“Radical indifference means that it doesn’t matter what is in the pipelines as long as they are full and flowing.”
a call to qualms on the unfurling tech-dystopia from the American professor, social psychologist, philosopher, scholar & “humanist” Shoshana Zuboff.
“The best products don’t win. The ones everyone uses win…make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here.” – Facebook
“they absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news” – Facebook insider whistleblower
Rather extraordinary & exceedingly troubling as you would expect, this 525-page canary howl, first published in 2019, & now considered a classic on the subject, verifies a uniquely destructive & subjugating menace that Zuboff defines as instrumentarianism & surveillance capitalism.
“This rise in instrumentarian power is intended as a bloodless coup, of course. Instead of violence directed at our bodies, the instrumentarian third modernity operates more like a taming. Its solution to the increasingly clamorous demands for an effective life pivots on the gradual elimination of chaos, uncertainty, conflict, abnormality, and discord in favour of predictability, automatic regularity, transparency, confluence, persuasion, and pacification. We are expected to cede our authority, relax our concerns, quite our voices, go with the flow, and submit to the technological visionaries whose wealth and power stands as an assurance of their superior judgement.
It is assumed that we will cede to a future of less personal control and more powerlessness, where new sources of inequality divide and subdue, where some of us are subjects and many are objects, some are stimulus and many are response.”
sounds & smells like slavery.
But the negation, ill-intent & annulment expand even further.
“It replaces legitimate contract, the rule of law, politics and social trust with a new form of sovereignty and its privately administered regime of reinforcements.”
“Surveillance capitalism is a boundry-less form that ignores older distinctions between market and society, market and world, or market and person. It is a profit-seeking form in which production is subordinated to extraction as surveillance capitalists unilaterally claim control over human, societal, and political territories extending far beyond the conventional institutional of the private firm or the market.”
“It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people.”
a nightmare cocktail. Parasitic, ransacking, privatising, totalitarian, sterile, beyond-neo-liberal, intellectually & creatively degradative, kleptocratic in extremis to to both privacy & individual distinction & sovereignty, & an indescribably invasive polymorph of endless overreach & inner-corrosion targetting everything.
“More astonishing still is that surveillance capital derives from dispossession of human experience, operationalized in the unilateral and pervasive programs of rendition: our lives scraped and sold to fund their freedom and our subjugation, their knowledge and our ignorance about what they know.”
an extinction directive. Megalomania. Totalitarianism. Mass monopoly. assisted ruination. augmented regression & advanced incapacitation. Forced dependency. Suffocated sovereignty & the wiping out of idio-ecosystems.
Zuboff’s highly impassioned & eloquently penned research & dismay in the face of this mass lowering gathers alarming interview material, especially from whistleblowers & ex-employees from within the very mega conglomerates doing the exponential depredation & exponential looting of “the human sphere”. Much of the content is just staggering.
Unfortunately, the worse & most fantastically pernicious actor of them all – Palantir – & it’s arch dystopiphile – Peter Thiel – only feature on one page.
When this extremist companies abomination of a CEO & co-founder – Alex Karp – is not voicing his arousal at the firm’s oversized military-data-&-software support for the crime state of Israel’s unprecedented atrocity & genocide bonanza in Gaza & beyond, he is spewing obscenities in defense of pogroms at technofascist commerce seminars with lines such as (“The peace activists are war activists,“We are the peace activists.”).
An exceptionally high-quality piece of shocking reporting on the subject was printed in the Guardian Newspaper recently courtesy of Caroline Haskins, which I would urge you all to read in full.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/17/ai-weapons-palantir-war-technology
“because a body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by anybody”.
Highly pluralist & sweeping, this immense work could have delivered its major points & admonishment in 200-pages less than the final five-hundred-and-twenty-five. The thorough & windy coverage is never dull however, & Zuboff’s excellent command of language along with the humanist flare & grace make its entirety valid until the end.
I was unsure if I should march through the book, as it s evecitivel now “outdated, & I have already chewed through many on the same subject & am up-to-date on this anathema, but the strength & clarity here is starkly impressionable.
Big, big, big, big trouble, with Palantir the absolute worse of the trend.
“The cycle will be broken only when we acknowledge as citizens, as societies, and indeed as a civilization that surveillance capitalists know too much to qualify for freedom.”
Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Profile Books, 525 pages.