Big Tech Stole Our Data While Democracy Slept: Shoshana Zuboff on the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Author SHOSHANA ZUBOFF says: So how do we protect ourselves? All right. First thing, all of this has rooted and flourished in the last two decades, while democracy slept. And the question is: How did they get away with it? There are a bunch of answers to that question; I go into about 16 explanations for that. But there are a couple that are right at the top of the list, that we should talk about.

One is our ignorance, because key to this whole methodology, and why it’s called surveillance capitalism, is that all of this is conducted in secret. All of this is conducted through the social relations of the one-way mirror, ergo surveillance. The vast amounts of capital that have been accumulated here are trained to create these systems in a way that keeps us ignorant. Specifically, the data scientists write about their methods in a way that brags about the fact that these systems bypass our awareness, so that they bypass our rights to say yes or no, I want to participate or I don’t want to participate, I want to contest or I don’t want to contest, I want to fight or I don’t want to fight. All of that is bypassed. We are robbed of the right to combat, because we are engineered into ignorance.

You can see part 2 of her interview here.