Three Principles for the Third Decade Part 8 of so many unpacking Shoshana Zuboff’s very important New York Times editorial A TL/DR synopsis of the last post: Social media platforms are political-economic institutions that operate as chaos machines for hire. Yipes. Aren’t you ready to start considering what to do about that? I am. We’ll just scratch the surface of what to do, today. A good place to start is…

Part 7— Unpacking Shoshana Zuboff’s very important NYTimes editorial Let’s be real, if history teaches us anything, it’s that social order is a damn miracle. Ours is a young information civilization. And by young, I mean extra, especially vulnerable. Human societies and their fragile social orders have always rested on “common sense knowledge.” That is, the knowledge we share…

An object lesson in how surveillance capitalism drove social media to screw the pooch. Part 6 of many unpacking Shoshana Zuboff’s very important editorial The World Health Organization declared Covid 19 a global pandemic in March of 2020. A month earlier people who watch this sort of thing reported an ‘infodemic’ of rumors about disease. Social media is where these rumors were socialized. Zuboff writes that by May at least 34 extremist right-wing websites…

Surveillance Capitalism is agnostic about the quality of information. What it serves up doesn’t need to be even just a little bit truthy to be very, very useful to the surveillance capitalist’s mission. What it does need to do is keep you clicking. The goal is to continually extract data…

Part 4 of many — This section of Shoshana Zuboff’s important NYTimes editorial is thorny. Social media companies’ extraction operations thrive in the unfettered world of surveillance exceptionalism. This sort of exceptionalism is the promotion of surveillance over other values and standards we hold dear. …

Part 3 of many unpacking Shoshana Zuboff’s important NYTimes editorial After 9/11 the government needed information about us, all of us, and to get it they leaned on private companies to collect and generate that data. After all, private companies can do things we don’t want the government to do…

And for today’s Zuboff Adventure we explore how the surveillance capitalist coup went down. How did they do it? It takes just 4 steps to co-opt democratic norms and practices. Spoiler alert: we’re on step 3. Step 1: Surveillance Capitalism. Surveillance capitalism — the kind of business practiced by every…

A week or two ago Shoshana Zuboff published “The Coup We Are Not Talking About” an important editorial in the Sunday New York times. She’s writing about the surveillance society we live in and dude, it’s really worth understanding. But her writing was lo-oo-oo-ng and the language Zuboff uses was…

Right now a virus we have no familiarity with is whipping around the world. It’s killing people. And here’s a tricky part: 30% of those infected show no symptoms at all. You may be infected and not know it, not ever know it. But you can still pass that thing…