Shoshanna Zuboff Coins Another Term
She was hypnotically compelling, but with time I snapped out of it and categorized her book as a polemic. However I did notice the extroverts in my life who don't care for "privacy" are quite taken with Zuboff's framing, which is very much for privacy. She gets through to some.
Friday Zuboff published an update to her stance, articulate as ever, each sentence building on the next. Here she uncovers the tragedy of the uncommons:
The world’s liberal democracies now confront a tragedy of the “un-commons.” Information spaces that people assume to be public are strictly ruled by private commercial interests for maximum profit. The internet as a self-regulating market has been revealed as a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social wreckage in its wake: the wholesale destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the poisoning of social discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.
These social harms are not random. They are tightly coupled effects of evolving economic operations. Each harm paves the way for the next and is dependent on what went before.
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
