monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

In a series of remarkably prescient articles, the first of which was published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the summer of 2013, Shoshana Zuboff pointed to an alarming phenomenon: the digitization of everything was giving technology firms immense social power. From the modest beachheads inside our browsers, they conquered, Blitzkrieg-style, our homes, cars, toasters, and even mattresses. Toothbrushes, sneakers, vacuum cleaners: our formerly dumb household subordinates were becoming our “smart” bosses. Their business models turned data into gold, favoring further expansion.

Google and Facebook were restructuring the world, not just solving its problems. The general public, seduced by the tech world’s youthful, hoodie-wearing ambassadors and lobotomized by TED Talks, was clueless. Zuboff saw a logic to this digital mess; tech firms were following rational—and terrifying—imperatives. To attack them for privacy violations was to miss the scale of the transformation—a tragic miscalculation that has plagued much of the current activism against Big Tech.

This analytical error has also led many clever, well-intentioned people to insist that Silicon Valley should—and could—repent. To insist, as these critics do, that Google should start protecting our privacy is, for Zuboff, “like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand or asking a giraffe to shorten its neck.” The imperatives of surveillance capitalism are almost of the evolutionary kind: no clever policy, not even in Congress, has ever succeeded in shortening the giraffe’s neck (it has, however, done wonders for Mitch McConnell’s).

Zuboff’s pithy term for this regime, “surveillance capitalism,” has caught on. (That this term had been previously used—and in a far more critical manner—by the Marxists at Monthly Review, is a minor genealogical inconvenience for Zuboff.) Her new, much-awaited book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism exhaustively documents its sinister operations. From Pokemon Go to smart cities, from Amazon Echo to smart dolls, surveillance capitalism’s imperatives, as well as its methods—marked by constant lying, concealment, and manipulation—have become ubiquitous. The good old days of solitary drunken stupor are now gone: even vodka bottles have become smart, offering internet connectivity. As for the smart rectal thermometers also discussed in the book, you probably don’t want to know. Let’s just hope your digital wallet is stocked with enough Bitcoins to appease the hackers.

Zuboff’s book makes clear that the promises of “surveillance capitalists” are as sweet as their lobbying is ruthless. Tech companies, under the pompous cover of disrupting everything for everyone’s benefit, have developed a panoply of rhetorical and political tricks that insulate them from any pressure from below. It helps, of course, that the only pressure coming from below is usually the one directed at the buttons and screens of their data-sucking devices.

Had Donald Trump not been elected president—reportedly by that accidental data wizard of Steve Bannon, his hapless colleagues at Cambridge Analytica, and a bunch of Russians who managed to use Facebook as it was always intended to be used—the power of Silicon Valley might have remained a niche topic: good for nerdy Twitter banter on the renegade think-tank circuit but pretty useless for anything else.

Zuboff stepped into this global conversation five years ago, just as the first signs of discontent about the power of Big Tech began to bubble up. Silicon Valley was no stranger to criticism, but Zuboff was no ordinary critic. One of the first female professors to receive tenure at Harvard Business School, she has also worked as a columnist for Fast Company and Businessweek, two bastions of techno-optimism not exactly known for anti-capitalist sentiment. If members of the establishment were beginning to bash Silicon Valley, something, it seemed, was truly rotten in the digital kingdom. What was it?

(...)

Two People, One Palestine

For some people the European Jews who settled Israel were basically colonialists who came in and kicked out the native Palestinian population.

That sort of thing used to be much more acceptable but it's not as easy to get away with now and as a result a lot of people around the world are critical of the Israeli state.

It happens.

The thing is, the world would feel the same way about Laplanders, Sicilians, Huguenots, or any other group of people who organized themselves to colonize someone else's land.

And don't give me the "Judea and Samaria" argument;

a bible story isn't a deed.

There's no way we could effectively return every ethnic group which was ever conquered, or every ethnic group which ever migrated, to the land the claim as their ancestral home so we shouldn't establish a precedent in Palestine, right? Otherwise I'll have to learn how to speak Passamaquoddy.

Two People, One Palestine

native Palestinian population.

hightor wrote:

For some people the European Jews who settled Israel were basically colonialists who came in and kicked out the native Palestinian population.

We refer to such people as antisemites and neonazis.

You're regurgitating Zionist propaganda.

Israel will never know peace.

Israel will never know peace.

It's intransigence in regard to its oppression of the Palestinian peoples

only serves to impel other extremist regimes to seek the Zionist regime's end for their own purposes. The Zionist regime's days are numbered.

With Islam no one know peace until Sharia rules the world. Wise up hater.