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

“Whether you're trying to deal with an insurance company or a telephone company or an airline or your healthcare provider or even the school system, these institutions have been scraped to the bone and it's so hard for us to get the information and the support and the relationship and all the things that we're looking for, let alone the voice and the influence. So the institutional world has become a very impoverished frustrating place for most people unless you're super wealthy and you can buffer yourself from these things. That's really what drove us to the internet. You know, back in the day, in the late 90s, when the World Wide Web broke on us, we called it the World Web.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and someone was paying attention and willing to spend some money. Right, exactly. Looking toward the future and all the things that we're supposed to count on our institutions to do. Right, which they didn't do. Which they didn't do largely because of this ideology that swept in and maximized shareholder value. Shareholder. And now finally, again, all these years, decades later, we're finally getting the critiques of exactly the destruction and devastation wrought by that shareholder value maximization paradigm that has had everybody by the throat for so long. And that's kind of the segue to the new work in a way too, because that paradigm scraped the life out of so many of our institutions and our businesses.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would say, I don't know, whatever, a $70 million business in San Francisco, the Chronicle, for example. It would be collapsed to seven and never go back. Like it wasn't going to be 70. Seven was the amount. And so what I kept thinking was every single thing that can be digitized would be digitized. And of course it would be digitized. And there'd be no question about it. And therefore, so many jobs would be eliminated. So many people would not be able to be trained properly. And figuring out how to train them was really difficult, very difficult to do unless someone was really paying attention.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were all researchers and they knew all the facts, and then the computer came in and would spit out the fact instantly so they could replace the entire thing. It was such a tricky little movie. Actually, it was trying to be light and bright, but it wasn't at all light and bright. In the end, the humans prevail, but they didn't. Like you sort of like, that's going to last for five seconds. And they had a great cast, like Joan Blondell, I think, was in it and stuff. But the concept that I always think about when I first started to see these things, and I especially saw I worked at a newspaper and I saw them around classifieds. And I covered retail. And I was like, these people don't need to advertise in retail. You know, they don't need to advertise. They don't classifieds are static, expensive. The person who's taking the ad is a jerk, and they don't work. Like these were the things. Your whole business model is terrible and classifieds do. Like the classifieds online do. And I thought they weren't going to just...”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do think this idea that people would matter in this equation. I don't know if you remember a crazy movie. That's one of my favorite movies, Desk Set with Catherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, where he's a wonderful movie about that issue. It's very much for another.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“smart inclusive workforce that was going to carry us way into the 21st century that was not on anybody's radar so I really was kind of a voice in the wilderness on that subject and I think you know that has come back to haunt us now, to haunt our society, to haunt our people, but also to haunt our competitive capacity.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the exclusion, well, I mean, it was ubiquitous. Honestly, Kara, it was there wasn't a single company that I researched companies all over the world going through this transformational process. And I rarely found a company that was taking the deep-seated need for a new level of educational effort and inclusion, public-private collaboration around that. I mean, the bigger story here is, you know, I write about this in the new book, The Neoliberal Paradigm, the idea that, you know, we're moving into, this is, you know, back in the 1980s, we're moving into a shareholder value maximization universe. Everything is cost down. Everything is cost-cutting. Everything is automation. Everything is offshoring. Everything is outsourcing. So really the workforce and the development of road.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then, you know, now 30 years later, we've got so many people excluded from the workforce, so many people, you know, taking drugs and having no place to go and not being part of this future. And at the same time, we've got businesses who are complaining, hey, we don't have a skilled workforce. Right, right. Where are skilled workers? So this is the profound irrationality that we've seen developing in this. So white back then did it.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But even before we get to entrepreneurship, the idea that I'm working in a factory, I used to deal with a machine and it was a whole body experience of that thing And now I'm looking at a screen and I'm looking at information and I've got to understand it. And if I'm going to be included in the workforce, then I've got to have the intellectual skills to understand this new milieu and make a contribution. Unfortunately, what happened in our society is that most businesses went the other direction. They didn't include the workforce in this shift.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I understood early on that this was going to require profound re training. I kind of hate that word because it's so trivializes the real deal here, which is that.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, what was happening then was typical of the 20th century story of capital, which was the real Titanic struggles in society were between capital and labor. And the forces of capital came down in the economic domain, in our workplaces, on our lives as workers, as employees, even as managers eventually, you know, in our factories, in our offices. And so That was the front line where I first began to understand that this shift to the digital wasn't only a change in the equipment that we used, but a change in the whole way that we construe and relate to reality and to our own experiences, the removal from the sensual, the removal from the embodied experience toward more abstraction, toward the intellectualization of work and so forth.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And talk about that time for people to understand it. I had a K pro. I had a trash 80. I know all these things. But talk about what was happening then. I had one of those suitcase phones and everything else.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, hats off. So I'll date myself. I'll come right out there and date myself. I mean, I started in 1978 interviewing office workers, linotype workers, factory workers who were the first, the front line of our workforce that was shifting to the digital medium. And that over time led to my first book, The Age of the Smart Machine, The Future of Work and Power.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, as far as my professional career, I began studying the shift to the digital in 1978. So were you born then, Carrie?”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interestingly, I just did an interview on Twitter with Jack Dorsey that was sort of a bit of a goat rodeo, but it was interesting because a lot of the questions I keep asking for specifics and he couldn't do them. And it was really fascinating. I think people found that part the most fascinating besides the platform being terrible to try to conduct any kind of conversation on. But let me hear from your background. Talk about some of the things you've done before this. And then I want to get in the term surveillance capitalism, which I think is a fantastic way to put it. Let me hear the trajectory of your career. You started where to get to this kind of topic.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has to do what it's doing. It's a machine that's got to move in the direction that it's moving. And the people in it are not bad people. They're not bad actors. But they themselves now are caught up in an economic machine that sometimes they even don't understand very well and where it's driving and what its imperatives are. And most important what the consequences of those imperatives are.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And also difficult control. And I like the word compulsion because I think that's a really good way to put it, it's an emotional word, but it's not. It's actually, it has to do what it's doing.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which it was at the beginning. And a sense that this dream was flipping away. And that the reasons why it was flipping away, the causes of this shift We're not really clear, not really well understood of forces taking shape very much behind the scenes. And it's almost like we woke up, and suddenly the internet was owned and operated by private capital. Under a kind of regime, a new economic logic that really was not well understood. And so my motivation, Kara, has come from really wanting to spend the time to understand, to name exactly what this economic logic is. And how its own imperatives, its own compulsions created a completely different trajectory toward the digital future, something that we didn't buy into. We didn't expect, and because it's so unprecedented, it is by its very nature difficult to perceive.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the impetus for this book, which has been a long time in the making, seven years just to produce this book, but many years before that and the ideas and development. The real driver here is the sense that Hopes and dreams for the digital future, our sense of an empowering and democratizing digital future.”
2019-02-20 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Shoshana Zuboff · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT