Today's MUST WATCH: "Klein, Zuboff, and Browne will unpack the dangers of surveillance capitalism — and how we can rise to this crisis and create a fair and equitable future." @NaomiAKlein @shoshanazuboff and @wewatchwatchers in conversation! theintercept.com/2020/09/11/cor…
.@shoshanazuboff begins by pointing out record gains for big tech companies. A sobering reminder that the 'moment of reckoning' in The Discourse About Big Tech is not necessarily a real reckoning
Zuboff: The pandemic has been great for extracting user data. And civil unrest has also produced institutional data surveillance contracts.
Somewhat awkward framing of this summer's massive mobilization for Black liberation as 'manufactured' but I get her point about the data surveillance contracts
Zuboff summarizing the situation re: the shift to online learning and the implications for surveillance capitalism. Notes Feb 2020 Google Education was being sued for data mining kids. Now? They've become the key platform for public school students
Side note, Cambridge Public Schools are on Google education platform, so I'm getting first hand experience of what this looks/feels like with my partner's 10 and 12 year olds
Now Zuboff is summarizing data platforms and tech company partnerships with law enforcement (various levels of police, DHS, ICE, FBI, etc). (For the most powerful work in this area see carceral.tech )
Now @wewatchwatchers is summarizing her work on the historical roots of surveillance in slavery, slave ships, lantern laws, systems of biometric surveillance that governed Black and Indigenous life for centuries
Browne: Ursula Franklin showed us the State often has to produce a credible 'enemy' in order to allocate the funds to develop and deploy biometric surveillance
Browne: prototypical whiteness in biometric technology by pseudoscientific researchers who also deployed racist, sexist, ableist frames
Now Browne is referencing the recent Zoom and Twitter kerfuffle
https://twitter.com/schock/status/1308037512049446917?s=20
She complicates that conversation: "I don't want to be made legible by Twitter!"
She also points out the many researchers, activists, and advocates, like @AJLUnited, who have been fighting back against the encoding of antiblackness in sociotechnical systems
(The chat in the YouTube stream is pretty much on fire as well)
Naomi notes that there is a shift in public conversation that is out of line with what is happening at the political/economic level. A growing critique of Big Tech
Zuboff is now summarizing public opinion data about privacy. For example, in a recent poll she cites 74% of people in the US said they are more alarmed about their privacy than ever. 36% say companies are responsible. 28% say companies. But 34% say individual is responsible.
She sees this as the result of 2 decades of gaslighting: a model where privacy is a personal calculation that we make. 'I give google my data, I get a free service.' Zuboff wants to reframe this.
Zuboff just said she calls metadata surplus data. That... does not make sense. I mean, it doesn't make sense as a Marxian concept or even as a metaphor.
Zuboff is great at hammering home 'surveillance is a business model, and you are the product.' Would love to see her more deeply integrate race, gender, disability analysis, and also, center knowledge and practices from social movements that actively resist.
Klein brings in movements that are filling the streets rn
Now we're getting into how Browne sees the surveillance of #BlackLivesMatter
Browne: the school to prison pipeline has come into the home. A 12 y/o with a toy gun in the background, then administrators sent the police to his home.
"The home has become an extension of the carceral state"
Browne: I turn to those abolitionists who have been doing this work for so long. Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Mariame Kaba.
We need to stop the construction of the Zoom to Prison Pipeline. h/t @jovialjoy &
https://twitter.com/flexlibris/status/1304424116083134465?s=20
Klein: warehouse workers, uber drivers, instacart shoppers, are not often centered in the conversations about tech worker organizing. The companies REALLY get nervous when white collar workers organize w/blue collar. #TechWontBuildIt
Klein: what about a digital commons? There are limits on the conversations around regulation, breaking up tech. We have a right to use these technologies in our own interest!
Zuboff: The labor organizing is key. once you introduce a labor contract, it's protected by the NRLB. It is protected by democratic law, as opposed to employing people on at will contracts where ToS, other contract law, puts all the power in the company's hands.
Zuboff: when you hear 'Ethical AI' or 'Ethical Tech,' just substitute in your mind 'gaslighting, gaslighting, gaslighting.'
[Side note: I agree with a lot of Zuboff's critiques, but also, sometimes it sounds like she is universalizing (we're all just products of surveillance capitalism) when some are far more harmed than others.]
[Also, she is so invested in differentiating 'surveillance capitalism' from other forms of capitalism, and doesn't seem to hear Browne's location of biometric surveillance in hundreds of years of racial capitalism. Tl;DR Zuboff needs to read Browne more closely ;) ]
Zuboff's focus is on how our behavior and selves are modified by predictions. It's fundamentally a critique of nudge capitalism. But without a sustained gaze at the interlocking nature of systems of oppression - Patricia Hill Collins' 'matrix of domination.'
She defines 'instrumentarian power' as the unprecedented amount of information that the companies have amassed about us. Subliminal shifting, shaping, tuning our behavior to align with profit interests.
Zuboff: authoritarian power now has control over instrumentarian power, which is 'what she's always dreaded.' It's the nightmare scenario.
[The realities that some communities have already experienced are beyond the capacity of others to imagine, even in their worst nightmares]
[For example, as Browne writes, the slave ship as a 'total surveillance environment' predates surveillance of Uighurs by hundreds of years.]
Browne shares a story of police requesting ability to use LRADs (?) to disperse protesters. Calls out security theater, temperature scanners, race based contact tracing.
Browne: Black women get absented from the narrative of how we fight surveillance, although they have often been key whistleblowers.
Like the FB employee who recently spoke out against how the platform was weaponized in multiple countries' political struggles but leadership ignored
Browne ends with a call to center stories of resistance, especially Black Women and those who are too often made invisible in the narrative about how we fight back against surveillance and the carceral state
What a brilliant talk. Thanks to Klein, Zuboff, and Browne. and ... if you want to take action, join ajlunited.org!
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