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Mera Granberg Paul
Mera Granberg Paul

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Mar 15, 2021

How to handle a bully like Surveillance Capitalism —

Part 9 unpacking Shoshana Zuboff’s very important New York Times Editorial Surveillance capitalism, by its very nature, is unable to play nicely with our Republic. At this moment, we still have a Republic and we have some democratic norms. For argument’s sake, let’s say we’d like to keep them. So, what to do? Zuboff pleads we not focus downstream “…on arguments…

Shoshana Zuboff

3 min read


Mar 12, 2021

Surviving the Information Civilization

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…

New York Times

2 min read


Mar 9, 2021

Knowledge Terrorism’s easy victims: young information civilizations

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…

Shoshana Zuboff

2 min read


Mar 8, 2021

When Chaos met Covid

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…

NY Times

2 min read


Mar 5, 2021

Surveillance Capitalism is radically indifferent to the truth— unpacking Shoshana Zuboff’s very important NYTimes editorial -part 5 of many

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…

Shoshana Zuboff

3 min read


Mar 4, 2021

Good Intentions Paving Project -the Economics and Politics of Knowledge Chaos

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. …

Shoshana Zuboff

2 min read


Mar 3, 2021

The Surveillance Exception. That time we drunk dialed Surveillance and invited them to move in.

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…

Shoshana Zuboff

2 min read


Mar 2, 2021

Social Media destroys democratic norms and practices in 4 easy steps — part 2 of many

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…

Shoshana Zuboff

4 min read


Mar 1, 2021

Untangling Shoshana Zuboff’s very important NYTimes editorial — part 1 of many

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…

Shoshana Zuboff

2 min read


Mar 18, 2020

Save Prom! and Grandma! — 4 actions to fight Coronavirus

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…

Coronavirus

5 min read

Mera Granberg Paul

Mera Granberg Paul

Left-coaster, stepmom, defender of democracy

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