Download or read book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism written by Shoshana Zuboff and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Download or read book Surveillance Capitalism in America written by Josh Lauer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveillance Capitalism in America explores the historical development of commercial surveillance long before computers and suggests that a ubiquitous but often unseen surveillance infrastructure created by business and the state has been central to American capitalism since the nation's founding.

Download or read book After the Digital Tornado written by Kevin Werbach and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-23 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Networks powered by algorithms are pervasive. Major contemporary technology trends - Internet of Things, Big Data, Digital Platform Power, Blockchain, and the Algorithmic Society - are manifestations of this phenomenon. The internet, which once seemed an unambiguous benefit to society, is now the basis for invasions of privacy, massive concentrations of power, and wide-scale manipulation. The algorithmic networked world poses deep questions about power, freedom, fairness, and human agency. The influential 1997 Federal Communications Commission whitepaper “Digital Tornado” hailed the “endless spiral of connectivity” that would transform society, and today, little remains untouched by digital connectivity. Yet fundamental questions remain unresolved, and even more serious challenges have emerged. This important collection, which offers a reckoning and a foretelling, features leading technology scholars who explain the legal, business, ethical, technical, and public policy challenges of building pervasive networks and algorithms for the benefit of humanity. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Download or read book Creditworthy written by Josh Lauer and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life—yet we know almost nothing about them. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and financial status. This data is used to predict our riskiness as borrowers and to judge our trustworthiness and value in a broad array of contexts, from insurance and marketing to employment and housing. In Creditworthy, the first comprehensive history of this crucial American institution, Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from its nineteenth-century origins to the rise of the modern consumer data industry. By revealing the sophistication of early credit reporting networks, Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played—ahead of state surveillance systems—in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person's trustworthiness. Ultimately, Lauer argues that by converting individual reputations into brief written reports—and, later, credit ratings and credit scores—credit bureaus did something more profound: they invented the modern concept of financial identity. Creditworthy reminds us that creditworthiness is never just about economic "facts." It is fundamentally concerned with—and determines—our social standing as an honest, reliable, profit-generating person.

Download or read book Between Truth and Power written by Julie E. Cohen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. It argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it is changing in fundamental ways.

Download or read book The Known Citizen written by Sarah E. Igo and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Book of the Year Winner of the Merle Curti Award Winner of the Jacques Barzun Prize Winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “A masterful study of privacy.” —Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books “Masterful (and timely)...[A] marathon trek from Victorian propriety to social media exhibitionism...Utterly original.” —Washington Post Every day, we make decisions about what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and public identity has become an urgent task of modern life. How did privacy come to loom so large in public consciousness? Sarah Igo tracks the quest for privacy from the invention of the telegraph onward, revealing enduring debates over how Americans would—and should—be known. The Known Citizen is a penetrating historical investigation with powerful lessons for our own times, when corporations, government agencies, and data miners are tracking our every move. “A mighty effort to tell the story of modern America as a story of anxieties about privacy...Shows us that although we may feel that the threat to privacy today is unprecedented, every generation has felt that way since the introduction of the postcard.” —Louis Menand, New Yorker “Engaging and wide-ranging...Igo’s analysis of state surveillance from the New Deal through Watergate is remarkably thorough and insightful.” —The Nation

Download or read book The Culture of Surveillance written by David Lyon and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-05-21 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 9/11 to the Snowden leaks, stories about surveillance increasingly dominate the headlines. But surveillance is not only 'done to us' – it is something we do in everyday life. We submit to surveillance, believing we have nothing to hide. Or we try to protect our privacy or negotiate the terms under which others have access to our data. At the same time, we participate in surveillance in order to supervise children, monitor other road users, and safeguard our property. Social media allow us to keep tabs on others, as well as on ourselves. This is the culture of surveillance. This important book explores the imaginaries and practices of everyday surveillance. Its main focus is not high-tech, organized surveillance operations but our varied, mundane experiences of surveillance that range from the casual and careless to the focused and intentional. It insists that it is time to stop using Orwellian metaphors and find ones suited to twenty-first-century surveillance — from 'The Circle' or 'Black Mirror.' Surveillance culture, David Lyon argues, is not detached from the surveillance state, society and economy. It is informed by them. He reveals how the culture of surveillance may help to domesticate and naturalize surveillance of unwelcome kinds, and considers which kinds of surveillance might be fostered for the common good and human flourishing.

Download or read book Terror Capitalism written by Darren Byler and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Terror Capitalism anthropologist Darren Byler theorizes the contemporary Chinese colonization of the Uyghur Muslim minority group in the northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang. He shows that the mass detention of over one million Uyghurs in “reeducation camps” is part of processes of resource extraction in Uyghur lands that have led to what he calls terror capitalism—a configuration of ethnoracialization, surveillance, and mass detention that in this case promotes settler colonialism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the regional capital Ürümchi, Byler shows how media infrastructures, the state’s enforcement of “Chinese” cultural values, and the influx of Han Chinese settlers contribute to Uyghur dispossession and their expulsion from the city. He particularly attends to the experiences of young Uyghur men—who are the primary target of state violence—and how they develop masculinities and homosocial friendships to protect themselves against gendered, ethnoracial, and economic violence. By tracing the political and economic stakes of Uyghur colonization, Byler demonstrates that state-directed capitalist dispossession is coconstructed with a colonial relation of domination.

Download or read book Capitalism in America written by Alan Greenspan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the legendary former Fed Chairman and the acclaimed Economist writer and historian, the full, epic story of America's evolution from a small patchwork of threadbare colonies to the most powerful engine of wealth and innovation the world has ever seen. Shortlisted for the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award From even the start of his fabled career, Alan Greenspan was duly famous for his deep understanding of even the most arcane corners of the American economy, and his restless curiosity to know even more. To the extent possible, he has made a science of understanding how the US economy works almost as a living organism--how it grows and changes, surges and stalls. He has made a particular study of the question of productivity growth, at the heart of which is the riddle of innovation. Where does innovation come from, and how does it spread through a society? And why do some eras see the fruits of innovation spread more democratically, and others, including our own, see the opposite? In Capitalism in America, Greenspan distills a lifetime of grappling with these questions into a thrilling and profound master reckoning with the decisive drivers of the US economy over the course of its history. In partnership with the celebrated Economist journalist and historian Adrian Wooldridge, he unfolds a tale involving vast landscapes, titanic figures, triumphant breakthroughs, enlightenment ideals as well as terrible moral failings. Every crucial debate is here--from the role of slavery in the antebellum Southern economy to the real impact of FDR's New Deal to America's violent mood swings in its openness to global trade and its impact. But to read Capitalism in America is above all to be stirred deeply by the extraordinary productive energies unleashed by millions of ordinary Americans that have driven this country to unprecedented heights of power and prosperity. At heart, the authors argue, America's genius has been its unique tolerance for the effects of creative destruction, the ceaseless churn of the old giving way to the new, driven by new people and new ideas. Often messy and painful, creative destruction has also lifted almost all Americans to standards of living unimaginable to even the wealthiest citizens of the world a few generations past. A sense of justice and human decency demands that those who bear the brunt of the pain of change be protected, but America has always accepted more pain for more gain, and its vaunted rise cannot otherwise be understood, or its challenges faced, without recognizing this legacy. For now, in our time, productivity growth has stalled again, stirring up the populist furies. There's no better moment to apply the lessons of history to the most pressing question we face, that of whether the United States will preserve its preeminence, or see its leadership pass to other, inevitably less democratic powers.

Download or read book Surveillance State written by Josh Chin and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where is the line between digital utopia and digital police state? Surveillance State tells the gripping, startling, and detailed story of how China’s Communist Party is building a new kind of political control: shaping the will of the people through the sophisticated—and often brutal—harnessing of data. It is a story born in Silicon Valley and America’s “War on Terror,” and now playing out in alarming ways on China’s remote Central Asian frontier. As ethnic minorities in a border region strain against Party control, China’s leaders have built a dystopian police state that keeps millions under the constant gaze of security forces armed with AI. But across the country in the city of Hangzhou, the government is weaving a digital utopia, where technology helps optimize everything from traffic patterns to food safety to emergency response. Award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin take readers on a journey through the new world China is building within its borders, and beyond. Telling harrowing stories of the people and families affected by the Party’s ambitions, Surveillance State reveals a future that is already underway—a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance.

Download or read book Silicon Values written by Jillian C. York and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The battle for online rights and for the future of democracy Who decides what is permissible on the internet: Politicians? Mark Zuckerberg? Users? Who determines when political debate becomes hate speech? How does this impact our identity or our ability to create communities and to protest? Silicon Values reports on the war for digital rights and how major corporations—Facebook, Twitter, Google and Tiktok—threaten democracy as they harvest our personal data in the pursuit of profit.

Download or read book Don t Be Evil written by Rana Foroohar and published by Currency. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A penetrating indictment of how today’s largest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, our social fabric, and our minds—from an acclaimed Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst WINNER OF THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND EVENING STANDARD “Don’t be evil” was enshrined as Google’s original corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company’s cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous. Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever: from digital surveillance and the loss of privacy to the spreading of misinformation and hate speech to predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable to products that have been engineered to manipulate our desires. How did we get here? How did these once-scrappy and idealistic enterprises become rapacious monopolies with the power to corrupt our elections, co-opt all our data, and control the largest single chunk of corporate wealth—while evading all semblance of regulation and taxes? In Don’t Be Evil, Financial Times global business columnist Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul—and ate our lunch. Through her skilled reporting and unparalleled access—won through nearly thirty years covering business and technology—she shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing both our data and our attention, without us seeing a penny of those exorbitant profits. Finally, Foroohar lays out a plan for how we can resist, by creating a framework that fosters innovation while also protecting us from the dark side of digital technology. Praise for Don’t Be Evil “At first sight, Don’t Be Evil looks like it’s doing for Google what muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell did for Standard Oil over a century ago. But this whip-smart, highly readable book’s scope turns out to be much broader. Worried about the monopolistic tendencies of big tech? The addictive apps on your iPhone? The role Facebook played in Donald Trump’s election? Foroohar will leave you even more worried, but a lot better informed.”—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of The Square and the Tower

Download or read book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism written by Anne Case and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller A Wall Street Journal Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year A New Statesman Book to Read From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class Deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism are rising dramatically in the United States, claiming hundreds of thousands of American lives. Anne Case and Angus Deaton explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. This critically important book paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline, and provides solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone.

Download or read book Surveillance Valley written by Yasha Levine and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built. In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project. A visionary intelligence officer, William Godel, realized that the key to winning the war in Vietnam was not outgunning the enemy, but using new information technology to understand their motives and anticipate their movements. This idea -- using computers to spy on people and groups perceived as a threat, both at home and abroad -- drove ARPA to develop the internet in the 1960s, and continues to be at the heart of the modern internet we all know and use today. As Levine shows, surveillance wasn't something that suddenly appeared on the internet; it was woven into the fabric of the technology. But this isn't just a story about the NSA or other domestic programs run by the government. As the book spins forward in time, Levine examines the private surveillance business that powers tech-industry giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, revealing how these companies spy on their users for profit, all while doing double duty as military and intelligence contractors. Levine shows that the military and Silicon Valley are effectively inseparable: a military-digital complex that permeates everything connected to the internet, even coopting and weaponizing the antigovernment privacy movement that sprang up in the wake of Edward Snowden. With deep research, skilled storytelling, and provocative arguments, Surveillance Valley will change the way you think about the news -- and the device on which you read it.

Download or read book How to Hide an Empire written by Daniel Immerwahr and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the ten best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune A Publishers Weekly best book of 2019 | A 2019 NPR Staff Pick A pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an “empire,” exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories—the islands, atolls, and archipelagos—this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century’s most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.

Download or read book Data Politics written by Didier Bigo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Data has become a social and political issue because of its capacity to reconfigure relationships between states, subjects, and citizens. This book explores how data has acquired such an important capacity and examines how critical interventions in its uses in both theory and practice are possible. Data and politics are now inseparable: data is not only shaping our social relations, preferences and life chances but our very democracies. Expert international contributors consider political questions about data and the ways it provokes subjects to govern themselves by making rights claims. Concerned with the things (infrastructures of servers, devices, and cables) and language (code, programming, and algorithms) that make up cyberspace, this book demonstrates that without understanding these conditions of possibility it is impossible to intervene in or to shape data politics. Aimed at academics and postgraduate students interested in political aspects of data, this volume will also be of interest to experts in the fields of internet studies, international studies, Big Data, digital social sciences and humanities. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Data-Politics-Worlds-Subjects-Rights/Bigo-Isin-Ruppert/p/book/9781138053267, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Download or read book Digital Disconnect written by Robert W. McChesney and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrants and skeptics alike have produced valuable analyses of the Internet's effect on us and our world, oscillating between utopian bliss and dystopian hell. But according to Robert W. McChesney, arguments on both sides fail to address the relationship between economic power and the digital world. McChesney's award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy skewered the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information is a democratic one. In Digital Disconnect McChesney returns to this provocative thesis in light of the advances of the digital age, incorporating capitalism into the heart of his analysis. He argues that the sharp decline in the enforcement of antitrust violations, the increase in patents on digital technology and proprietary systems, and other policies and massive indirect subsidies have made the Internet a place of numbing commercialism. A small handful of monopolies now dominate the political economy, from Google, which garners an astonishing 97 percent share of the mobile search market, to Microsoft, whose operating system is used by over 90 percent of the world's computers. This capitalistic colonization of the Internet has spurred the collapse of credible journalism, and made the Internet an unparalleled apparatus for government and corporate surveillance, and a disturbingly anti-democratic force. In Digital Disconnect Robert McChesney offers a groundbreaking analysis and critique of the Internet, urging us to reclaim the democratizing potential of the digital revolution while we still can.