23 lines
1.2 KiB
Plaintext
23 lines
1.2 KiB
Plaintext
surveillance capital
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The "web 2.0" business model which emerged from Silicon Valley from
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approximately 2004 onwards and which was enabled by the advent of
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cloud computing. The term was coined by Shoshana Zuboff in 2014
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and thereafter entered widespread use as a way of describing the
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dominant business model of the internet.
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Surveillance capital solved the dot com problem from the late 1990s of
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how to monetize the internet in a situation where "nobody will pay
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for web services" directly. Or at least, not enough to be profitable.
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Instead the idea was that you "pay with your privacy", and in some
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cases also your liberty.
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By collecting data about how people use the internet detailed personal
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profiles could be created which could then be monetized for advertising,
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or used by letter agencies for political policing. If you know enough
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about someone's habits, preferences and political or religious views
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then they become more amenable to social engineering, and this could
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be behavioristically automated via machine learning. By the late 2010s
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surveillance capital had gone far beyond advertising and was being used
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to influence the outcomes of elections or public referenda.
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