Lecture 10: Zuboff and Surveillance Capitalism

Posthumanism and Technology

This week we are going to explore Shoshana Zuboff’s major recent work Surveillance Capitalism. In SC Zuboff does something really interesting and innovative. Zuboff believes that we do not really have the right concept or ideas for the effects which have been wrought on us by the internet revolution. While we say and are aware of words like ‘big data,’ ‘e-commerce,’ ‘encryption’ and ‘authentication’ and ‘GDPR,’ but do we really know how they actually work, who works them and who monitors who works them? This lecture will explain precisely what is ‘behavioural surplus,’ how and when it appeared, and examines how tech corporations – e.g. Google, Facebook, Microsoft – have harnessed this new form of exchange to constitute predictable, consuming, and malleable humans through data extraction, as well as the invention of new coercive forms of power.

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