Group Members – Fox Gleason, Chris Anderson, Ashley King, Chloe Falkner

Article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook

Quotes and inspired discussion:

“Surveillance capitalism is a human creation. It lives in history, not in technological inevitability.”

-Tech aids efficiency

“Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists,” says Zuboff, “or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking old Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”

-can’t teach surveillance capitalism morals

“Surveillance capitalists extract predictive value from the exclamation points in your post, not merely the content of what you write, or from how you walk and not merely where you walk. Users might get “ownership” of the data that they give to surveillance capitalists in the first place, but they will not get ownership of the surplus or the predictions gleaned from it – not without new legal concepts built on an understanding of these operations.”

-interpretation based on correct/wrong punctuation. If it confuses humans, what does it do to algorithms?

“We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.” – data scientist

-the manipulation behind algorithms

“The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched.”

-Although part of the “watched”, normal people are also guilty of being watchers