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There are people who have done precisely that (to quite excruciating detail I might add :-) with the informed legal and civics background that I could only drea

There are people who have done precisely that (to quite excruciating detail I might add :-) with the informed legal and civics background that I could only dream of: Check [0] and her bible. It is calm, meticulous deconstruction of what is happening, why, and why it is wrong. Forming a consensus (imho this can easily span the traditional political spectrum as it affects literally everybody - its not frequently you get to see the two extremes agree on something) and moving towards a new framework that will sketch "what good looks like" is entirely possible and would come not a moment too early. The stakes are really high. This is a struggle for democracy, but also for the shape of the future economy. There are many sectors: medical, insurance, finance, education that are looking with disbelief at what is going on. if the political signal is that the Faustian pact of surveillance capitalism is irreversible the ensuing race to the bottom will be the end... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff

quotemstr 5y ago
Can you summarize her policy position? The Wikipedia article doesn't list her specific recommendations. From my point of view, the elite consensus is that there should be some body of "responsible" people that decides what opinions the general public is allowed to express to a broad audience. Any idea control of this kind is totally unacceptable no matter what form it takes.
- streamofdigits 5y ago
  Reading the book is definitely recommended. A lot of people have an intuitive feeling of how things have gotten out of control but she places the developments in context [0]. She is quite clear that "breaking up" is not a solution as it will merely create a cluster of replicas. She is basically arguing for banning the business model underpinning surveillance capitalism. There are many reviews out there, find one from a source you trust. This Harvard Business Review podcast has a summary interview ~30 min [1] I don't think the issue of controlling information flow (which is a political hot potato) has much to do with the legitimacy or not of this business model. E.g., Newspapers are obviously controlling flow, may have biases from sponsors, advertisers etc but they do not create user profiles by collecting all the private data they can get access to, they do not modify news shown based on profiles and (in any democracy) there is a wide variety of them and you can always choose which one to read. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1610395697 https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr... [1] https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/06/surveillance-capitalism https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/06/surveillance-capitalism
  - quotemstr 5y ago
    Sorry, I don't have time right now to listen to a half hour podcast. What specific conduct does the author propose making illegal? "Surveillance capitalism" is incisive rhetoric, but it's not specific enough to serve as the basis for law.
    - streamofdigits 5y ago
      Sorry I don't have time for people who only react to punchlines with their own punchlines. This is a defining issue for how digital society is going to be organized and you obviously don't care to inform yourself sufficiently about what is happening (=hence cannot parse what the policy recommendation "ban this business model" means)
      - quotemstr 5y ago
        "Educate yourself" is not an argument. If you can't briefly summarize an argument in your own words, you don't really understand it. What I'm gathering from this conversation is that you have an emotional reaction to Facebook but haven't done the mental homework necessary to identify what specifically Facebook is doing wrong and what specific rules you would impose on social media platforms going forward.
  - devchix 5y ago
    You've persuaded me to get the book, I haven't read it yet but I listened to the podcast. I have a few errant thoughts, not exhaustive, it's what I remember. 1. She described the first diagram of a home-automation device with 2 nodes, the device and the device owner. She made the case that in that schematic, the owner's privacy, autonomy, agency is respected. She made the contrast that Nest requires thousands of agreements w/r/t data collected. I understood this to mean she prefers something like this model, no 3rd party interaction. This is impossible if the vast majority of Nest users (as an example) cannot program Nest to deliver temperature, on/off switches to their phone. You can see the problem, the world is increasingly software driven and despite the "everyone should learn to code" homily, this is not so and doesn't look like it's going to be so in our future. As a corollary to (1), I wonder if this is an inherent attribute of the software which we write to day. If we are to write software for a device which we will never interact with again, or have very few opportunity to interact with it for repair purposes (eg, software sent to the moon or Mars), it would be a different kind of software written with a different maintenance model. We build remote capabilities into devices (eg Nest) because we ship an MVP, first to market, and we build the reach-back into it to fix it afterward. Its first purpose is not to collect data, I don't think. The data collection mechanisms and purposes accreted over time. 2. She segued into the creation of the mobile phone as the next step in creating the predictive product, after the click-through ads. "Let us give you this device, maybe a smartphone ..." Who is this "us"? The smartphone was an iterative product with an inflection point. Personal organizers, navigation systems, existed before the smartphone and did not find market viability (Newton, Palm, Garmin), not the way the smartphone did. The smartphone is what it is because it fulfilled consumers' needs and customers demanded it. This line of deduction seems backward. 3. She said "predictive products" (I forget the exact words she used, things that predicts human actions) should not exist. Even the interviewer said that's a radical prescription! Humans have been doing this, wanted to do this forever. We want to use what we know to "nudge" behaviors in a certain direction, there's actually a thing in behavioral economic called "nudging", nudge people to invest in 401K, eat their veg, not fall into addiction and crime. I'm not sure how she proposes to do away with this. She will say I'm committing a category error, by conflating the predictive nudge with capitalism. I'm not sure how that can be decoupled, because as a society, capitalism is how we allocate values, and money is a proxy for value. I'm not saying the allocation is always correctly coupled or aligned but if a behavior is valuable, then the nudge toward that behavior is valuable and the information that enables the delivery of the nudge is valuable. That's my immediate reaction as I listened, the book will have a more nuanced discussion I'm sure. I am willing to be persuaded but I'm forever skeptical of social scientists' conclusions about the workings, intents, and outcomes of tech decisions.

quotemstr 5y ago

Can you summarize her policy position? The Wikipedia article doesn't list her specific recommendations. From my point of view, the elite consensus is that there should be some body of "responsible" people that decides what opinions the general public is allowed to express to a broad audience. Any idea control of this kind is totally unacceptable no matter what form it takes.

streamofdigits 5y ago
Reading the book is definitely recommended. A lot of people have an intuitive feeling of how things have gotten out of control but she places the developments in context [0]. She is quite clear that "breaking up" is not a solution as it will merely create a cluster of replicas. She is basically arguing for banning the business model underpinning surveillance capitalism. There are many reviews out there, find one from a source you trust. This Harvard Business Review podcast has a summary interview ~30 min [1] I don't think the issue of controlling information flow (which is a political hot potato) has much to do with the legitimacy or not of this business model. E.g., Newspapers are obviously controlling flow, may have biases from sponsors, advertisers etc but they do not create user profiles by collecting all the private data they can get access to, they do not modify news shown based on profiles and (in any democracy) there is a wide variety of them and you can always choose which one to read. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Frontier/dp/1610395697 https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr... [1] https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/06/surveillance-capitalism https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/06/surveillance-capitalism
- quotemstr 5y ago
  Sorry, I don't have time right now to listen to a half hour podcast. What specific conduct does the author propose making illegal? "Surveillance capitalism" is incisive rhetoric, but it's not specific enough to serve as the basis for law.
  - streamofdigits 5y ago
    Sorry I don't have time for people who only react to punchlines with their own punchlines. This is a defining issue for how digital society is going to be organized and you obviously don't care to inform yourself sufficiently about what is happening (=hence cannot parse what the policy recommendation "ban this business model" means)
    - quotemstr 5y ago
      "Educate yourself" is not an argument. If you can't briefly summarize an argument in your own words, you don't really understand it. What I'm gathering from this conversation is that you have an emotional reaction to Facebook but haven't done the mental homework necessary to identify what specifically Facebook is doing wrong and what specific rules you would impose on social media platforms going forward.
- devchix 5y ago
  You've persuaded me to get the book, I haven't read it yet but I listened to the podcast. I have a few errant thoughts, not exhaustive, it's what I remember. 1. She described the first diagram of a home-automation device with 2 nodes, the device and the device owner. She made the case that in that schematic, the owner's privacy, autonomy, agency is respected. She made the contrast that Nest requires thousands of agreements w/r/t data collected. I understood this to mean she prefers something like this model, no 3rd party interaction. This is impossible if the vast majority of Nest users (as an example) cannot program Nest to deliver temperature, on/off switches to their phone. You can see the problem, the world is increasingly software driven and despite the "everyone should learn to code" homily, this is not so and doesn't look like it's going to be so in our future. As a corollary to (1), I wonder if this is an inherent attribute of the software which we write to day. If we are to write software for a device which we will never interact with again, or have very few opportunity to interact with it for repair purposes (eg, software sent to the moon or Mars), it would be a different kind of software written with a different maintenance model. We build remote capabilities into devices (eg Nest) because we ship an MVP, first to market, and we build the reach-back into it to fix it afterward. Its first purpose is not to collect data, I don't think. The data collection mechanisms and purposes accreted over time. 2. She segued into the creation of the mobile phone as the next step in creating the predictive product, after the click-through ads. "Let us give you this device, maybe a smartphone ..." Who is this "us"? The smartphone was an iterative product with an inflection point. Personal organizers, navigation systems, existed before the smartphone and did not find market viability (Newton, Palm, Garmin), not the way the smartphone did. The smartphone is what it is because it fulfilled consumers' needs and customers demanded it. This line of deduction seems backward. 3. She said "predictive products" (I forget the exact words she used, things that predicts human actions) should not exist. Even the interviewer said that's a radical prescription! Humans have been doing this, wanted to do this forever. We want to use what we know to "nudge" behaviors in a certain direction, there's actually a thing in behavioral economic called "nudging", nudge people to invest in 401K, eat their veg, not fall into addiction and crime. I'm not sure how she proposes to do away with this. She will say I'm committing a category error, by conflating the predictive nudge with capitalism. I'm not sure how that can be decoupled, because as a society, capitalism is how we allocate values, and money is a proxy for value. I'm not saying the allocation is always correctly coupled or aligned but if a behavior is valuable, then the nudge toward that behavior is valuable and the information that enables the delivery of the nudge is valuable. That's my immediate reaction as I listened, the book will have a more nuanced discussion I'm sure. I am willing to be persuaded but I'm forever skeptical of social scientists' conclusions about the workings, intents, and outcomes of tech decisions.