PDF The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Audible Audio Edition Shoshana Zuboff Nicol Zanzarella Hachette Audio Books
Download As PDF : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Audible Audio Edition Shoshana Zuboff Nicol Zanzarella Hachette Audio Books
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism", and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.
Shoshana Zuboff's interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and democratization?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the 21st century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.Â
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PDF The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Audible Audio Edition Shoshana Zuboff Nicol Zanzarella Hachette Audio Books
"I was really looking forward to reading this book but I read about 100 pages and put it down in frustration. It perhaps needs a better and more forceful editor because the author can't seem to decided if she want to write a flowery novel or an informative and topical book. She uses phases that make no sense and distract from the points she is trying to make.
For example on Page 55 the end of the paragraph reads: "But the lessons of that day had not yet been fully tallied when fresh answers - or, more modestly, the tenuous glimmers of answers as fragile as a newborn's translucent skin-rose to the surface of the world's attention gliding on scented ribbons of Spanish lavender and vanilla." I expect to see this in a Romance novel not a book on Surveillance Capitalism.
By eliminating such indulgences the book could be half the length, more focused and certainly more powerful. I am sure it is an important topic but in the end I did not finish it. I will wait for a more edited version that gets to the point."
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Audible Audio Edition Shoshana Zuboff Nicol Zanzarella Hachette Audio Books Reviews :
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Audible Audio Edition Shoshana Zuboff Nicol Zanzarella Hachette Audio Books Reviews
- I was really looking forward to reading this book but I read about 100 pages and put it down in frustration. It perhaps needs a better and more forceful editor because the author can't seem to decided if she want to write a flowery novel or an informative and topical book. She uses phases that make no sense and distract from the points she is trying to make.
For example on Page 55 the end of the paragraph reads "But the lessons of that day had not yet been fully tallied when fresh answers - or, more modestly, the tenuous glimmers of answers as fragile as a newborn's translucent skin-rose to the surface of the world's attention gliding on scented ribbons of Spanish lavender and vanilla." I expect to see this in a Romance novel not a book on Surveillance Capitalism.
By eliminating such indulgences the book could be half the length, more focused and certainly more powerful. I am sure it is an important topic but in the end I did not finish it. I will wait for a more edited version that gets to the point. - As Shoshana Zuboff explains, "This book is about the darkening of the digital dream and its rapid mutation into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism."
She provides an abundance of information, insights, and counsel that she hopes will help those who read her book to contest and interrupt, then contain and vanquish an unprecedented threat to the human race. "At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx's image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human experience."
According to Zuboff, her book documents "a journey to encounter what is strange, original, and even unimaginable in surveillance capitalism. She examines several major organizations -- notably , Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft -- that are in various stages of developing a "technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction-operation." Her journey's ultimate destination? "Our aim in this book is to discern the laws of surveillance capitalism that animate today's Trojan horses, returning us to age-old questions as they bear down on our lives, our societies, and our civilization."
Zuboff carefully explains how and why "surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge." The result "Our lives are scraped and sold to fund the freedom of surveillance capitalists and our subjugation," juxtaposing "their knowledge and our ignorance about what they know." Indeed, they know too much to qualify for freedom.
How to respond effectively to the potential dangers of surveillance capitalism, to what she so aptly characterizes as "an overthrow of the people's sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift toward democratic deconsolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies"? As the material cited in her Notes section clearly indicates (Pages 537-663), Shoshana Zuboff has conducted wide and deep research to support her recommendations.
If knowledge has power, and I think it can, those who possess knowledge that has the greatest power will have a decisive competitive advantage over those who do not. Zuboff shares what she has learned from others in order to support what becomes a call to action. In John 832, Jesus is quoted as saying, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." Sustaining totalitarianism depends on severely limited access to knowledge but first it must be obtained by surveillance.
The tone of her book reminds me in some respects of Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Rights of Man. That is, both urge their reader to awaken to a serious danger and defeat it while they can before it is too late. "The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, but above all it was because the people of East Berlin said, 'No more!' We too can be the authors of many 'great and beautiful' new facts that reclaim the digital future as humanity's home. No more! Let this be our declaration."
I am again reminded of two questions attributed to Hillel the Elder “If not you, who? If not now, when?†- "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff is a considerable writing which contains themes of inequities in the unequal distribution of knowledge and power.These inequities produce threats to human autonomy.There are struggles between individual and group dominance including the infamous groupthink.The concept of groupthink subverts the primacy and freedom of the individual.The author also places a premium on the privacy and individuality of consumers. This aspect of the discussion is proper.
There is too much emphasis on economic logic over the need to produce true value for consumers. Great products sell based upon what people truly need. For this reason, basic staple products sold best in the worst of times like the Great Depression. When times are bad, people still need shaving equipment, soap, toothpaste and a whole host of goods related to everyday living.
Many economic systems have some form of negation(s). For instance, Gosplan struggled with State planning quotas which tended to be too bureaucratic and burdened with politics and structural inefficiencies. In addition, the Ural Mountains were a natural divide between the more advanced knowledge based economies of communities west of the Urals versus the diverse peoples living east of the Urals.
China had great challenges in replicating the economic and educational successes in the coastal areas with inland communities like the yurts. In addition, great flooding and earthquakes posed cataclysmic living disruptions.
Overall, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff dissects some of the most criticized aspects of capitalism over the centuries in favor of promoting the common good in global commerce.Our system is not imperfect in every sense. Civil litigation provides consumers with a legal forum to "even the playing field" with business entities. In civil litigation, consumers can challenge hidden fees, unlawful charges, the failure to honor guarantees, undisclosed product problems in operability and many other manufacturing negations or problem sets.
