The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts
A
storm of controversy made Skinner’s science of human behavior Beyond Freedom & Dignity an
international best seller. The public rejected Skinner’s argument that there
were cultural matters more important than preserving and extending individual
freedom.
Pentland’s
book, Social Physics, summons
Skinner’s social vision into the twenty-first century. Both Skinner and
Pentland believe in the authority of the utopianists to impose their plan. In
Pentland’s view, Facebook already exemplifies these dynamics. Its contagion
experiments reveal active mastery of the ability to manipulate human empathy
and attachment with tuning techniques such as priming and suggestion.
In
an article titled “The Death of Individuality,” Pentland insists that “instead
of individual rationality, our society appears to be governed by a collective
intelligence that comes from the surrounding flow of ideas and examples. It is
time that we dropped the fiction of individuals as the unit of rationality and
recognized that our rationality is largely determined by the surrounding social
fabric.”
No comments:
Post a Comment