Tom Scott: welcome to life
03. ZOMBIE ONTOLOGY
In a networked information economy, our digital selves seem more and more shaped by corporate media and consumerism. How can storytellers and artists twist and reinvent the digital tools to reclaim a networked world? Can concepts such blockchain help us imagine digital and virtual communities with ‘data sovereignity’.
In what Harvard scholar & social psychologist Shoshanna Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism,’ she states: “We thought that we search Google, but now we understand that Google searches us. We assumed that we use social media to connect, but we learned that connection is how social media uses us. Surveillance capitalists exploit the widening inequity of knowledge for the sake of profits. They manipulate the economy, our society and even our lives with impunity, endangering not just individual privacy but democracy itself.” We are now remotely controlled. Surveillance tools are being deployed as a means to exert social control, and turning security agency tech on their own civilians. Surveillance capitalists have committed a coup: they control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.
Even if we as users would slightly be vigilant about how our data is used, we would have to review over 1000 privacy contracts, and by only questioning these, we would be written out of the system as access would be denied to these very tech tools, that in essence should be a part of our everyday infrastructure as a commons instead it has turned into an info-dystopia. “It is the right to our Future Tense.”
FURTHER READING & RESEARCH
Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,”First Monday” ‘August 2, 1999)
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (2001)
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)
Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism (2002)
The Intercept: How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations (2004)
Zuboff, Shoshana: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019)
Marina Warner: Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time: The 1994 Reith Lectures by Marina Warner (1994
Scott Bukatman, Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins (2016)
Mark Fisher: The Weird and the Eerie (2017)
Jaron Lanier: Who Owns The Future (2013) + Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality (2017) + Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)
Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” (1999)
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (2001)
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)
Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism (2002)
The Intercept: How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations (2014)
David Bollier, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2009)