Re: <nettime> John Naughton on Shoshana Zuboff: 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism

[carlo von lynX <lynX@time.to.get.psyced.org>]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 06:39:54PM +0100, Patrice Riemens wrote:
>                         And the problem with living through a
> revolution is that it’s impossible to take the long view of what’s
> happening. Hindsight is the only exact science in this business, and
> in that long run we’re all dead.

It's all pertinent, yet I need to point out two things: it
would be enough to simply understand, agree and lobby towards
making all collection and aggregation of intimate data illegal.

There are no ethically valueable use cases for collecting info
on mouse movements and typing indecision, especially if AI will
then tell you who is liable for psychological manipulation and
who isn't. Given this, surveillance capitalism would be a thing
of the past pretty quick! No need to wait for the "long view".
Just make the surveillance Internet illegal and give the market
a few years to come up with a better one.

But there is a more urgent problem that grows on top of
surveillance capitalism. It is our inability to exercise
democracy properly, and therefore to soon lose the ability
to make any such legislation. So we must stop to focus on
surveillance capitalism and start to focus on surveillance
removing our ability to regulate capitalism, or any other
problem on planet Earth.

Stop using leftist terminology (which makes Christian Democrats
and other peeps stop paying attention). What we are facing is a
facet of totalitarianism. Surveillance totalitarianism. We just
don't know who's going to be the big dictator at the end
(presuming that ten years into this game it isn't all sorted
out yet), and maybe we will never be told.

This period of time may be our last chance to influence 
politics at all. If we lose this window of opportunity, it
doesn't matter whether we lose our ecology or our economy
first. We're just slowly becoming poorer and more poisoned.

The political message to take to the streets is so simple:
Just make the surveillance Internet illegal and give the market
a few years to come up with a better one.

Yes, I am intentionally using the word "market" to appeal to
those folks that are stubbornly not understanding that markets
need regulation to function without doing harm to people.


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