Thus, it was under these ominous and suspicious circumstances, that the fuse to a mostly hidden data revolution was lit. And its fuel was the homeowner's continued ignorance.
That revolution is what this author has coined Surveillance Capitalism (SC): "a parasitic self-referential thief of human capital."
Pound for pound more valuable than gold, SC has unilaterally claimed human experience as free raw material for back door mining and extraction.
The overall structure of the data mining game is that while the homeowners remain unwitting puppets to their own dominion, data are collected, analyzed and sold at scale; and those who own these data extraction farms, become immensely wealthy and potent players on the global economic scene.
With this power, knowledge and authority, we the fleeced and exploited, are left confused with a false sense that what is happening to us is built-in technological inevitability.
But this author tells us that the data mining game is neither a technological imperative, or inevitable. For this power laid fallow on the internet for more than a decade before Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Amazon could figure out how to monetize it.
This book chronicles the rapid development of surveillance capitalism after its monetization: from the innocence project at Georgia Tech, to its development of "behavioral futures markets" at Google and Facebook, where bets are currently being placed on how efficient and exploitative data mining enterprises can become.
Even though it's utility to us has been grossly oversold, and we have willingly given up our privacy, and then, embarrassingly, been forced to endure the numbing pain of being tracked, mined, parsed, modified, and watched as our data is being traded behind our backs along a data-linked conveyor belt for huge profits, we nevertheless have become dependent on it.
The reader is left to puzzle out how this "Faustian dependency" came about? How did we, in exchange for marginal improvements in control over home appliances, and online access to commerce and social participation, become dependent on our own exploitation? How did we get trapped in this "draconian quid pro quo?"
It is the author's claim that because of the contemporary corporate mindset, SC's asymmetry in knowledge, power and authority, has come to take priority over all else.
It knows everything about us but carefully conceals any knowledge we might gain about it, its architecture, it's algorithms or other essential mining extraction attributes; or how the theft is implemented all along the data mining chain.
As an emergent property of technology, what it does to us is so new and unprecedented that we misread it as blending in with, and a logical continuation of, what past technologies have done. However, this author warns us that this misreading is a gross distortion of what is actually taking place. SC presents unique dangers that cannot be grasped within existing concepts.
According to her, SC is not a technology at all, but "a logic that imbues technology, commanding it into action, and then assigning the price tag of subjugation and helplessness to what the technology does."
We need a new vocabulary to understand it's implications and it's dangers; and we need new laws to break up its exploitative data chains and to encircle its exploitation legally.
This book is the map we need to track this unknown territory. It is a book that no one can afford not to read. Ten stars
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