I'm still sad that of all the criticism of our technopolitical landscape it was the "Surveillance Capitalism" book that stuck. It's really not a good analysis.
@tante tl;dr, what was the faulty pitch?
@koen_hufkens it doesn't realize that the things it pins to "surveillance capitalism" are just features of capitalism - which the book explicitly wants to salvage (because Amazon's capitalism is so great for everyone!). It also takes corporate narratives of "we know you better than you do through data" as fact and bases the whole analysis on this false assumption.
Interesting take I almost agree with.
For sure Zuboff is careful to avoid structural questions. For sure she reads the whole thing within an outdated economical framework that cannot describe a cybernetic society.
For sure she focus on surveillance overlooking individuals' manipulation on large scale.
But the statistical manipulation on a large scale is not a "false assumption" but an evident phenomen.
And yes, I agree that we are talking about an emergent feature of Capitalism that, as Marx wrote, is an ever changing moving target.
BUT we should not repeat her error and limit our interpretation of this new form of oppression within a social-economical framework ideated to describe industrial economy in '900.
We need a cybernetic model of society, if we want a chance to conceive a just political theory to fight for.
