What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:

  • Google Says It Doesn’t ‘Sell’ Your Data. Here’s How the Company Shares, Monetizes, and Exploits It.

  • Fake animal news abounds on social media as coronavirus upends life

  • How flagging content really affects the perception of truthfulness

  • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

    • “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as a free raw market for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to a product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.”
    • “Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us.”
    • “The raw materials that had been solely used to improve the quality of search results would now also be put to use in the vice of targeting advertising to individual users. Some data would continue to be applied to service improvement, but the growing stores of collateral signals would be repurposed to improve the profitability of ads for both Google and its advertisers.”
    • “Ford’s inventions revolutionized productions. Google’s inventions revolutionized extraction and established surveillance capitalism’s first economic imperative: the extraction imperative. The extraction imperative meant that raw-material supplies must be produced at an ever-expanding scale.”
    • “Reinvestment is user services became the method for attracting behavioral surplus, and users became the unwitting suppliers of raw material for a larger cycle of revenue generation.”
    • “The last thing that Google wanted was to reveal the secrets of how it had rewritten its own rules and, in the process, enslaved itself to the extraction imperative. Behavioral surplus was necessary for the revenue, and secrecy would be necessary for the sustained accumulation of behavioral surplus.”
    • “together a convergence of political circumstances and proactive strategies helped enrich the habitat in which this mutation could root and flourish. These include (1) the relentless pursuit and defense of the founders’ ‘freedom’ through corporate control and an instance on the right to lawless space; (2) the shelter of specific historical circumstances, including the policies and juridicial orientation of the neoliberal paradigm and the state’s urgent interest in the emerging capabilities of the behavioral surplus analysis and prediction in the aftermath of the September 2001 terror attacks; and (3) the international construction of the fortifications in the worlds of politics and culture, designed to protect the kingdom and deflect any close scrutiny of its practices.”
    • “It is important to understand that surveillance capitalists are impelled to pursue lawlessness by the logic of their own creation. Google and Facebook vigorously lobby to kill online privacy protection, limit regulations, weaken or block privacy-enhancing legislation, and thwart every attempt to circumscribe their practices because such laws are existential threats to the frictionless flow of behavioral surplus.”
    • “The Constitution is exploited to shelter a range of novel practices that are antidemocratic in their aims and consequences and fundamentally destructive of the enduring First Amendment values intended to protect the individual from abusive power.”
    • “Fortifications have been erected in four key arenas to protect Google, and eventually other surveillance capitalists, from the political interference and critique: (1) the demonstration of Google’s unique capabilities as a source of competitive advantage in electoral politics; (2) a deliberate blurring of public and private interests through relationships and aggressive lobbying activities; (3) a revolving door of personnel who migrated between Google and the Obama administration, united by elective affinities during Google’s crucial growth years of 2009-2016; and (4) Google’s intentional campaign of influence over academic work and the larger cultural conversation so vital to policy formation, public opinion, and political perception.”
    • “Its dispossession operations reveal a predictable sequence of stages that must be crafted and orchestrated in great detail in order to achieve their ultimate destination as a system of facts through which surplus extraction is normalized. The four stages of the cycle are incursion, habituation, adaptation, and redirection.”
    • “For now, suffice to say that Street View and the larger project of Google Maps illustrate the new and even more ambitious goals toward which this cycle of dispossession would soon point: the migration from an online data source to a real-world monitor to an advisor to an active shepherd - from knowledge to influence and control.”
    • “This unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society.”
    • “Surveillance capitalists understood that their future wealth would depend upon new supply routes that extend to real life on the roads, among the trees, throughout the cities. Extension wants your bloodstream and your bed, your breakfast conversation, your commute, your run, your refridgerator, your parking space, your living room.”
    • “This is not the automation of society, as some might think, but rather the replacement of society with machine action dictated by economic imperatives.”
    • “Each smart object is a kind of marionette; for all its ‘smartness,’ it remains a hapless puppet dancing to the puppet master’s hidden economic imperatives.”
    • “We are left with few rights to know, or to decide who knows, or to decide who decides.”
    • “The need for scale drove a relentless search for new high-volume supplies of behavioral surplus, producing competitive dynamics aimed at cornering these supplies of raw material and seeking lawless undefended spaces in which to prosecute these unexpected and poorly understood acts of dispossession. All the while, surveillance capitalists stealthily but steadfastly habituated us to their claims. In the process, our access to necessary information and services became hostage to their operations, our means of social participation fused with their interests.”
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    • “Forget the cliche that if it’s free, ‘You are the product.’ You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The ‘product’ derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life.”
    • “Surveillance capitalists work hard to camouflage their purpose as they master the uses of instrumentarian power to shape our behavior while evading our awareness.”
    • “Social media is designed to engage and hold people of all ages, but it is principally molded to the psychological structure of adolescence and emerging adulthood, when one is naturally oriented toward the ‘others,’ especially toward the rewards of group recognition, acceptance, belonging and inclusion. For many, this close tailoring, combined with the practical dependencies of social participation, turns social media into a toxic milieu.”
    • “Both television and social media deprive us of real-life encounters, in which we sense the other’s inwardness and share something of our own, thus establishing some threads of communality. Unlike television, however, social media entails active self-presentation characterized by ‘profile inflation,’ in which biographical information, photos, and updates are crafted to appear ever more marvelous in anticipation of the stakes for popularity, self-worth and happiness. Profile inflation triggers more negative self-evaluation among individuals as people compare themselves to others, which then leads to more profile inflation, especially among larger networks that include more ‘distance friends.’”
    • “The greatest danger is that we come to feel at home in glass life or in the prospect of hiding from it. Both alternatives rob us of the life-sustaining inwardness, born in sanctuary, that finally distinguishes us from the machines.”
Reading 

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