Shoshana Zuboff takes aim at surveillance capitalism.

. . . the digitization of everything was giving technology firms immense social power. From the modest beachheads inside our browsers, they conquered, Blitzkrieg-style, our homes, cars, toasters, and even mattresses. Toothbrushes, sneakers, vacuum cleaners: our formerly dumb household subordinates were becoming our “smart” bosses. Their business models turned data into gold, favoring further expansion.

Google and Facebook were restructuring the world, not just solving its problems. The general public, seduced by the tech world’s youthful, hoodie-wearing ambassadors and lobotomized by TED Talks, was clueless. Zuboff saw a logic to this digital mess; tech firms were following rational—and terrifying—imperatives. To attack them for privacy violations was to miss the scale of the transformation—a tragic miscalculation that has plagued much of the current activism against Big Tech . . . 

“Forget the cliché that if it’s free, ‘You are the product,’” she exhorts. “You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The ‘product’ derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life.” The worst, though, is still to come, she argues, as tech giants shift from predicting behavior to engineering it. “It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us,” she warns; “the goal now is to automate us.”

Abandoned carcasses unite!  You have nothing to lose but the illusion that you are a living, breathing being possessed of free will!

{ 2 comments }

Presenting a video in which I and about a dozen other writers discuss the collaborative project that is Wild Cards.

{ 0 comments }

I’ve been trying to work hard and mostly failing, so I might as well listen to Pink Martini and surrender to the mood.

The chorus is a riff off the French composer Poulenc, and translates as follows:

I don’t want to work

I don’t want to lunch

All I want is to forget

And I want to smoke

Except that I like lunch and don’t care for tobacco, that pretty much describes my present.  In my current mood, I’ll settle for 50%.

{ 2 comments }

My home town of Duluth was hammered last week by the Polar Vortex, and so of course there were various photos of frozen eyelashes and stalled cars and people bundled up like the Michelin Man.  (Fortunately it didn’t last.  In a single day the temperature went from -31 to +31.  That’s Fahrenheit, of course, since if we were talking Celsius that would be far more alarming.)

There’s another weather phenomenon that I find fascinating, and that’s sea smoke, seen here in this video from Sky Candy Studios, which also features the dramatic entrance of the ore carrier Edgar B. Speer under the Aerial Lift Bridge and into the frozen harbor.

The Speer can also be viewed here in more clement weather conditions.  And there are also some amazing photos of sea smoke online.

{ 1 comment }