The real psychological truth is this: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you are nothing.
Work is meaningful and fun when it’s an expression of your true core.
Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can’t meet.
Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. Work comes to depend on an ability to understand, respond to, manage, and create value from information.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
by Shoshana Zuboff
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.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit — at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future — if we let it.
監視資本主義: 人類の未来を賭けた闘い
2021/6/25
ショシャナ・ズボフ (著), 野中 香方子 (翻訳)
この地図の多くの地点は、荒れ狂う時代の急速な流れから自然に浮かび上がってきたものだ。わたしは現代の状況を理解するために、テクノロジーの詳細と企業のレトリックとの複雑な交差の深部にパターンを読み取るという手法をとった。わたしの挑戦が成功すれば、この地図と概念は、前例のないものの全容を明らかにするとともに、監視資本主義が経済的・全社会的支配を追い求めるにつれてわたしたちの周囲で起きてきた激しく急速な変化を、より賢明かつ包括的に理解する助けになるだろう。