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Zuboff: The machinations of surveillance capitalism reduce you to a cog in the machine, a machine that feeds on the very self and pushes you to contribute ever more to its bosses. Me: *leans forward* Zuboff: Not at all like Ford's assembly line which was just great. Me:Permalink On twitter.com
♻️ 3 Retweets
❤️ 24 Favorites
Mood +5 🙂
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Zuboff: The leaders of Google manipulated politics to give themselves a lawless land in which they were free to do anything just like the Robber Barron of the Gilded Age. Me: *hold breath* Zuboff: 2 discrete unique situations that happen to align and tell us nothing in aligning.Permalink On twitter.com
♻️ 1 Retweets
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Mood 0
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I am somewhat sympathetic to the capitalist objections to this book, not because I agree w/them but I think because, ironically, the same objection emerges when I read with a capitalist lens as with a socialist one: the specifics are novel, the way these systems work are not.Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood +5 🙂
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I can see why I only skimmed this book the last time. There are a lot of fascinating details when I slow down to read them, but the insistence the means of production or the way the system harvests and manipulates people are somehow without precedent feels almost disingenuous...Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood +3 🙂
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It becomes sort of hard to take seriously her constant references to some harmonious prelapsarian capitalism of the age of Ford when we can draw a pretty direct line to current day assembly workers robbed of self and agency and forced to piss themselves for the boss...Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood -3 🙁
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In my life I have held a number of very different opinions of economics, some conflicting, and it is weird that they basically all would have looked at this book with exactly the same critique...Permalink On twitter.com
Mood -6 🙁
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I can see that while there's some great stuff in the book that is worth building on top of, it's internal self-contradiction was likely pretty off-putting to many, even if they couldn't frame it that way. This more detailed read makes those objections a lot easier to understand.Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood +8 🙂
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I will eventually have to write something more detailed on this because it is driving me crazy.On twitter.com
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Mood -2 🙁
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It's just frustrating b/c her argument would be much more powerful & streamlined (capitalist or not) if she could just acknowledge that this is fundamentally how capitalism works, that while the computers are novel the way people are treated are not.Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood +2 🙂
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Like... it's clear she thinks unbridled neoliberal capitalism is bad. But if she wants to make an argument that the solution is regulation making it clear that this is a continuous problem that emerges from capitalism without state intervention would be a *much* stronger argumentPermalink On twitter.com
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Mood +2 🙂
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It would also find her a wider base of allies, because then she *isn't* arguing for an abnormal one-off regulation on Big Tech, but a unified consistent regulatory regime on capitalism that has breadth and consistency...Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood +2 🙂
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And on the flip side, if she leaned into the fact that she's basically rewriting socialist economic theory but with different labels... and just gave things consistent labels across history... well then she'd find a rising movement of allies to pull on that thread with her...Permalink On twitter.com
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Mood 0
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And that would also give a consistent wider movement a role in her specific critique! Both of these are options she seems to be unwilling or unable to take and it really is driving me crazy. In either framework, she's undercutting her own argument. I can't stop thinking about it!Permalink On twitter.com
Mood -5 🙁