---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Orsan Senalp <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Apr 30, 2014 at 11:13 AM Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: <nettime> Shoshana Zuboff: Dark Google To: [email protected] Might be interesting for the list.. Begin forwarded message: *Resent-From:* [email protected] *From:* Florian Cramer <[email protected]> *Date:* 30 april 2014 14:23:37 CEST *Resent-To:* Nettime <[email protected]> *To:* Nettime <[email protected]> *Subject:* *<nettime> Shoshana Zuboff: Dark Google* Published today in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "We witness the rise of a new absolute power. Google transfers its radical politics from cyberspace to reality. It will earn its money by knowing, manipulating, controlling the reality and cutting it into the tiniest pieces." http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshanna-... Quotes from the article: "During the second half of the twentieth century, more education and complex social experience produced a new kind of individual. No longer content to conform to the mass, more people sought their own unique paths to self-determination. [...] The arrival of the Internet provided a new way forward. [...] This was a new 'networked public sphere,' as legal scholar Yochai Benkler called it. [...] The whole topography of cyberspace then began to morph as Google and Facebook shifted away from the ethos of the public web, while carefully retaining its rhetoric. They began to develop a new logic of operations in what had until then been a blank area. The new zone didn???t resemble the bricks and mortar world of commerce, but neither did it follow the norms of the open web. This confused and distracted users. In fact, the firms were developing a wholly new business logic that incorporated elements of the conventional logic of corporate capitalism ??? especially its adversarialism toward end consumers ??? along with elements from the new Internet world ??? especially its intimacy. The outcome was the elaboration of a new commercial logic based on hidden surveillance. Most people did not understand that they and their friends were being tracked, parsed, and mined without their knowledge or consent." So far, these are no new insights for Nettimers. But Zuboff adds two interesting ideas: (1) According to her, it's a mistake to think of Internet capitalism having destroyed privacy, but privacy has just been transferred. It shifted from individuals to Google and the NSA who "assert a right to privacy with respect to their surveillance tactics and then exercise their choice to keep those tactics secret". Zuboff characterizes, from what seems to be a liberal viewpoint, as a new form of absolutism. Alternatively, it could be described as a 21st century form of cognitive capitalism that follows the post-democratic/post-1990 success formula of oligarchical capitalism. (2) Zuboff quotes Karl Polanyi's model of three "fictional commodities" on which industrial capitalism is based: the reinvention of human life as labor, the reinvention of nature as real estate and the reinvention of purchasing power as money. For Zuboff, Google adds a "fourth fictional commodity" that is "emerging as a dominant characteristic of market dynamics in the 21st century": "'Reality' is about to undergo the same kind of fictional transformation and be reborn as 'behavior.' This includes the behavior of creatures, their bodies, and their things. It includes actual behavior and data about behavior." -F # 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: [email protected] _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/