The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana
Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts
Propaganda
and advertising have always been designed to appeal to unacknowledged fears and
yearnings. This is not the first time that the unconscious mind has been
targeted as an instrument of others’ aims. (Public
Opinion Series) These have relied more on art than science, using gross
data or professional intuition for the purpose of mass communication. Those
operations cannot be compared to the scientific application of today’s historic
computational power to the micro-measured, continuous rendition of your
more-or-less actual feelings.
Surveillance
capitalists declare their right to modify others’ behavior for profit according
to methods that bypass human awareness, individual decision rights, and the
entire complex of self-regulatory processes that we summarize with terms such
as autonomy and self-determination. The new toolmakers do not intend to rob you
of your inner life, only to surveil and exploit it. All they ask is to know
more about you than you know about yourself.
At
no other time in history have private corporations of unprecedented wealth and
power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive
global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control
constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money
can buy.
Under
surveillance capitalism, the means of production serves the means of behavioral
modification. Machine processes replace human relationships so that certainty
can replace trust.
New York tenants fight as landlords
embrace facial recognition cameras
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/29/new-york-facial-recognition-cameras-apartment-complex
30 May 2019
More than 130 residents at a Brooklyn apartment
complex oppose plan to use the cameras, whose use is quietly expanding in
cities. At Atlantic Plaza Towers in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn,
the landlord, Nelson Management Group, is moving to install a new system to
control entry into the buildings. It would use facial recognition to open the
front door for recognized tenants rather than traditional keys or electronic
key fobs. “We do not want to be tagged like animals,” said Icemae Downes, who
has lived at Atlantic Plaza Towers since it opened 51 years ago. “We are not
animals. We should be able to freely come in and out of our development without
you tracking every movement.”
The row, which the tenants believe could become an
important test case, comes as concern about the spread of facial recognition
systems has grown across the US and globally, with law enforcement agencies
increasingly relying on the tool. San Francisco this month became the first US
city to ban city police and government agencies from using it. Private firms
are also increasingly keen on the technology.
Residents fear the move reflects the spreading
pressures of gentrification further into the east of Brooklyn, and a desire to
attract white, higher-income residents in the buildings, whose tenants are
mostly black. They say there is already a culture of surveillance and that if
they are suspected of breaking one of the building’s rules, they might find an
image of themselves pushed under their doors. Facial recognition algorithms are
less accurate when used on black people and women, as compared with white
people and men.
San Francisco is first US city to ban
police use of facial recognition tech
14 May 2019
San Francisco supervisors have voted to make the
city the first in the United States to ban police and other government agencies
from using facial recognition technology. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who
championed the legislation, said: ‘We can have security without being a
security state. We can have good policing without being a police state.’ And
part of that is building trust with the community based on good community
information, not on Big Brother technology.” Critics argued that police need
all the help they can get, especially in a city with high rates of property
crime. .
China's Xinjiang citizens monitored with police app, says rights group
02 May 2019
Chinese police are using a mobile app to keep data
on millions of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang province. The app is used to closely
monitor behaviors, including lack of socializing, using too much electricity or
having acquaintances abroad. In particular, it targets "36 person
types" that authorities should pay attention to. These include people who
seldom use their front door, use an abnormal amount of electricity and those
that have gone on Hajj - an Islamic pilgrimage - without state authorization.
China has 170 million CCTV cameras in place across the country and by the end
of 2020, an estimated 400 million new ones will be installed. All this is part
of China's aim to build what it calls "the world's biggest camera
surveillance network". China's also setting up a "social credit"
system that is meant to keep score of the conduct and public interactions of
all its citizens. The aim is that by 2020, everyone in China will be enrolled
in a vast national database that compiles fiscal and government information,
including minor traffic violations, and distils it into a single number -
ranking each citizen.
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