Google and Facebook have become “antithetical to democracy,” says The Age of Surveillance Capitalism author Shoshana Zuboff | Recode

Check the source for a podcast interview and transcript

"“All of the economic imperatives now that define surveillance capitalism are aimed at, how do we get better and better prediction products?” Zuboff told Recode’s Kara Swisher. “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.”

There are just a couple problems: One, when customers are fully informed about how their data is being used, they don’t like it. So, companies like Google and Facebook have decided to “take without asking,” Zuboff said. And whoever has all that data has a tremendous amount of power — so much so that the same people who unwittingly provided more data than they realized to tech companies can then be manipulated toward commercial and political outcomes.

“Right now, surveillance capitalists sit on a huge asymmetry of knowledge,” she said. “They have an asymmetry of knowledge, a concentration of knowledge unlike anything ever seen in human history ... We have an institutional disfiguring of these huge asymmetries of knowledge and power which are antithetical to democracy.”"

Google and Facebook have become “antithetical to democracy,” says The Age of Surveillance Capitalism author Shoshana Zuboff | Recode