YouSaid · the spoken record

Shoshana Zuboff

lines on the record: 69
first: 2019-02-20
most recent: 2019-02-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That humankind has sacrificed for millennia in order to get to the ideas of human autonomy and individual sovereignty and democracy that the demos can regulate itself, that we cannot let go of these ideas. Every generation has to step up to the responsibility to reclaim, to fight, to resuscitate, to maintain the flourishing and the growth and the deeper rooting and institutionalization of these ideas. We cannot let this go. Mark has already let it go. He's a cynic on democracy, but I'm not. I don't think you are. I don't think most of our listeners are.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like any of it. Once again, we're back to Mr. Action Cara because what that statement does is that statement has given up on democracy. Right. And some people may think, you know, these folks, surveillance capitalists think that we can substitute computation for democracy, computation for politics. That's what the Google City is, substituting computation for politics. I believe in democracy. I believe that the values of the Enlightenment in the arc of human history, these values were produced five minutes ago.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is not the future for our kids. Religion. You're speaking my religion. But let me just end on this. One of the things I did an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, and one of the things he put forward, and I was hammering him on all the things, these kind of things, saying exactly, not as eloquently as you have, but I was hammering him. And one of the things he said, well, you know, what they're doing in China, they're doing all this surveillance facial recognition, this and that. I'm like thinking you'd love to do that, Mark Zuckerberg. But he was like, he essentially was putting out the term, it's either G or me. Like if we don't, if we aren't running the internet, if you constrain us, us big companies, the Chinese internet, where they do do facial recognition, where they do do where they allow social scores and things like that. And I was thinking when he said this, I like, I don't like either choice. I don't like you. I don't like China. I don't like any of it.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the tools are for us, not for them, about us, the knowledge is for us, not about us. If we get that new competitive solution, we've got those new competitors literally Kara, have an opportunity to have every single human being on Earth as their customer. Because there is no one on earth who voluntarily wants to tangle with surveillance capitalism. They have foreclosed the alternatives. They have hijacked the internet. They have hijacked the digital medieu. They've hijacked our homes, our cars, and our bodies. This is not okay. This is not how it's supposed to be. It's not healthy capitalism. It's not a healthy 21st century society. And it's deadly, deadly recipe for human freedom and for democracy. This is not the future for our kids.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changing public consciousness, outrage, intolerability, mustering democracy, new law, regulation, intervening, outlawing. We've got new forms of collective action. And a third critical piece is the opportunity for competitive solutions. We get the new companies, the right companies, the new leadership to create the new ecosystems and alliances that really provide an alternative trajectory to a digital future, the kind of place that we wanted in the first place, the kind of place that is human, that we can call home.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then he says, How many of you upload things to it? And they were like, what? And he goes, You're all digital sharecroppers. It was an astonishing thing to say in front of it. You know what I mean? But he was right. You were being used by the powers that be to till their land. Like you have now, your land is now their land and your information is now theirs. And it was really an eye-opening moment for me. And I was sort of like, and then the kids, of course, got it. Like, oh, if we're not part of the land.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about it exactly. It's their name for us, not our name. I think it was Ban Jones who was speaking in front of a group of young African-American kids in a church. And I wouldn't have said this, but he did this. It was really amazing. He said, how many of you download stuff from the internet? And they said, oh, like what a stupid old man. Oh, yeah, of course we do. Everybody does.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Behavioral futures. Is that the way we want to make money in the 21st century? So that's number one. Number two, we need new forms of collective action. In the 20th century, we had collective bargaining. We had the institution of the strike. We had people coming together to create power, to balance capital. We need to do that now in the beyond the economic domain. We're just called users, but we're not just users. We have political, social, and psychological vested interests in what's going on and then the possibility of a free and democratic future.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What. All right, so we've got sort of three big categories of what we do. Number one, we need a sea change in public opinion. We need to wake up. We need to name what's going on. We need to grasp it. We need to understand it. They have allowed to develop in this direction for the last 20 years as democracy has slept. They have been unimpeded by law, unimpeded by regulation. That has to change. And the way that's going to change is a sea change in public awareness, the outrage, the sense of intolerability. This is not okay. As we become aware as a public, we're putting pressure on our democratic institutions. We need new law. We need new regulatory regimes that interrupt and outlaw the key mechanisms of surveillance capitalism, including the very principles of taking human experience unilaterally and translating it into data, including the very principles of do we want a dominant capitalism that trades in”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Moral autonomy and individual sovereignty. These are the elements that are the constituent forces of democracy. You can't imagine a democratic society without imagining people who have these qualities. So we're getting eroded from the inside and from the outside. And when we see something like Cambridge Analytica, which has been a big aha for a lot of people all over the world, what we see is this erosion in play using exactly the methodologies of surveillance capitalism, just slightly pivoting them toward political outcomes, Instead of commercial outcomes, using them to change our behavior, and the only way they can do that is by mustering these huge asymmetries of knowledge, turning that into power to intervene on us and modify us and control us and manipulate us and undermining our individual sovereignty. What do we do?”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's eroding democracy from the big institutional level. But now from the individual level, from the inside out, the fact that our autonomy is compromised, that these things are happening outside of our awareness, that they can take hold of our behavior and shift it and modify it in ways that we know. Make it very noisy. This is eroding our moral autonomy, our ability to claim our future for our own agency, for our own decisions, for our own choices, our own promises of where I want to go and how I want to get there.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have an asymmetry of knowledge, a concentration of knowledge unlike anything ever seen in human history. And with that knowledge comes, as we talked about before, the ability to actually shape and modify our behavior to tune us and hurt us toward their commercial outcomes. So this is now a new axis of social inequality that's not only economic inequality, which is still critically important, but also knowledge inequality and the inequality of decision rights, the inequality of our capacity to be autonomous and self-determining, the inequality of human agency. So we have an institutional disfiguring of now these huge asymmetries of knowledge and power, which are antithetical to democracy. You cannot have A well functioning democracy with massive inequalities of knowledge and power.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where in an information society, we shift from really an emphasis on labor and the division of labor is the key thing that organizes us to learning in a division of learning is the key thing that organizes us. Who gets to know stuff? Who decides who gets to know stuff? Who decides who decides who gets to know stuff? These are the dilemmas of all goes to Mark Zuckerberg. Knowledge, authority, and power that define our 21st century society, surveillance capitalists sit on a huge asymmetry of knowledge.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the things that I think is so important for us to think about is that we're talking about, when we talk about surveillance capitalism, just as industrial capitalism gave us the culture and the quality and the moral milieu of our industrial society and our industrial civilization, right now surveillance capitalism dominates. And if we don't stop it, it's going to define the moral milieu and the culture and the nature of 21st century society. And right now what that looks like is an extremely unequal society.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, so everything that we're talking about here, this is just the consequence of digital technology. You want the digital, this is what you get. That is absolutely dead wrong. Yeah, they can turn it off. Dead wrong. We know that there were wonderful models and reports and projects and early developments, the smart home, before surveillance capitalism became public when Google IPO'd in 2004 and we began to actually see this economic logic at work. And the whole idea was a simple closed loop. You've got devices in the home. Those devices are producing useful information for the occupant of the home. Simple closed loop, two nodes. The devices...”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is big time. This is economic history, right? So this is big time flows of capital. These are corporations. And I think there are a couple important things for our listeners to know. One is that... There are some, you know, what the philosophers call category errors that have been foisted upon us. One is that this is how the digital works.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not Well, part of what you're talking about here is the misdirection is the romance weaving this romance. Because you like a magician about it. We're going to connect you. We're, you know, relevant ads and we're the new church. Look, this is.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bird's eye view. What the worst part is, I think, when I talk to them, is they don't think they are. Like, I'm like, are you lying or lying to yourselves? Or it's a really weird, they, I don't know how this happened, Carol. I don't know how we have all this data. I don't know how we misused it. And then you get sort of essential bullshit from people like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like, what we want to do is bring you relevant ads. And I'm like, said nobody to anybody ever. Like I do not want those. I do, maybe I do, but not really. It's not something I requested. So what do we do?”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hijack them. Right, exactly. Like, hey, it's great to be able to manipulate your temperature on an app. Great. What a great product. Absolutely. But then I realized the other day, oh, they're watching my temperature. Now I don't know what you said is, but there's some use to it. There's some fascinating use. So what do we do? Because even like, I like literally, I'm like, they have me coming and going. And I'm pretty aware of this stuff.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Shashana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She's also a professor Emirata at Harvard Business School and has written lots of books about technology and economics. And we're just talking about this idea that they're sneaking around, really. Pretty much they're sneaking around and we don't know what they're doing. And we're agreeing to it tacitly by not doing it anything or being taken advantage of. Which way do you look at it? Because I think people do accept, especially because they're enormous companies. I was just talking to someone this week when Ero was bought by Amazon. And I have Ero in my house. I like it. It's a mesh network. My kids like it because it makes their whatever redemption 26 work better. And it was bought by Amazon. And I remember thinking, oh God, they got into my house. I didn't let any of them into my house now. And I like this work. Or I had a ring thing in the front of my house and Amazon bought that. And then Google's nest was in my house and I had to take it out. You're going down, girl. I know.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Online, we can do something that changes you enough to actually change your behavior in the real world. This is a very big deal. So in the scholarly write-up, they brag about this. They say now we know that we can use the online medium to change behavior in the real world. And they boast very clearly, very explicitly. And we can do this bypassing the individual's awareness. Right, exactly. That is a critical success factor to this entire economic logic.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not that some of that isn't true. It's just that it's misdirecting us to this piece of the iceberg when the whole other part of the iceberg is underwater, unavailable, uninspectable, obfuscated, intentionally hidden. And so, you know, fast forward 2012, 2013, the scholarly write-ups about the Facebook emotional contagion experiments where the smart people, data researchers from Facebook and academics, they write about the outcomes of this research in which they discovered that they can use subliminal cues online. To manipulate offline behavior.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one time I took a few weeks off and I got together all the manuals I could find that great magicians had ever written to describe their craft and how they actually pull off these incredible tricks. And what I learned from that was that the key pivot for a great magician is the idea of misdirection. Misdirection. Distraction. Right. So boom, I'm over here. You're over there. Your eyes are there. I'm working over here. And then going back to look at the rhetoric and the practice of surveillance capitalists right from the beginning, it's so clear that misdirection has been an essential piece of this. So we're telling you, we're giving you free services and we're connecting the world. We're making community and you can search for everything. Democratization of knowledge”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, actually, better yet, don't call it anything. Right, right. Yo, they're doing it over here. What we're not doing anything, what are you talking about?”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like Well, that's another story. But they understood early on that if they're going to get these surplus data, they had to do it surreptitiously. They had to do it through what I call the social relations of the war. We can get data that people don't even know they disclose because we can fit together different bits and pieces and make deductions and inferences. Therefore, we can come up with profiles and insights and patterns about individuals and groups and so forth that people don't even know they're giving away and did not agree to give away. Right. So from the beginning for this thing to work to get that behavioral surplus, they had to do it secretly. They had to do it backstage. They had to do it with mechanisms that were designed to keep us ignorant, designed to bypass our awareness.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what happened in this discovery process was they realized that there were behavioral data all over the place that had tremendous predictive value. And it was more data than they needed to improve their products and services. So it was surplus data. So, how are we going to get this surplus data? Because people aren't giving it to us. Or if they give it to us, it's by accident and they don't know we're taking it. If we ask them for it, they're not going to give it to us because really anytime every piece of research going back to the early 2000s, anytime you tell people about these practices of taking their experience, turning it into data, using it to predict and so forth, nobody wants any part of it. As you said a moment ago, everybody wants security. Everybody wants to be protected from it. Nobody wants to be part of this.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, when you're saying surveillance, someone, I think it was Roger McNamee said the other day, you know, capitalism is like chicken. You can make it taste like anything. As you add whatever the special factor is. And in this case, surveillance is it.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These adjectives that modify the capitalism, what they're doing is they're pointing to the pivotal piece that is the value creation hub, that critical success factor for value creation that defines this unique market form. So for mass production, capitalism, it was the mass production system that was the source of value creation in contrast to, say, mercantile capitalism. For managerial capitalism was the whole professional managerial hierarchy, the administration, all of that that created the value that drove the economies of this new capitalism and made it so successful.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About that. Yeah, I hear you. That's a really good question. And I really want our listeners to know that it's not hyperbolic. No, it's not. Yeah. And it was very intentional. Because think about the term mass production capitalism, which historians have used a lot or later managerial capitalism, which historians have used a lot.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the parts of it that I find really is the They push away the power they have. They pretend they do not have this power. And then what I begin to realize recently and over the last year or two is that they're incompetent to the task. They don't have the skills necessary. They don't have the ethical underpinnings. They don't have the knowledgeable about society. They don't have the emotional quotin to do it. The whole thing is so abstract that they can't even begin to get what's happening. So the question, talk about how you came up with the idea of surveillance, because surveillance is a very... Heavy word”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. That's exactly. I was just talking about with someone is that you don't understand it and you shouldn't have to understand it. You don't understand why a car is unsafe. You don't need to be an engineer to understand that you should be protected in that way. And what they do is they force you to do, I was just saying this to Dorsey on the thing. I'm like, you say we're sick and then you force us to secure ourselves when you created the illness. Which is fascinating. And they're like, what?”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, to tune and herd and shape us with methods that are designed to be out of our awareness. Right. That's exactly right.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In human history Digital architecture of intense detailed knowledge, which also means intense kind of power. What is this knowledge that has never existed before? And what is the kind of power that accrues to them that with that knowledge from all this ubiquitous architecture that allows them to know so much about us? What is the kind of power that accrues to that that allows them to now use this architecture as a global means of behavioral modification, essentially, to tune? It is used.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then we're going deep into personality, emotions, facial recognition, voice. But then finally, we're going beyond scale and beyond scope to something I call action, economies of action. How do we actually intervene in the state of play to shift, modify, tune, herd your behavior toward our guaranteed outcomes, our guaranteed commercial outcomes? Because the more we can do that, the more powerful the predictive data is.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because ultimately, you know, as you just mentioned, Kara, first we go for scale. We need a lot of data. Then we go for scope. We need all different kinds of data out from the online universe into the real world where we're going, all the sensors, all the cameras, all the devices, all the Internet of Things.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of what have become the dominant form of information capitalism in our time where we are trading futures in human behavior. That has become how surveillance capitalism rose to dominance, how it makes its enormous revenues, how it has earned its market cap, and become the largest, most powerful companies on earth. by convening these markets to business customers, not to us, that want to know what we are going to do in the future. And all of the economic imperatives now that define surveillance capitalism are aimed at how do we get better and better prediction products, how do we win the most lucrative prediction products so that not only are we predicting the future, but really increasingly our prediction products are equal to observation.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, then you got it. Yeah, it was fascinating. This is the database of the human future. And what those online targeted ad marketplaces were the first precursors really”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They spun it into gold. That's exactly what they did, Kara. And in fact, there are stories about Larry Page. We're unilaterally claiming this private human experience for a market dynamic. Now we're taking it into the market once we take it into the market, it comes out the other side as behavioral data. We combine that behavioral data with computation, and out of that, we produce these prediction products that tell us what you are likely to do now, soon and later.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now we have a logic where the surveillance capitalism is unilaterally claiming private human experience because, of course, the folks who are searching and browsing didn't know that they were exuding these collateral data or that those data were being saved. Right.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what they were going to do is now sell this to their advertisers, coming out of the black box, a product, a computational product that predicts this little piece of human behavior where someone is going to click. So those online advertising markets Suddenly we're transformed, not just advertisers figuring out keywords and where to place their ads. Now they're transformed into a different kind of market. These markets, if you just zoom out a tiny bit, what you see is that these markets are now trading in behavioral futures. They're trading in these tiny products that predict future human behavior, again, specifically here, click-through behavior.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stored or organized, but some people had been fooling around with it, understood that it had a lot of predictive value. Under the state of exception, what they decided to do was to use these data logs, quote, data exhaust. For their predictive power, combine those with their already frontier computational capabilities. And even in those days, they were calling it AI. You know, AI is a moving target, as you know better than anyone. In every era, it's AI, but it keeps changing. So combine these unused data with their computational capabilities and use that to predict a piece of future behavior in this future human behavior. In this case, where someone was likely to click.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go over it. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, this kind of pressure really changes the situation for people. They're not the only ones who have experienced this kind of thing. But, you know, then you got to make some tough choices. And essentially what they did was declare a state of exception. You know, that state of exception is powerful, powerful concept. You get to suspend your principles. In politics, you get to suspend the parliament, suspend the Congress, suspend democracy in order to operate under emergency. So they declared a state of exception. And at that point, there was already a situation where they knew that they had a lot of collateral behavioral data that was left over from people's searching and browsing behavior. The data was set aside, considered ways, not adequately.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did like the purity of it at the beginning. They really did. They really did mean that. And I do remember there's a story in Fortune called Chaos at Google. I remember it was with doing the O's with Chaos. And I remember thinking, oh, dear, now they're going to have to, you know, there was pressure, you're right 100%. Yeah.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're the on-site reporter girl, so I just have to say when I saw that first plane, then they had several. It's done. I hear you. I hear you. So, what happened was even though it was widely understood that they had the best search engine, even they were now under tremendous financial pressure. And even their very swanky venture capitalists were threatening to withdraw support. And so long story short, you know, they went through a dark night of the soul. They had been very public about rejecting online advertising as a disfiguring force both in general on the internet and specifically for their search engine.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. Well, the way I tell the story, surveillance capitalism, like mass production capitalism, was invented at a time and place. You could say invented, discovered, cobbled together, trial and error experiment, but the thing is it was a human thing and it was discovered, invented, elaborated at a moment of emergency in Silicon Valley with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, a lot of pressure on all those young startups, all those fledgling companies. Google was right there. It had the best search engine. It had some of the smartest people, these brilliant founders, great values. Alleged things.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, you know what I mean? Something happened. Something happened. All right. When we get back, we're talking. Funny thing happened on the way to the forum. That's right.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the idea of it was that idea of reachability. It was a sort of a Star Trekian version of, you know what I mean, that we all shared information freely and that it was easy to reach people, that you could connect. I will never forget going to AOL, guys got to be in the 90s at six, earlier than that, four or five, 94. And there was a bunch of quilters there who had met online.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Google that we know Came out of the bus, and it came out of the bust. Building on that vocab came out of the bust gangbusters because it had discovered surveillance capitalism. It had discovered this economic logic. And that's what saved it. And that's what spread from there. So there was a window when our hopes and the promise of the digital milieu of a new information civilization which reintegrated these principles of the individual and democratization and so on, there was reality there. But that window Slowly closed, it was closing even before we knew it. We still were thinking that it was this one thing when it was already turning into something very different.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And find like minded people or people with a similar ailment or people trying to tackle a similar problem. And so the promise of empowerment and democratization was real for a few years. And the way I read that history Was that there came a moment, and I write about it, that a lot of it had to do with the financial emergency of the dot-com bus and so forth, where that began to turn. That's when surveillance capitalism was discovered, invented, stumbled into, happened it happened at Google.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You bet. And, you know, and we rush there really looking for the succor, the voice, the influence, the information, the connection that we couldn't get in these hierarchical silos that we're just now cost down and, you know, you get seven minutes with your doctor and so forth. So we went to the internet looking for what had been taken from us in the real world. And for a while, that promise really was alive. You know, that you could get information that had been siloed away from government. And you could contact people up in a hierarchy that would never pay any attention to you. And you could create connection and networking that was medical.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT