The Power of Awareness: Overcoming Surveillance Capitalism

Scott Larson's case is that surveillance capitalism is a fixable business model rather than a property of the technology. Google and Facebook build predictive behavioural profiles and sell influence over them, commercial and political, and he argues the model reshaped society without anyone being asked. His remedy is civic rather than technical: informed attention, on the grounds that concentrated data power will serve an authoritarian movement of any stripe. The talk sets today's quiet shaping of behaviour against historical examples of engineered cultural influence, and lands on cynicism as the thing that makes it work.

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