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- Factual Dispatch #11: Surveillance Capitalism and Piracy Boxes vs. Netflix
Factual Dispatch #11: Surveillance Capitalism and Piracy Boxes vs. Netflix
Factual Dispatch
Now that we've reached the winter of digital discontent, the age of surveillance capitalism is upon us. The term emerged first in a paper written in 2015 by Shoshana Zuboff. Professor Zuboff was one of the first named/endowed chair female professors at Harvard Business School (ever) and she's been simmering on this idea for almost 30 years now. Loosely, surveillance capitalism refers to the wholesale trawling, collection, and aggregation of data, from all parts of the human experience. All facets of your existence are either directly applicable or applicable to something adjacent to a process or question whose answer is that existence, in data form. Maciej Ceglowski gave a talk in 2016 at the SASE Conference in Berkeley that captures the problem and gravity of surveillance capitalism better than anything else I've read. Not only does he predict a bunch of what ICE has done when it comes to tracking and harassing immigrants, here's what he thought was possible if the other candidate won:
Or consider the other candidate running for President, the one we consider the sane alternative, who has been a longtime promoter of a system of extrajudicial murder that uses blanket surveillance of cell phone traffic, email, and social media to create lists of people to be tracked and killed with autonomous aircraft. The system presumably includes points of human control (we don't know because it's secret), but there's no reason in principle it could not be automated. Get into the wrong person's car in Yemen, and you lose your life. That this toolchain for eliminating enemies of the state is only allowed to operate in poor, remote places is a comfort to those of us who live elsewhere, but you can imagine scenarios where a mass panic would broaden its scope.
This isn't that far out y'all. The ACLU is already sounding the alarm about surveillance data being used for predictive policing. And it's not even just the applications of surveillance data to government processes that we should be worried about. As Dr. Nathalie Marechal discusses for Motherboard, targeted advertising has brought us everything from ubiquitous digital tracking to the destruction of traditional marketing. I could go on about this for days or weeks, but it's easily the most important issue of the digital age.
Semi-relatedly it seems the Western world is finally waking up to the little boxes that both your friend who remains obsessed with ROMs and your ethnic uncle back home have been using for years, Piracy Boxes! With every network, company and studio realizing there's gold in them there subscriptions, piracy is on the rise again and not just in the USA. The splinterfication of streaming and increasing difficulty is trying the patience of viewers across the world. Who are taking increasingly extreme measures to punish greedy broadcasters, such as pirating the entire World Cup. Yes, all of it.
Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: One-third of the donations on GoFundMe are for medical bills. Also, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of 16,000 examined Twitter accounts tweeted out 80% of the misinformation pretending to be news in a study published in Science last week."Huh, Interesting" Read of the Week: Pranayama breathing, an ancient yogic practice, has been confirmed to be quite effective in the fight against stress, insomnia, and mindlessness by Western medicine. As any yoga person has probably already told you. Annoying-But-Correct Take of the Week: No, Israel didn't cure cancer this week. Also, the drain of coherent conservative editorial staff at RedState should be a canary in the coal mine for any self-respecting person left in conservative media.Dunk of the Week:
Stay fly,T