Is Humor The Best Antidote to Tyranny?
Keen On
Andrew talks to the legendary Czech diplomat, writer and human rights activist Michael Zantovksy about how to fight authoritarianism.
info_outline
Pivoting to the Killer-app.
Keen On
Andrew talks with writer Larry Downes, the author of five books including this year’s bestselling Pivot To The Future. Best known, however, for his first book, Unleashing The Killer App, which, in 1998, sold 200,000 copies and was one of the first big hits about the internet.
info_outline
Facebook’s Moral Crisis
Keen On
The American technology journalist and impresario David Kirkpatrick is probably the world’s leading authority on the history of Facebook. The author of the 2010 best-selling Facebook Effect, over the last few years – become one of the Facebook most articulate critics.
info_outline
Ninja Morality: The case for technological innovation
Keen On
Andrew talks to Ninja Future author Gary Shapiro about our moral obligation to unleash technological innovation on society
info_outline
Keen On The State of American Democracy
Keen On
Andrew talks to noted Harvard Law School scholar Noah Feldman about the health of American democracy, populism, anti-trust law and what James Madison would think of contemporary America.
info_outline
How to Lose a Country With Turkish Author Ece Temelkuran
Keen On
Today Andrew is talking to Turkish born author of How To Lose A Country, Ece Temelkuran. As global citizens we chat about her rejection of the parochial, cul-de-sac of identity politics and shows us how to engage in REAL democratic conversation.
info_outline
Why Democracy Is a Conversation
Keen On
Andrew talks to internet guru Jeff Jarvis about how to save democracy through turning it into a civil and civic discussion
info_outline
Why Democracy needs Team Human
Keen On
Douglass Rushkoff is one of the world’s leading humanist critics of contemporary capitalism, particularly of the digital economy. In this week’s episode we chat about his latest acclaimed book is TEAM HUMAN.
info_outline
How Globalism Is Turning Us All Into Palestinians
Keen On
Andrew talks to Ian Bremmer, author of the bestselling Us Vs Them: The Failure of Globalism about the political crises of inequality and alienation.
info_outline
Finally Some Good News: Democracy works in Turkey!
Keen On
Andrew talks to noted Turkish political pundit Soli Ozel about democracy in Turkey. Democracy works, Ozel says. Authoritarianism may even be on the wane.
info_outlineThe most acclaimed new book about technology is by the distinguished Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff. It’s entitled THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: THE FIGHT FOR A HUMAN FUTURE AT THE NEW FRONTIER OF POWER. But when I sat down with Zuboff in Berkeley last week, it became increasingly clear that THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM might have been subtitled:
THE FIGHT FOR A DEMOCRATIC FUTURE AT THE NEW FRONTIER OF POWER
ZUBOFF FIVE POINTS:
- “Something is not right, but we don’t know what to call it,” Shoshana Zuboff says. It’s a problem with no name, she explains, so I set out to name the elephant. And what Zuboff has done, more than anything else in the AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, is, indeed, to name that elephant. Like Rachel Carson in Silent Spring or Betty Friedan in the Feminine Mystique, Zuboff has unfogged our minds. She’s spent seven years simplifying. Seven years untangling the technology and language of Silicon Valley.
- Yes, language matters, Zuboff is telling us. We need to use our words carefully – particularly in terms of fighting back against the sophisticated PR artilleries of Silicon Valley. And the idea of “fighting back” is no metaphor. We are in a war, she tells us. An information war. One defined by asymmetries of knowledge between the ubiquitous Silicon Valley platforms and ourselves.
- So what, exactly, is surveillance capitalism? Zuboff’s description of it as the “social relations of the one-way mirror” is hauntingly exact. Created and elaborated by Google at the turn of the century and now spreading virally throughout the economy, this appropriation of our data represents what she calls the “complete destruction of privacy.” It takes away “the boundaries of our own experience”. We can no longer determine our autonomy.
- THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM might have been subtitled THE FIGHT FOR A DEMOCRATIC FUTURE AT THE NEW FRONTIER OF POWER. That’s because Zuboff thinks that democracy is the most human of qualities and it’s the thing that is being most undermined by surveillance capitalism. This economy is, she warns, on a collision course with freedom. She’s right, of course. Especially the way in which surveillance capitalism, in its sophisticated campaigns of disinformation, undermines human agency.
- But as Zuboff reiterates time and time again, it doesn’t have to be this way. Rather than technology, the problem is what she calls an economic logic. And while can’t have surveillance capitalism without digital, we can imagine a digital world with surveillance capitalism. But how? The solution, she argues, is collective action. The solution is democracy. So just as we organized against the great injustices of industrial capitalism in the 19th & 20th centuries, we need to organize against the equally unfair practices of 21st century surveillance capitalism. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again, Zuboff says. That, indeed, is what being human is all about.
Hope you enjoyed this week’s episode with Shoshana Zuboff, you can find out more about her here:
Find her Books here:
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
Please be sure to check out DLD’s up and coming events,
Produced by Jason Sanderson - Podcast Tech