How Tracking And Selling Our Data Became A Business Model

This show originally aired Jan. 15, 2019.

Find our buildout from this hour, featuring a partial transcription, here.

With Meghna Chakrabarti

There are new calls for tech companies to stop selling your location to third parties. We’ll look at the economics and perils of “surveillance capitalism.”

Guest

Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School and former faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,” among other titles. (@shoshanazuboff)

From The Reading List

Excerpt from “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff

The Unprecedented

One explanation for surveillance capitalism’s many triumphs floats above them all: it is unprecedented. The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar categories, thereby rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented. A classic example is the notion of the “horseless carriage” to which people reverted when confronted with the unprecedented facts of the automobile. A tragic illustration is the encounter between indigenous people and the first