| Patrice Riemens on Sun, 27 Jan 2019 09:52:50 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> John Naughton on Shoshana Zuboff: 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism |
James is right, I think, in believing Carlo's argument does not account for the rapid, 'liquid' change advertising, and the current economic dispensation in general has undergone at an ever increasing speed over the last decade. But what I liked most in his post is that it provides a splendid plea for what in French is called 'la decroissance', de-growth. And de-growth, save massive, and generally very unwelcome political intervention (Maduro's Venezuela anyone?), can only be achieved at the individual level. Think of 'there is war, but nobody goes there'. Along and aside James' (imminent?) collapse-based view that things will change anyway I would add the observation that a still minute, but ever increasing number of people are switching to a different lifestyle, often in communities of sorts, within and outside cities. Society as a whole is still a very long way of weaning itself from manipulated consumerism, and the collapse-as-a-process has already started for real, yet there is a chance that something good will come about if, again, manipulated, unnatural individualism can be reverted into solidarity, mutual aid, and peer support. Yet another French concept/discipline we might well embrace: the 'entraidologie' (the theory of mutual assistance). And of course, more DIYT (Do It Yourself, Together) instead of relying on outside, big business sources!
On 2019-01-27 08:31, James Wallbank wrote:
Hi Carlo, I'd suggest that your response doesn't acknowledge the fluidity and adaptability of capitalism, which is just one framework to manifest a desire to gain advantage and control. If you ban targeted advertising, that doesn't mean that advertisers will go back to "regular" advertising. It means that advertising will morph into a different and almost unidentifiable practice. In fact, it already is. We see that advertisers mobilise social media "influencers", and we may sense (I certainly do) that supposedly "public service broadcasting" has been subverted. Imagine a circumstance in which the people who were advertisers are invisibly infiltrating every part of life, with techniques that may be impossible to distinguish from other cultural activity. An advertiser can intervene at any part of the communication process. For example: * If they're blocked from putting product placements into films, they can write films themselves. * If they can't get media channels to feature their planted messages, they can produce their own channels. * New foods, new fashions, new music, new rumours, new words, all can be engineered to render recipients (who become participants) more suggestible and more aligned with a particular way of thinking. Some global producers are now so pervasive that they don't really need to advertise ANY SPECIFIC PRODUCT. The message "Got a problem? Buy something!" is enough to be to their advantage. The key resistant mechanisms are education and critical thinking. In other words, for each individual to get smarter, to be more able to evaluate influences, and to gain greater agency over their own life. Of course, the mechanism of education itself is under information-attack - education is replaced by training, information replaced by disinformation, history is replaced with propaganda, truth is replaced by faith. Resisting the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism on an individual level is completely feasible. There are numerous tactics to generate digital disinformation that disguises an individual's tracks. However, these may be pointless - not only do they expend energy, they also don't intervene at the contextual scale. I have to say, I'm hopeful, but not optimistic. Unless a critical mass of individuals do manage to get smarter, we may be living in an age in which the very notion of individual, autonomous human consciousness is coming to an end. Each of us may be increasingly absorbed into a collective cultural/media matrix in which independent thought is simply not a thing. Welcome to the hive. I shouldn't worry that much, though - because (fortunately) sea-level rise, energy crisis, ultra-nationalist revolution, soil degradation, pandemic, accident, fire, flood and famine will obliterate the group-mind and save independent thinking... at the cost of a few hundred million lives. Happy days! James ===== On 25/01/2019 20:14, carlo von lynX wrote:On Fri, Jan 25, 2019 at 09:00:33PM +0100, Patrice Riemens wrote:Well, as I understood Shoshana Z, the pb is that you cannot, in the current dispensation, legislate something that would destroy the very basis on which today's version of capitalism is based. Making data gathering illegal is not a tweak, it's system(ic) change.That's an interesting "fatalistic" perspective. Let's discuss it. I don't see a reason why it should be so difficult to go back to where we were 15 years ago: - Booking targeted advertising becomes illegal/impossible, so you go back to do regular advertising. - Since the whole industry does the same, your competitors have no advantage over you. - If your business model was profoundly unethical, you go out of business. That is intentional. Transition within months, mostly painless. That's my estimate, and I'm usually good at these kind of estimates.Just like a predicted that GDPR would not achieve anything substantial.# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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