"Google is to surveillance capitalism what GM was to managerial capitalism"

Razer Rayzer at riseup.net
Tue Jul 7 13:32:35 PDT 2015


> Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information
> Civilization
>
> Shoshana Zuboff, Berkman Center for Internet & Society; Harvard
> Business School
>
> April 4, 2015
>
> Abstract:    
> This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the
> networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its
> implications for ‘information civilization.’ Google is to surveillance
> capitalism what General Motors was to managerial capitalism. Therefore
> the institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google
> Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in
> two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian.
>
> Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated
> transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms
> due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and
> ‘continuous experiments.’
>
> An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds
> light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global
> architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This
> architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new
> expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by
> unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction,
> commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their
> own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and
> modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and
> departs in key ways from the centuries long evolution of market
> capitalism.
>
> Number of Pages in PDF File: 15
>
> Keywords: surveillance capitalism, big data, Google, information
> society, privacy, internet of everything 

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754

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