John Danaher writes:
You have probably noticed it already. There is a strange logic at the heart of the modern tech industry. The goal of many new tech startups is not to produce products or services for which consumers are willing to pay. Instead, the goal is create a digital platform or hub that will capture information from as many users as possible — to grab as many ‘eyeballs’ as you can. This information can then be analysed, repackaged and monetised in various ways. The appetite for this information-capture and analysis seems to be insatiable, with ever increasing volumes of information being extracted and analysed from an ever-expanding array of data-monitoring technologies.
The famous Harvard business theorist Shoshana Zuboff refers to this phenomenon as surveillance capitalism and she believes that it has its own internal ‘logic’ that we need to carefully and critically assess.
Read more on Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies.