Ralph has an absolutely fascinating talk with Harvard Business School professor, Shoshana Zuboff, about how Google, Facebook and other digital companies make money by watching every move you make, and how it can be stopped.
Professor Shoshana Zuboff was one of the first tenured women at the Harvard Business School. She was also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Her career has been devoted to the study of the rise of the digital, its individual, organizational, and social consequences, and its relationship to the history and future of capitalism. The author of many books and papers on the subject of modern corporate capitalism, Professor Zuboff’s latest is entitled “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.”
“All of us click on this little ‘I agree’ box in a cynical way, because we know we have no choice.”
“We are being forced into the arms of a unique economic logic that thrives on the unilateral claiming of our experience for its behavioral data to create predictions about our behavior that it sells to business customers. That’s how it makes its money.”
“I believe we have an opportunity as citizens to interrupt and outlaw Surveillance Capitalism as the dominant economic logic.”
“We’ve heard people like Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google say, ‘If you have something to hide, then maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.’ And my response to that is ‘Anyone who has nothing to hide is nothing.’
“The thing that we’ve got to get out in front of now is the economic logic itself, that it is illegitimate to take people’s experience and turn it into data.”
“Our society knows how to tame raw capitalism. We’ve done it in the Gilded Age, in the Depression. We’ve done it in the post-war years where we institutionalized collective bargaining and living wage and so many laws from child labor, safety regulation, so many laws that tethered the raw excesses of industrial capitalism to the well being of people and society and democracy. Our societies know how to do this. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.”
From Professor Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism