The tech companies’ innovation rhetoric effectively blinded users and lawmakers for many years. Facebook and Google were regarded as innovative companies that sometimes made dreadful mistakes at the expense of our privacy. Since then the picture has sharpened. It’s easier to see that what we thought of as mistakes actually were the innovations […] an expression of a larger breakthrough: the invention of what I call surveillance capitalism. […] It is an economic logic that has hijacked the digital for its own purposes. The logic of surveillance capitalism begins with unilaterally claiming private human experience as free raw material for production and sales. […] These experiences are translated into behavioural data. Some of this data may be applied to product or service improvements, and the rest is valued for its predictive power.
In einem Gastbeitrag in The Guardian (It’s not that we’ve failed to rein in Facebook and Google. We’ve not even tried) beschreibt Shoshana Zuboff ihr Konzept des Überwachungskapitalismus und dessen Auswirkungen auf die Demokratie in seltener, aber damit umso erfrischenderer Klarheit.