- Aug 2019
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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The company started firing older workers and replacing them with millennials, who IBM’s consulting department said “are generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.”
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International Business Machines Corp. has fired as many as 100,000 employees in the last few years in an effort to boost its appeal to millennials and make it appear to be as “cool” and “trendy” as Amazon and Google, according to a deposition from a former vice president in an ongoing age discrimination lawsuit.
IBM has a long history of working against humanity, e.g. when colluding with the Nazis.
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- Jul 2019
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www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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Even if we never see this brain-reading tech in Facebook products (something that would probably cause just a little concern), researchers could use it to improve the lives of people who can’t speak due to paralysis or other issues.
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That’s very different from the system Facebook described in 2017: a noninvasive, mass-market cap that lets people type more than 100 words per minute without manual text entry or speech-to-text transcription.
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Their work demonstrates a method of quickly “reading” whole words and phrases from the brain — getting Facebook slightly closer to its dream of a noninvasive thought-typing system.
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theintercept.com theintercept.com
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SZ: We are not users. I say we are bound in new psychological, social, political, as well as, economic interests. That we have not yet invented the words to describe the ways that we are bound. We have not yet invented the forms of collective action to express the interests that bind us. And that that is a big part of the work that must follow in this year and the next year and the year after that, if we are to ultimately interrupt and outlaw what I view as a pernicious rogue capitalism that has no business dominating our society.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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“We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well-intentioned the leaders of these companies may be.”Mr. Hughes went on to describe the power held by Facebook and its leader Mr. Zuckerberg, his former college roommate, as “unprecedented.” He added, “It is time to break up Facebook.”
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ir.aboutamazon.com ir.aboutamazon.com
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Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales up 20% to $63.4 Billion
Do note that this page mentions nothing on worker rights nor worker wages.
See this page on the matter.
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AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Personalize, a fully-managed machine learning service that trains, tunes, and deploys custom, private machine learning models.
Is this more of commoditising human experience so that Jeff Bezos can be even more rich?
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Amazon announced that it will hire nearly 12,000 new employees across Europe in 2019, taking its permanent workforce in Europe to nearly 95,000 by the end of 2019. Amazon pledged to upskill 100,000 of its employees across the U.S. by 2025, dedicating over $700 million to provide employees across its corporate offices, tech hubs, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network with access to training programs that will help them move into more highly-skilled roles within or outside of the company. Programs include Machine Learning University, Amazon Technical Academy, and Career Choice.
More workers that can practically be enslaved in 55-hour-work weeks and sleep standing up: yeay!
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The number of Alexa-compatible smart home devices continues to grow, with more than 60,000 smart home products from over 7,400 unique brands
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Amazon introduced the all-new Echo Show 5
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www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com
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Döpfner: Last week we had Bill Gates for dinner here and he said in a self-ironic manner that he has a ridiculous amount of money and it is so hard to find appropriate ways to spend that money reasonably and to do good with the money. So what does money mean for you, being the first person in history who has a net worth of a three-digit amount of billions. Bezos: The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.
Why fix the issues with how many Amazon workers are basically wage slaves, working 55-hour weeks, while falling asleep during work?
For more information:
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money.cnn.com money.cnn.com
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Amazon (AMZN) disclosed in a filing Wednesday that the median pay for its employees was just $28,446 in 2017. Put another way: half of Amazon's employees earned less than that amount.
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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they are calling for better working conditions, pay and health benefits.
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hundreds of Amazon workers in Italy and Germany went on strike, saying they were under “high pressure to create more and more in less time."
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labor unions have been on the front lines of calling for workers' rights at the company’s warehouse facilities, where physical demands can be grueling and temperatures can reach extremes.
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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According to Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a landmark moment, because it revealed a micro version “of the larger phenomenon that is surveillance capitalism”. Zuboff is responsible for formulating the concept of surveillance capitalism, and published a magisterial, indispensible book with that title soon after the scandal broke. In the book, Zuboff creates a framework and a language for understanding this new world. She believes The Great Hack is an important landmark in terms of public understanding, and that Noujaim and Amer capture “what living under the conditions of surveillance capitalism means. That every action is being repurposed as raw material for behavioural data. And that these data are being lifted from our lives in ways that are systematically engineered to be invisible. And therefore we can never resist.”
Shoshana Zuboff's comments on The Great Hack.
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niklasblog.com niklasblog.com
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www.nature.com www.nature.com
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The New York Times have published this article about this study.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Two years ago, when he moved from Boston to London, he had to register with a general practitioner. The doctor’s office gave him a form to sign saying that his medical data would be shared with other hospitals he might go to, and with a system that might distribute his information to universities, private companies and other government departments.The form added that the although the data are anonymized, “there are those who believe a person can be identified through this information.”“That was really scary,” Dr. de Montjoye said. “We are at a point where we know a risk exists and count on people saying they don’t care about privacy. It’s insane.”
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Scientists at Imperial College London and Université Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, reported in the journal Nature Communications that they had devised a computer algorithm that can identify 99.98 percent of Americans from almost any available data set with as few as 15 attributes, such as gender, ZIP code or marital status.
This goes to show that one should not trust companies and organisations which claim to "anonymise" your data.
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www.nakedcapitalism.com www.nakedcapitalism.com
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the question we should really be discussing is “How many years should Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg ultimately serve in prison?”
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“those who were responsible for ensuring the accuracy ‘did not give a shit.’” Another individual, “a former Operations Contractor with Facebook, stated that Facebook was not concerned with stopping duplicate or fake accounts.”
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journals.sagepub.com journals.sagepub.com
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In contrast to such pseudonymous social networking, Facebook is notable for its longstanding emphasis on real identities and social connections.
Lack of anonymity also increases Facebook's ability to properly link shadow profiles purchased from other data brokers.
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Within this larger context, Facebook, Google (YouTube, Google+, Blogger), and Twitter have grown from small projects mocked up on sketchbooks and developed in college dorms to global networks of billions, garnering attention from venture capitalists who invested in pursuit of growth in revenues and profits and ultimately public offerings of stock. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are thus articulated into a particular political economy of the Internet, one dependent on surveillance of user activities, the construction of user data profiles, and the sale of user attention to an increasingly sophisticated Internet marketing industry (Langlois, McKelvey, Elmer, & Werbin, 2009).
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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What should lawmakers do? First, interrupt and outlaw surveillance capitalism’s data supplies and revenue flows. This means, at the front end, outlawing the secret theft of private experience. At the back end, we can disrupt revenues by outlawing markets that trade in human futures knowing that their imperatives are fundamentally anti-democratic. We already outlaw markets that traffic in slavery or human organs. Second, research over the past decade suggests that when “users” are informed of surveillance capitalism’s backstage operations, they want protection, and they want alternatives. We need laws and regulation designed to advantage companies that want to break with surveillance capitalism. Competitors that align themselves with the actual needs of people and the norms of a market democracy are likely to attract just about every person on Earth as their customer. Third, lawmakers will need to support new forms of collective action, just as nearly a century ago workers won legal protection for their rights to organise, to bargain collectively and to strike. Lawmakers need citizen support, and citizens need the leadership of their elected officials.
Shoshana Zuboff's answer to surveillance capitalism
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- Jun 2019
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The company has sky-high hopes that Libra could become the foundation for a new financial system not controlled by today’s power brokers on Wall Street or central banks.
Facebook want another way to circumvent government? Well, let's circumvent Facebook.
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Shoshana Zuboff writes about George Orwell and surveillance capitalism.
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www.wired.com www.wired.com
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By comparison, Amazon’s Best Seller badges, which flag the most popular products based on sales and are updated hourly, are far more straightforward. For third-party sellers, “that’s a lot more powerful than this Choice badge, which is totally algorithmically calculated and sometimes it’s totally off,” says Bryant.
"Amazon's Choice" is made by an algorithm.
Essentially, "Amazon" is Skynet.
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- May 2019
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abe-winter.github.io abe-winter.github.io
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They’ve learned, and that’s more dangerous than caring, because that means they’re rationally pricing these harms. The day that 20% of consumers put a price tag on privacy, freemium is over and privacy is back.
Google want you to say yes, not because they're inviting positivity more than ever, but because they want you to purchase things and make them richer. This is the essence of capitalism.
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www.ynharari.com www.ynharari.com
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in Conversation
...in Conversation about something other than how Facebook only wants to use humans to consume and give it our data.
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www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the Pokémon Go-style smartphone game co-developed by Niantic and WB Games
I thought The Verge would be critical. I've paraphrased some paragraphs from Shoshana Zuboff about the matter in this blog post.
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- Apr 2019
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techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
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The report also noted a 27 percent increase in the number of foreigners whose communications were targeted by the NSA during the year. In total, an estimated 164,770 foreign individuals or groups were targeted with search terms used by the NSA to monitor their communications, up from 129,080 on the year prior.
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The data, published Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), revealed a 28 percent rise in the number of targeted search terms used to query massive databases of collected Americans’ communications.
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privacy.microsoft.com privacy.microsoft.com
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we get some of it by collecting data about your interactions, use and experiences with our products. The data we collect depends on the context of your interactions with Microsoft and the choices that you make, including your privacy settings and the products and features that you use. We also obtain data about you from third parties.
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www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com
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drivers delivering Amazon packages have reported feeling so pressured that they speed through neighborhoods, blow by stop signs, and pee in bottles in the trucks or outside
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Amazon's system tracks a metric called "time off task," meaning how much time workers pause or take breaks, The Verge reported. It has been previously reported that some workers feel so pressured that they don't take bathroom breaks.
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Amazon employs a system that not only tracks warehouse workers' productivity but also can automatically fire them for failing to meet expectations.
The bots now fire humans. AI 2.0.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Facebook said on Wednesday that it expected to be fined up to $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations. The penalty would be a record by the agency against a technology company and a sign that the United States was willing to punish big tech companies.
This is where surveillance capitalism brings you.
Sure, five billion American Dollars won't make much of a difference to Facebook, but it's notable.
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So far, according to the Times and other outlets, this technique is being used by the FBI and police departments in Arizona, North Carolina, California, Florida, Minnesota, Maine, and Washington, although there may be other agencies using it across the country.
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In a new article, the New York Times details a little-known technique increasingly used by law enforcement to figure out everyone who might have been within certain geographic areas during specific time periods in the past. The technique relies on detailed location data collected by Google from most Android devices as well as iPhones and iPads that have Google Maps and other apps installed. This data resides in a Google-maintained database called “Sensorvault,” and because Google stores this data indefinitely, Sensorvault “includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”
Google is passing on location data to law enforcement without letting users know.
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www.apnews.com www.apnews.com
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Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: “You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.” That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking. (It’s possible, although laborious, to delete it .)
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www.goodreads.com www.goodreads.com
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“The brain-disease model takes control over people’s fate out of their own hands and puts doctors and insurance companies in charge of fixing their problems. Over the past three decades psychiatric medications have become a mainstay in our culture, with dubious consequences.”
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gizmodo.com gizmodo.com
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Per a Wednesday report in Business Insider, Facebook has now said that it automatically extracted contact lists from around 1.5 million email accounts it was given access to via this method without ever actually asking for their permission. Again, this is exactly the type of thing one would expect to see in a phishing attack.
Facebook are worse than Nixon, when he said "I'm not a crook".
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www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
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Amazon said it was using automated technology to weed out false reviews.It said it invested "significant resources" to protect its review system "because we know customers value the insights and experiences shared by fellow shoppers". /**/ (function() { if (window.bbcdotcom && bbcdotcom.adverts && bbcdotcom.adverts.slotAsync) { bbcdotcom.adverts.slotAsync('mpu', [1,2,3]); } })(); /**/ "Even one inauthentic review is one too many," it added.But Which?'s probe suggested fake reviews were commonplace.
"Online retail giant Amazon's website is flooded with fake five-star reviews for products from unfamiliar brands, consumer group Which? has claimed."
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www.insurancejournal.com www.insurancejournal.com
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“In contrast to Dr. Wood’s claims, bias found in one system is cause for concern in the other, particularly in use cases that could severely impact people’s lives, such as law enforcement applications,” they wrote.
This is more important than most people probably realise. Recognition bias will decide if a person dies or not, when implemented at substantial scale, which isn't far away.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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“Those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains,” Ma wrote.
This is what capitalists, especially those who make far more money than others below them in their company, want you to believe.
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Richard Liu, chief executive of Alibaba arch-foe JD.com Inc., said in a recent post on his WeChat moments that, while he would never force staff to work a 996 schedule, people who slacked off were not considered his “brothers.”
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www.sec.gov www.sec.govS-13
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Risks Related to Our Business The personal mobility, meal delivery, and logistics industries are highly competitive, with well-established and low-cost alternatives that have been available for decades, low barriers to entry, low switching costs, and well-capitalized competitors in nearly every major geographic region. If we are unable to compete effectively in these industries, our business and financial prospects would be adversely impacted.
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The development of our autonomous vehicle technologies is highly dependent on internally developed software, as well as on partnerships with third parties such as OEMs and other suppliers.
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Our Autonomous Driving Strategy We are investing in technology to power the next generation of transportation.
Uber wants no pesky drivers who can make demands, like, wages.
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www.ft.com www.ft.com
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Yes, but isn't this what investing is? You try to pick the right company so you make money? If you protect investors from the risk of losing money if they make a bad decision, then you've given up on the whole point of capitalism: capitalists are supposed to allocate resources to the proper part of society because if they don't do so, they don't make money.
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techcrunch.com techcrunch.com
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The highlight of today’s announcements is the beta launch of the company’s AI Platform. The idea here is to offer developers and data scientists an end-to-end service for building, testing and deploying their own models.
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After introducing it in preview last year, the company also today launched the beta of its Contact Center AI. This service, which was built with partners like Twilio, Vonage, Cisco, Five9, Genesys and Mitel, offers a full contact center AI solution that uses tools like Dialogflow and Google’s text-to-speech capabilities to allow its users to build a virtual agent system (and when things go awry, it can pass the customer to a human agent).
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chanind.github.io chanind.github.io
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China’s tech sector is notorious for treating workers like machines, with extremely long working hours being the norm. The phrase 996 refers to 9am - 9pm, 6 days per week, and is an unspoken rule in a lot of Chinese tech companies. The CEO of Youzan, a large Chinese e-commerce company, seemingly didn’t get the memo about keeping 996 as an “unspoken” rule, and surprised his employees at their 2019 yearly company party by telling them Youzan is officially switching to 996.
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unlikekinds.com unlikekinds.com
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AMP is a set of rules that publishers (typically news and analysis content providers) must abide by in order to appear in the “Top Stories” section of Google’s search results, a lucrative position at the top of the page.
This is just one of many reasons for not using Google's search engine. Or most of their products.
Monotheistic and, more importantly, monopolistic thinking like this drags us all down.
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www.aftonbladet.se www.aftonbladet.se
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Det är tydligt att den moraliska kompassen trängs undan i jakten på vinst.
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Svenska skattebetalare har räddat bankerna flera gånger och finns där om det kniper igen. Går det dåligt för banken så vet ägarna att skattebetalarna finns där. Staten tar över, rensar upp och sen säljs banken vidare till nya privata ägare som ordnar nya skandaler och riskerar den finansiella stabiliteten.
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Amazon.com Inc. is positioning Alexa, its artificial-intelligence assistant, to track consumers’ prescriptions and relay personal health information, in a bid to insert the technology into everyday health care.
Surveillance capitalism, anyone?
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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“They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of democratic institutions. “[They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm. “They #dontgiveazuck” wrote Edwards.
Well, I don't think he should have deleted his tweets.
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Amazon’s technology struggles more than some peers’ to identify the gender of individuals with darker skin, prompting fears of unjust arrests. Amazon has defended its work and said all users must follow the law.
Draw any parallel to "The Handmaid's Tale" and you're right.
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U.S. securities regulators shot down attempts by Amazon.com Inc to stop its investors from considering two shareholder proposals about the company’s controversial sale of a facial recognition service, a sign of growing scrutiny of the technology.
Surveillance capitalism at its worst; this behemoth tries to have the people who own it not make decisions.
Capitalism is like Skynet, an organism that's taken flight on its own, bound to make solipsistic and egoistic judgments and choices.
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tressiemc.com tressiemc.com
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Digital sociology needs more big theory as well as testable theory.
I can't help but think here about the application of digital technology to large bodies of literature in the creation of the field of corpus linguistics.
If traditional sociology means anything, then a digital incarnation of it should create physical and trackable means that can potentially be more easily studied as a result. Just the same way that Mark Dredze has been able to look at Twitter data to analyze public health data like influenza, we should be able to more easily quantify sociological phenomenon in aggregate by looking at larger and richer data sets of online interactions.
There's also likely some value in studying the quantities of digital exhaust that companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. are using for surveillance capitalism.
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There’s bad news for users of Microsoft’s eBook store: the company is closing it down, and, with it, any books bought through the service will no longer be readable.To soften the blow, the company has promised to refund any customers who bought books through the store (a clue that there may not have been that many of them, hence the closure. Microsoft did not offer further comment).
How about this for posterity and owning what you buy?
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www.theverge.com www.theverge.com
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“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other experts say it plays into the exploitative economics of prisoners being required to work for very low wages.
Naturally, this is exploitative; the inmates do not learn a skill that they can take out into the real world.
I'd be surprised if they'd not have to sign a NDA for this.
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- Mar 2019
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www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
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You might have also seen that our podcasts are no longer available on certain Google products - including the Google Podcast app and Google assistant. I want to explain a little bit about why that has happened. Last year, Google launched its own podcast app for Android users - they’ve also said they will launch a browser version for computers soon. Google has since begun to direct people who search for a BBC podcast into its own podcast service, rather than BBC Sounds or other third party services, which reduces people’s choice - an approach that the BBC is not comfortable with and has consistently expressed strong concerns about. We asked them to exclude the BBC from this specific feature but they have refused.
Well, this is truly bad action from Google, not to mention how it reflects on them. The BBC are totally right in stating their claim to their own content. Cheers!
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timharford.com timharford.com
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If you do not like the price you’re being offered when you shop, do not take it personally: many of the prices we see online are being set by algorithms that respond to demand and may also try to guess your personal willingness to pay. What’s next? A logical next step is that computers will start conspiring against us. That may sound paranoid, but a new study by four economists at the University of Bologna shows how this can happen.
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Mention McDonald’s to someone today, and they're more likely to think about Big Mac than Big Data. But that could soon change: The fast-food giant has embraced machine learning, in a fittingly super-sized way.McDonald’s is set to announce that it has reached an agreement to acquire Dynamic Yield, a startup based in Tel Aviv that provides retailers with algorithmically driven "decision logic" technology. When you add an item to an online shopping cart, it’s the tech that nudges you about what other customers bought as well. Dynamic Yield reportedly had been recently valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars; people familiar with the details of the McDonald’s offer put it at over $300 million. That would make it the company's largest purchase since it acquired Boston Market in 1999.
McDonald's are getting into machine learning. Beware.
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www.inkstonenews.com www.inkstonenews.com
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As one of 13 million officially designated “discredited individuals,” or laolai in Chinese, 47-year-old Kong is banned from spending on “luxuries,” whose definition includes air travel and fast trains.
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Discredited individuals have been barred from taking a total of 17.5 million flights and 5.5 million high-speed train trips as of the end of 2018, according to the latest annual report by the National Public Credit Information Center.The list of “discredited individuals” was introduced in 2013, months before the State Council unveiled a plan in 2014 to build a social credit system by 2020.
This is what surveillance capitalism brings. This is due to what is called China's "Golden Shield", a credit-statement system that, for example, brings your credit level down if you search for terms such as "Tianmen Square Protest" or post "challenging" pictures on Facebook.
This is surveillance capitalism at its worst, creating a new lower class for the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and insurance companies. Keep the rabble away, as it were.
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www.bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com
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Amazon has been beta testing the ads on Apple Inc.’s iOS platform for several months, according to people familiar with the plan. A similar product for Google’s Android platform is planned for later this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they’re not authorized to share the information publicly.
Sounds like one of the best reasons I've ever heard to run Brave Browser both on desktop and mobile. https://brave.com/
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www.bmj.com www.bmj.com
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Sharing of user data is routine, yet far from transparent. Clinicians should be conscious of privacy risks in their own use of apps and, when recommending apps, explain the potential for loss of privacy as part of informed consent. Privacy regulation should emphasise the accountabilities of those who control and process user data. Developers should disclose all data sharing practices and allow users to choose precisely what data are shared and with whom.
Horrific conclusion, which clearly states that "sharing of user data is routine" where the medical profession is concerned.
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To investigate whether and how user data are shared by top rated medicines related mobile applications (apps) and to characterise privacy risks to app users, both clinicians and consumers.
"24 of 821 apps identified by an app store crawling program. Included apps pertained to medicines information, dispensing, administration, prescribing, or use, and were interactive."
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www.forbes.com www.forbes.com
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While employees were up in arms because of Google’s “Dragonfly” censored search engine with China and its Project Maven’s drone surveillance program with DARPA, there exist very few mechanisms to stop these initiatives from taking flight without proper oversight. The tech community argues they are different than Big Pharma or Banking. Regulating them would strangle the internet.
This is an old maxim with corporations, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft alike; if you don't break laws by simply doing what you want because of, well, greed, then you're hampering "evolution".
Evolution of their wallets, yes.
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Amy Webb, Author of “The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and their Thinking Machines could Warp Humanity” refers not only to G-MAFIA but also BAT (the consortium that has led the charge in the highly controversial Social Credit system to create a trust value among its Chinese citizens). She writes: We stop assuming that the G-MAFIA (Google, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon) can serve its DC and Wall Street masters equally and that the free markets and our entrepreneurial spirit will produce the best possible outcomes for AI and humanity
This is discussed by Shoshana Zuboff in her masterfully written "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism".
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www.apple.com www.apple.comAirPods1
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A speech-detecting accelerometer recognizes when you’re speaking and works with a pair of beamforming microphones to filter out external noise and focus on the sound of your voice.
I'll translate this for you: "This enables Apple to constantly listen to you, record your behaviour, and sell your behaviour data."
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www.insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com
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we don’t want to fund teachers and manageable class sizes, so we outsource the plagiarism problem to a for-profit company that has a side gig of promoting the importance of the problem it promises to solve.
Yet another example of a misdirected "solution" to a manufactured problem that ends up being more costly - in terms of monetary expense AND student learning AND faculty engagement - than it would have been to invest in human interaction and learner-centered pedagogies.
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction
please note that this book make the iron age argument "iron dint exist on this planet before the iron age" capitalism dint exist before ~1800
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- Feb 2019
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.”
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Larry Page grasped that human experience could be Google’s virgin wood, that it could be extracted at no extra cost online and at very low cost out in the real world. For today’s owners of surveillance capital the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers, oceans and forests before they fell to the market dynamic. We have no formal control over these processes because we are not essential to the new market action. Instead we are exiles from our own behaviour, denied access to or control over knowledge derived from its dispossession by others for others. Knowledge, authority and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely “human natural resources”. We are the native peoples now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.
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The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power.
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larrysanger.org larrysanger.org
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No one is forced on Twitter, naturally, but if you aren’t on Twitter, then your audience is (probably) smaller, while if you are on Twitter, they can steal your privacy, which I deeply resent. This is a big dilemma to me. Beyond that, I simply don’t think anybody should have as much power as the social media giants have over us today. I think it’s increasingly politically important to decentralize social media.
This is an important point! And nothing puts a finer point on it than Shoshona Zuboff's recent book on surveillance capitalism.
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collect.readwriterespond.com collect.readwriterespond.com
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interview with John Naughton, Shoshana Zuboff touches on the feeling of ‘informed bewilderment’
This reminds me that I need to listen to a recent long-form interview she gave to Leo Laporte on <cite>Triangulation</cite>.
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- Jan 2019
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www.insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com
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Turnitin’s practices have been ruled as fair use in federal court. But to Morris and Stommel, the ceding of control of students' work -- and their ownership over that work -- to a corporation is a moral issue, even if it's legally sound. Time spent on checking plagiarism reports is time that would be better spent teaching students how to become better writers in the first place, they argue. “This is ethical, activist work. While not exactly the Luddism of the 19th century, we must ask ourselves, when we’re choosing ed-tech tools, who profits and from what?” they wrote in the essay. “The gist: when you upload work to Turnitin, your property is, in no reasonable sense, your property. Every essay students submit -- representing hours, days or even years of work -- becomes part of the Turnitin database, which is then sold to universities.”
This is key issue for me - and we talked about this last week in GEDI when someone brought up the case of wide-scale cheating on the quizz / test that students took online.
I'd like teachers to focus on teaching and helping students learn. And I think the question about who profits and who benefits from ed-tech tools like TurnitIn need to be asked.
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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capitalism
Saw the idea of capitalism in Muckelbauer and Hawhee
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Zoe-centredegalitarianism is, for me, the core of a posthuman thought that mightinspire, work with or subtend informational and scientific practices andresist the trans-species commodification of life by advanced capitalism
The preamble was worth the payoff. This is gold; a succinct statement that outlines the ethics implicit in posthumanism which necessarily work against advanced capitalism.
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static1.squarespace.com static1.squarespace.com
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ra in which moneymight be dubbed the foremost rhetorical proof. In
Ethos, Logos, Pathos, Numus($)
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capitalis
mholder, I take it back. It's about both.
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ut cap
Are they making a distinction between capital (money) and capitalism (an ideology/economic system)?
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- Dec 2018
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eand.co eand.co
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The capitalist, ironically enough, is trying to earn his freedom from capitalism — just like everyone else
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Then there is social technology — social institutions, public goods, and public investment. Only in the last century or so, really, have human beings really become capable of operating things like healthcare, transportation, retirement elderly care, childcare, and so on at a social scale. That is because these things require post-capitalist management, too, which we’re still learning how to do.
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How Capitalist Utopia Became Everyone Else’s Dystopia
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openknowledge.worldbank.org openknowledge.worldbank.org
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This resource, while written from the perspective of economists, explores how intellectual property laws (and historically uneven enforcement of the laws) have increased the divide between developing countries and wealthy, industrialized developed countries.
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creativecommons.org creativecommons.org
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That said, for a thoughtful survey of how the commons, cultural and otherwise, might thrive inside of, or along with, with current conditions I recommend Peter Barnes’s book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. One of Barnes’s points is that our debates about the future often imagine only two actors: the government and private business. Barnes suggests a third set, common property trusts (as, for example, the kind of land trusts devised by the Nature Conservancy). There is much to say about common property trusts but for now the point is simply that we already have a mix of cultural modes and should continue to have them going forward with, I hope, the commons recognized and strengthened.
One of the areas I find challenging in addressing Creative Commons culture is how Creative Commons relates to capitalistic culture (or rejects it). Creative Commons can be compatible with open market, but it can also challenge some of the fundamental tenants of it. Throughout the units, as I tried to imagine applications of Creative Commons, or making licensing decisions as a creative and academic, I found that I had questions about artists and how they can earn a living in this model, and how this model supported and challenged my role as a librarian in academe.
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Could there be a better example of the abject failure of capitalism — and what it really is — than the world’s richest man asking for yet more money from broke Americans (LOL)? I mean, he’s already…the world’s richest man! Are you seeing the comical absurdity of the situation?
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Capitalism creates something much worse than people who are grimly, grubbily exploited in this way — it creates predators: people who are quite happy exploiting others, in order to get rich themselves.
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- Oct 2018
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communemag.com communemag.com
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Schoolchildren are often given Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phrase “suspension of disbelief” as a simple way to evaluate the success or failure of fantastic literature. Were you lulled into taking for granted the talking dragon and magical elves because of the otherwise “relatable” content? LeGuin should be thought of as doing something similar: effecting a communist suspension of disbelief, a suspension first and foremost of capitalist disbelief in the possibility of communism. To do this, she has to induce disbelief in the institutions of capitalism, to display them not as “how things are” but “how they’ve been made to be.”
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betterworldsblog.com betterworldsblog.com
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On the other hand, though much less likely, is the possibility of the gig economy becoming a long-term fixture of capitalism.
Whether or not the gig economy is here to stay, the result will be widespread un- or under-employment caused by technological displacement. Whether workers are gathered into a gig economy or are outright unemployed is what remains to be seen.
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- Aug 2018
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Local file Local file
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In this consumerist-led version of proletarianization, which is very per-tinent to what is happening with the commodification of higher educa-tion, the argument is that ‘consumers are “discharged” of the burden as well as the responsibility of shaping their own lives and are reduced to units of buying power controlled by marketing techniques’ (p. 34). For example, in rating and ranking scales and league tables, marketing agencies have essentially appropriated the decision-making process from students and their parents. Today’s ‘cognitive capitalism’, Lemmens says, is producing the ‘systematic destruction of knowledge and the knowing subject’ (p. 34), in what Stiegler calls the ‘systematic industri-alization of human memory and cognition’ (p. 34). As Stiegler (2010b) cryptically puts it, what is at stake is ‘the battle for intelligence’ (p. 35) which had its most recent genesis in the ‘psychopathologies and addic-tive ‘behavior patterns’ (Lemmens 2011, p. 34) brought about by the ‘logic of the market’ ushered in by Thatcher and supported by Reagan. This unleashed ‘a cultural and spiritual regression of unprecedented magnitude, transforming the whole of society into a machine for profit maximization and creating a state of “system carelessness” and “systemic stupidity” on a global scale’ (p. 34). It is literally ‘a global struggle for the mind’ in a context where there is an erasure of ‘consciousness and sociality’ (p. 35)
Draws on labour process theory and the work of Stiegler to conceptualise the de-professionalisation of academic workers and their proletarianisation. This relates to the arguments about how economic rationales have colonised all areas of social life.
This seems to mirror similar arguments put forward by Nikolas Rose and Michel Dean and other post-structuralists such as drawing on Foucault's governmentality
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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But the entire business model — what the philosopher and business theorist Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” — rests on untrammeled access to your personal data.
Is Shoshana Zuboff the originator of surveillance capitalism?
According to Wikipedia--No: Surveillance capitalism is a term first introduced by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney in Monthly Review in 2014 and later popularized by academic Shoshana Zuboff that denotes a new genus of capitalism that monetizes data acquired through surveillance.
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- Jul 2018
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kfitz.info kfitz.info
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Under late capital, the non-profit has been asked to take over the space of providing for community needs or supporting community interests that had formerly been occupied by the state as the entity responsible for the public welfare.
I know the book American Amnesia talks about the value built up by a strong government working in conjunction with a capitalist machine over the past century or so. I wonder if the later half of the book gets into how to shift things back in this manner?
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Similarly, E. P. Thompson [53], in his paper on time disci-pline and industrial capitalism, suggests that a view of time as an interchangeable commodity came to replace what had been a more task-oriented approach to time use. Glennie and Thrift argue against this conceptualisation of clock time. They acknowledge that people’s consciousness of time was disrupted by the clock, but disagree with a notion of clock time that is “inauthentic, unnatural, omnipotent” [p. 50], that follows the metaphor of the production line, or that adopts a narrative of a world that is intensifying and speeding up.
This seems to also follow Hassan's use of the commodity metaphor in thinking about time.
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www.yalelawjournal.org www.yalelawjournal.org
- Apr 2018
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www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
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Can civilisation prolong its life until the end of this century? “It depends on what we are prepared to do.” He fears it will be a long time before we take proportionate action to stop climatic calamity. “Standing in the way is capitalism. Can you imagine the global airline industry being dismantled when hundreds of new runways are being built right now all over the world? It’s almost as if we’re deliberately attempting to defy nature. We’re doing the reverse of what we should be doing, with everybody’s silent acquiescence, and nobody’s batting an eyelid.”
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Hillman accuses all kinds of leaders – from religious leaders to scientists to politicians – of failing to honestly discuss what we must do to move to zero-carbon emissions. “I don’t think they can because society isn’t organised to enable them to do so. Political parties’ focus is on jobs and GDP, depending on the burning of fossil fuels.”
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- Nov 2017
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www.mcclatchydc.com www.mcclatchydc.com
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Robert Mercer's hedge fund owes the IRS $7 billion.
Since the IRS found in 2010 that a complicated banking method used by Renaissance and about 10 other hedge funds was a tax-avoidance scheme, Mercer has gotten increasingly active in politics. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, he doled out more than $22 million to outside conservative groups seeking to influence last year’s elections, while advocating the abolition of the IRS and much of the federal government.
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- Sep 2017
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rampages.us rampages.us
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t is possible to identify a wide variety of actors who have contributed to ashift towards, and/or reproduced, academic capitalism:
Each of these could be a network. You could compare the networks to see if they are structured differently as a way of trying to understand who is most responsible for the push towards Academic Capitalism.
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- Aug 2017
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www.epi.org www.epi.org
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Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts
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- Jul 2017
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cole2.uconline.edu cole2.uconline.edu
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Surplus
Goes in hand with the notion that the core of capitalism is exploitation. The output produced by a worker is greater than the actual price of the workers salary. The difference between the value generated and what is paid out is the surplus which is then consummed by the bourgousie or owners /capitalists.
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- Mar 2017
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rhetcompnow.com rhetcompnow.com
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I am still an outsider running an underground railway and I am needing folks to guide me: is this connectedcourses System A or a well-disguised System B.
Both. These are not railway tracks they are intermingled and confusing networks - undergrowth and cash crops
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I started teaching at age 39 in a rural setting of intense poverty and dying culture. The culture that was dying was agri-culture
Did agriculture depend on industry?
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System B is oppressive, closed, degenerative, and exhausting.
Order Box Capitalism
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I feel the same issues with the materials of modern university life, online and face-to-face. They (the insiders) are killing the good that universities do for learners.
Let us identify what we mean by "insiders"
Those who are close to power.
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tachesdesens.blogspot.com tachesdesens.blogspot.com
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The Academy won't save us.
academia capitalism status quo
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I wasn't too sure about the BMW.
Capitalism Values
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tachesdesens.blogspot.com tachesdesens.blogspot.com
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I realized that what sold was not the script but the connection of excitement, the acceleration of a heart beat, the comic tone, the sudden absurd eruption in the life of another.
Facts count for nothing.
Excitement. - Career? Power? Attachment? Identification? Meaning? Numbers?
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For the next eleven months, first thing Monday morning, I listened to the moustachioed sales manager reeling off the figures before disappearing into his office. Each week, there were those whose heads dropped... There were those whose heads dropped over a period of two or three weeks consecutively... There were those who would suddenly be absent...
Alienation.
Dehumanisation
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The people on the other end were targets. They were nothing. They were nobody.
Alienation.
Targets.
Capitalism
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Cold calling, no product to see, contract sent in the post as soon as they said 'Yes' at the appropriate moment.
Meaning. Capitalism. Money.
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There was a grey dial phone, a scruffy copy of the yellow pages, a script in small print on one plastic covered piece of scruffy A4. "If you sell two ads in this magazine for civil servants, in the next two days, you have a job." "Small basic salary, the rest commission."
Alienation
Capitalism
Money
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- Nov 2016
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wearyourvoicemag.com wearyourvoicemag.com
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Consuming and propagating my culture and history as if it were an internet meme might seem revolutionary on the surface; but, in reality, it’s just another form of capitalist consumption and isn’t revolutionary, at all.
Reminds me I really mean to read "The Rebel Sell".
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- Sep 2016
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uknowledge.uky.edu uknowledge.uky.edu
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On a global scale, Debord not only views this as a way in which capitalism maintains the society it has created, but also argues that thepeople of anti-capitalist countries must question power instead of accepting reforms. Without the abolition of capitalism or any oppressive order, the working-class continues to struggle within the boundaries imposed on them by the system in place.
I would like to discuss this further in class. I am just a little confused on how capitalism is oppressive to everyone. As mentioned in another comment, capitalism can allow lower class citizens to work their way up, but it is just very difficult.
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theanarchistlibrary.org theanarchistlibrary.org
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Is capitalism hierarchical?
I really thank the writers of "an anarchist FAQ" for this masterpiece. I a, grateful, for without it, i wouldn't be where I am now.
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- Jul 2016
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www.forbes.com www.forbes.com
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While this segment has a strong potential to become an independent revenue stream for the company, a free education market place with a look and feel similar to its e commerce segment can definitely provide a boost to Amazon’s existing products in the short term.
ancillary market . . . OER as a means to selling other stuff
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- Apr 2016
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mikecaulfield.com mikecaulfield.com
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Here’s the basic idea — slow & measured reform is often a web of unfortunate compromises, but its protection of the status quo generally preserves business regulation, at least at some level. Because this is unacceptable to business interests, business needs to create a crisis or scale up an existing crisis. It needs to make the status quo malfunction to the point where there is supposedly “nothing left to lose”. With the system reduced, supposedly, to rubble, economic interests can move in to “solve” the problem — if the public will only place its faith in them, and abandon their old public institutions and outdated business regulations.
Mike Caulfield summarizes Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and points out that it's being applied to public education.
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- Mar 2016
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www.learningisearning2026.org www.learningisearning2026.org
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where learning has become a kind of currency
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- Jan 2016
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www.amazon.com www.amazon.com
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Raw Deal: How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism are Screwing American Workers<br> Steven Hill
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- Oct 2015
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cms.whittier.edu cms.whittier.edu
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I like to suggest that thisnew urbanity, the city-inside-out, not only it exhibits a profound processof exclusion, it also generates new dynamics of publicness that can haveimportant implications for social and political mobilization in terms ofwhat I have described as “street politics” and “political street”
with new anything comes consequences/change.. it is to decide whether or not these consequences/changes have a beneficial or negative impact on society's well being.. is exclusion a consequence of capitalism?
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inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net inst-fs-iad-prod.inscloudgate.net
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that the clear distinction which once existed between the urban and the rural is gradually fading into a set of porous spaces of uneven geographical development, under the hegemonic command of capital and the state.
Is this result what society had in mind during the planning or not so planning and action driven part of the process of this development?
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since urbanization depends on the mobiliza-tion of a surplus product, an intimate connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization.
the development and success of capitalism benefits urbanization by contributing resources over time that spur its growth.
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- Aug 2015
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www.investopedia.com www.investopedia.com
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The Nordic Model: Pros and Cons
- Social benefits like free education, healthcare and pensions.
- Redistributive taxation.
- Relaxed employment laws.
- History in family-driven agriculture. Culture of small entrepreneurial enterprises.
- High rates of taxation.
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compensating for it by also doing good.
"Good" isn't something you can buy like carbon credits. It's something that's done instead.
Perhaps the debits and credits economics are at play even here in the terminology used to "understand" doing good.
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