Digital Democracy
Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw
Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff . "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," how the biggest tech companies deal with our data. How do we regain control of our data? What is surveillance capitalism?
In this documentary, Zuboff takes the lid off Google and Facebook and reveals a merciless form of capitalism in which no natural resources, but the citizen itself, serves as a raw material. How can citizens regain control of their data?
It is 2000, and the dot.com crisis has caused deep wounds. How will startup Google survive the bursting of the internet bubble? Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin don't know anymore how to turn the tide. By chance, Google discovers that the "residual data" that people leave behind in their searches on the internet is very precious and tradable.
This residual data can be used to predict the behavior of the internet user. Internet advertisements can, therefore, be used in a very targeted and effective way. A completely new business model is born: "surveillance capitalism."
http://www.lnwr.in/lwrd/surveillance/surveillance3.html
Twitter owner Elon Musk, interviewed by the BBC early on April 12, said that he was likely to comply with the blocking orders issued by the Indian government instead of facing a situation where Twitter employees were being sent to jail.
https://thewire.in/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-india-it-rules
12/04/2023
Remember when the line that the current monopolist gave when we got our first personal computers. https://www.britannica.com/technology/computer/The-personal-computer-revolution One quote: The advent of the microprocessor did not inspire IBM or any other large company to begin producing personal computers. Time after time, the big computer companies overlooked the opportunity to bring computing capabilities to a much broader market. In some cases, they turned down explicit proposals by their own engineers to build such machines.
- Each of us were to be a subject getting information from different sources.
- We then got email and subscribed to bulletin boards where we felt a sense of community on different topics. We were to be the centre of information.
- Today, all our information is in data servers, most of the programmes/apps and the algorythms used to process these tell us that unless we are part of this big centralised service, we cannot reap the benefits of IT. After all it is easier to converse with your neighbour, through these centralised servers.. zoom, whatsapp, twitter, instagram.
- Even the so called services committed to privacy, need your data to be in a large server.