Opening Salvo // THE LOCUS OF CONTROL RESIDES IN GEN X

Locus of Control

Toward a Human Future

by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

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EXCERPT //

…Surveillance capitalism worries me a great deal more than “the patriarchy” right now. Shoshana Zuboff’s book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand just how much information about our lives has been vacuumed up by unaccountable corporations who are ushering in a new age of serfdom, just when we thought we were at our most free.

“Surveillance capitalism commandeered the wonders of the digital world to meet our needs for effective life, promising the magic of unlimited information and a thousand ways to anticipate our needs and ease the complexities of our harried lives,” writes Zuboff. “Thanks to surveillance capitalism, the resources for effective life that we seek in the digital realm now come encumbered with a new breed of menace. Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. In the absence of a decisive societal response that constrains or outlaws this logic of accumulation, surveillance capitalism appears poised to become the dominant form of capitalism in our time.”

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