garbage that goes out of a residential neighborhood; there is lots of data in it. Garbage analysis may be the next frontier! (and there is total coverage - even duckduckgo users are covered)
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
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/the-surveillance-parad...