This is Freud’s pleasure principle writ large—a social experience that is centered around pursuing endless saccharine indulgences with the promise of avoiding reality.
The most valuable consumer platforms have both the capacity to collect highly valuable personal data and the opportunity to use it to market to users at the most lucrative moments of their daily lives. These are the places in which the invisible hand of what I call technology capitalism is at work—…
These methodologies for predicting and shaping our behavior have grown more sophisticated over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Collection and analysis of big data about people is a well-established industry. It includes the companies collecting data (miners), those trading it (…
[...] As the planet slides further toward a potential future of catastrophic climate change, and as society glorifies billionaires while billions languish in poverty, digital technology could be a tool for arresting capitalism’s death drive and radically transforming the prospects of humanity. But …
In part, the motivation for this book comes from observing the ahistorical nature of discussions about technology. This has, at best, led to a benign yet thoughtless form of technological optimism. “When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good pl…
