“You are not the customer, you are the abandoned carcass. The real customer is the market that trades in your future behaviour.” - Shoshana Zuboff
Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has been on my list for a long time - finally diving in. It’s unsettling, brilliant, and painfully relevant. I wrote a short piece distilling her core message and what it means for digital freedom today.
Is this data bubble ever going to fuckung pop? So tired of this shit? I don’t want to live the rest of life like this. Who tf wants to have kids in this nightmare?
That’s not a bubble. AI is a bubble, other people wanting your data will go on until there is cultural and political will to prevent it, and there’s no guarantee we’re moving in the right direction. See the recent situation with chat control: it was postponed, but it will be back; and even when this particular attack is well and truly destroyed, there will be another. Privacy and digital rights are a never-ending fight, but a necessary one for the sake of human rights in general.
cultural and political will to prevent it
Well the EU and California are. Just yesterday I was reading https://www.lesnumeriques.com/informatique/une-premiere-victoire-polytechnique-claque-la-porte-a-microsoft-365-et-choisit-le-logiciel-libre-la-revolte-gagne-les-universites-n243905.html which is one example among many, here one of the most famous French engineering school switches away from Microsoft due to lack of GDPR clarity. Numerous administrations in the EU do the same. Yes it slow, yes it’s not enough BUT it’s something. I can’t say if the momentum will grow and transform to a mass exodus, or if it’s not a real trend and my bias highlights what I hope to see. Still it is happening.
We have to fight back and promote foss services.
Data and AI technologies are built for large institutions to enhance their power and dominant over individuals.
