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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Shoshana Zuboff is one of those people that make me upset when I discover them. Why didn't I hear about them and their books books much earlier? Is it only because she is not marketing her books well enough?

The Age of the Smart Machine (1988) is truly visionary and well written.

edit:

I'm currently reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The book has well developed concepts like 'behavioral surplus and 'instrumentarianism'. There are also clever terms like 'radical indifference', 'observation without witness', 'equivalence without equality'. They are just plain insightful. I can instantly recognize them as something I could not conceptualize before.

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This kind of books go through different channels than the ones that are followed by the engineers. Engineers pick up this stuff when it ends up in the mainstream but they don't really participate that much in the tech critique world.

somewhat unfortunate vicious cycle it seems like, engineers either don't consider the ramifications of what they build or are willing to handwave it away, until it all starts to come back around

Check out her videos:

- (2019) https://vimeo.com/313429468

- (2014) https://youtube.com/watch?v=0QwPHinDdOc

I've also just started reading 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'.

Some of my colleagues at work use the term 'digital native' to refer to (young) people who have grown up with ubiquitous computing. Next time someone says that, I should now perhaps say "oh, you mean, the wage slaves of the surveillance capitalists".

>oh, you mean, the wage slaves of the surveillance capitalists

That phrase is just a series of boo words concatenated together, as in, "wage (booooo) slave (booooo) of the surveillance (I'll give you that one) capitalists (boooo)." It is too woven in with the "capitalists (boooo)" movement to be effective as a rallying point for people that don't want to overturn all of society.

You think "wage" and "capitalist" are boo words? Really?

I'm not booing them myself, I'm talking about the (non-universal!) cultural subtext of those words. "Wage" has a negative connotation for being lower status than "salary," and appears in terms like "wagecuck." "Capitalist," is absolutely a boo word around leftists and was actually coined by Marx specifically to name his enemies.

> "Capitalist," ... was actually coined by Marx specifically to name his enemies.

Wikipedia [0] disagrees: The Hollandische Mercurius uses "capitalists" in 1633 and 1654 to refer to owners of capital. In French, Étienne Clavier referred to capitalistes in 1788,six years before its first recorded English usage by Arthur Young in his work Travels in France (1792).In his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), David Ricardo referred to "the capitalist" many times. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English poet, used "capitalist" in his work Table Talk (1823). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon used the term "capitalist" in his first work, What is Property? (1840), to refer to the owners of capital. Benjamin Disraeli used the term "capitalist" in his 1845 work Sybil.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

Just ordered The Age of Surveillance Capitalism based on your appraisal. Thank you.

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