How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781736205907
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
OneZero, Medium's official technology publication, is thrilled to announce a print-on-demand edition of How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow, with an exclusive new chapter. How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism was first published online in August, where it was an instant hit with readers, scholars, and critics alike. For years now, we've been hearing about the ills of surveillance capitalism - the business of extracting, collecting, and selling vast reams of user data that has exploded with the rise of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. But what if everything we've been hearing is wrong? What if surveillance capitalism is not some rogue capitalism or a wrong turn taken by some misguided corporations? What if the system is working exactly as intended - and the only hope of restoring an open web is to take the fight directly to the system itself? In Doctorow's timely and crucial new nonfiction work, the internationally bestselling author of Walkaway, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Little Brother, argues that if we're to have any hope of destroying surveillance capitalism, we're going to have to destroy the monopolies that currently comprise the commercial web as we know it. Only by breaking apart the tech giants that totally control our online experiences can we hope to return to a more open and free web - one where predatory data-harvesting is not a founding principle. Doctorow shows how, despite popular misconception, Facebook and Google do not possess any "mind-control rays" capable of brainwashing users into, say, voting for a presidential candidate or joining an extremist group - they have simply used their monopoly power to profit mightily off of people interested in doing those things and made it easy for them to find each other.Doctorow takes us on a whirlwind tour of the last 30 years of digital rights battles and the history of American monopoly - and where the two intersect. Through a deeply compelling and highly readable narrative, he makes the case for breaking up Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple as a means of ending surveillance capitalism.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395700
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 683

Book Description
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Attack Surface

Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1250757525
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface is a standalone novel set in the world of New York Times bestsellers Little Brother and Homeland. Most days, Masha Maximow was sure she'd chosen the winning side. In her day job as a counterterrorism wizard for an transnational cybersecurity firm, she made the hacks that allowed repressive regimes to spy on dissidents, and manipulate their every move. The perks were fantastic, and the pay was obscene. Just for fun, and to piss off her masters, Masha sometimes used her mad skills to help those same troublemakers evade detection, if their cause was just. It was a dangerous game and a hell of a rush. But seriously self-destructive. And unsustainable. When her targets were strangers in faraway police states, it was easy to compartmentalize, to ignore the collateral damage of murder, rape, and torture. But when it hits close to home, and the hacks and exploits she’s devised are directed at her friends and family--including boy wonder Marcus Yallow, her old crush and archrival, and his entourage of naïve idealists--Masha realizes she has to choose. And whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get hurt. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

After the Digital Tornado

Author: Kevin Werbach
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108645259
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Networks powered by algorithms are pervasive. Major contemporary technology trends - Internet of Things, Big Data, Digital Platform Power, Blockchain, and the Algorithmic Society - are manifestations of this phenomenon. The internet, which once seemed an unambiguous benefit to society, is now the basis for invasions of privacy, massive concentrations of power, and wide-scale manipulation. The algorithmic networked world poses deep questions about power, freedom, fairness, and human agency. The influential 1997 Federal Communications Commission whitepaper “Digital Tornado” hailed the “endless spiral of connectivity” that would transform society, and today, little remains untouched by digital connectivity. Yet fundamental questions remain unresolved, and even more serious challenges have emerged. This important collection, which offers a reckoning and a foretelling, features leading technology scholars who explain the legal, business, ethical, technical, and public policy challenges of building pervasive networks and algorithms for the benefit of humanity. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Craphound

Author: Cory Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781983533198
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

Book Description
Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free

Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: McSweeney's
ISBN: 1940450780
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
“Filled with wisdom and thought experiments and things that will mess with your mind.” — Neil Gaiman, author of The Graveyard Book and American Gods In sharply argued, fast-moving chapters, Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free takes on the state of copyright and creative success in the digital age. Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today — about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them. An essential read for anyone with a stake in the future of the arts, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a vivid guide to the ways creativity and the Internet interact today, and to what might be coming next. This book is DRM-free.

Will Big Business Destroy Our Planet?

Author: Peter Dauvergne
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509524045
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
Walmart. Coca-Cola. BP. Toyota. The world economy runs on the profits of transnational corporations. Politicians need their backing. Non-profit organizations rely on their philanthropy. People look to their brands for meaning. And their power continues to rise. Can these companies, as so many are now hoping, provide the solutions to end the mounting global environmental crisis? Absolutely, the CEOs of big business are telling us: the commitment to corporate social responsibility will ensure it happens voluntarily. Peter Dauvergne challenges this claim, arguing instead that corporations are still doing far more to destroy than protect our planet. Trusting big business to lead sustainability is, he cautions, unwise — perhaps even catastrophic. Planetary sustainability will require reining in the power of big business, starting now.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 1429989076
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Cory Doctorow's miraculous novel of family history, Internet connectivity, and magical secrets Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off. Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls. Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge. Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan's past won't leave him alone—and Davey isn't the only one gunning for him and his friends. Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Surveillance After Snowden

Author: David Lyon
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745690882
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 89

Book Description
In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and its partners had been engaging in warrantless mass surveillance, using the internet and cellphone data, and driven by fear of terrorism under the sign of ’security’. In this compelling account, surveillance expert David Lyon guides the reader through Snowden’s ongoing disclosures: the technological shifts involved, the steady rise of invisible monitoring of innocent citizens, the collusion of government agencies and for-profit companies and the implications for how we conceive of privacy in a democratic society infused by the lure of big data. Lyon discusses the distinct global reactions to Snowden and shows why some basic issues must be faced: how we frame surveillance, and the place of the human in a digital world. Surveillance after Snowden is crucial reading for anyone interested in politics, technology and society.

Between Truth and Power

Author: Julie E. Cohen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190246693
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
This work explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. It argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it is changing in fundamental ways.