More underestimation of the Russians ' effect on the 2016 US election and government

[Joseph Tracy]

Kind of hilarious to some to read the Independent's breathless conception that Zuboff presents an unprecedented new insight into how capitalism works; nevertheless Zuboff gets a  lot right.

"Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Once we thought of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us as free."

 If, however,  it actually proposes, as  Smith or Marx did to be a major theory of the whole fabric of economic, social and political global patterning, it leaves out one or two very important factors, as did Smith and Marx,  the primary factor being the undisputable fact that we humans are one part of a planetary ecosytem in which the health, diversity and interactions of the parts are critical. Major temperature rise, loss of pollinators, destruction of medicinal plants, toxins in the water and food supply, desertification, loss of topsoil, snowpack and glacial runoff etc. are not just potentially destructive to current models, they are actively costing trillions already and show no sign of abatement. Human economies exist within  a living planet  and the the living world is not modeled on these brittle theories.
 
  The second major factor which Zuboff ignores is the role which  state surveillance and the Imperialist  doctrine of full spectrum  military and information dominance have played directly in the rise of Google or lesser enablers like Verizon. Google and Facebook are Zuboff's core models of surveillance capitalism. But as the article (https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e <https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e> ) I just posted and commented on shows quite emphatically there has been from the beginning a direct trade-off here between the US military/intelligence power and Google's growth, Google has been funded and enabled by DARPA , the NSA and CIA from the beginning and has fed into Military technologies in massive contracts. Not only has surveillance capitalism been reinforced directly by Google’s rise but good old police state surveillance is now able to use every cell phone as a device for telling these powerful entities what you think, where you go and what you spend your money on. This union of corporate and imperial interests is not new. The marriage of of colonializing weaponry and colonializing capital exploitation has always been the real world history of Adam Smth’s pretty theories just as megalomaniacal dictators like Mao and Stalin have been the dark side of Marxist theory. 






 
> On Jan 20, 2019, at 11:48 PM, jody2.718 <jody2.718 at protonmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Wow! I was just reading this article, when I paused to check out the p-list, and, lo and behold, it's being referenced by Mike. It is interesting and goes to the heart of consumer enabled self-enslavement Here's a good sample:
> 
> "While the general modus operandi of [Google](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/google), Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users. In that sense, her vast (660-page) book is a continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and – dare I say it – Karl Marx."
> 
> And Mr. Jing, glad to hear from you again, as well. You are Chinese I assume. I would love to hear your take on the Chinese use (and abuse?) of facial recognition technology. Of course, you may be Taiwanese, but still, you're sure to be more enlightened than I am about that sort of thing.
> 
> Sent with [ProtonMail](https://protonmail.com) Secure Email.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> For those of you debating the place of consumerism vs the deep state here's an interesting read
> 
> 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance
> capitalism
> <
> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
>> 
> 
> cheers
> Mike
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Mr Jing:
> 
> Ah, socialism. I guess nobody has tried that one yet.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l