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AccessingTechnology-DigitalLiberationOrDespotism-09252024 6 - 09 Oct 2024 - Main.MichaelMacKay
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I found the video “The Last Kilometer, The Last Chance” incredibly insightful, especially considering it was filmed in 2016 but so accurately anticipates the technological landscape of 2024/2025. It predicts the control, addiction, and monetization that data and technology now exert over people’s lives. While watching, this raised a crucial question: how do we reconcile the global expansion of internet access—often seen as a tool for educational and economic empowerment—with the growing evidence that this expansion primarily fuels corporate and state surveillance? | | | What makes this more alarming is how companies use the guise of convenience to strip away privacy. They collect and commodify our data without our explicit consent, making surveillance a key aspect of how these platforms function. As you mentioned, Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism makes it clear that this isn’t about making our lives easier—it’s about making our behavior predictable and profitable.
-- ZoieGeronimi - 06 Oct 2024 | |
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Hi Zoie,
I loved your point on the "guise of convenience," which made me think of the epigraph framing the first chapter of Zuboff's book:
"I saw him crying, shedding floods of tears upon Calypso’s island, in her chambers.
She traps him there; he cannot go back home."
—HOMER, THE ODYSSEY
For seven years, Odysseus effectively learns to love Calypso, but it is a malicious love where the hero's journey home to Penelope is displaced. In terms of targeted ads, how many times is our journey online similarly detained? When it comes to convenience, if we understand the word etymologically, we should ascribe "convenience" to something that "comes with" us on our journey. But ironically, I suspect that most of the users of Meta/Instagram or Alphabet/YouTube hardly realize that they are not the ones charting their own path.
As Zuboff puts it when discussing the perils of Google Home: "There was a time when you searched Google, but now Google searches you." In some ways, that's a new phenomenon, but in other ways, it's a tale as old as time (or at least Greek epic)!
-- MichaelMacKay - 09 Oct 2024 | | | |
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