Surveillance

Capitalism

“Privacy is dead.”

Mark Zuckerberg

“IBM maintained a customer site, known as the Hollerith Department, in virtually every concentration camp to sort or process punch cards and track prisoners…”

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust.

“…IBM engineers had to create Hollerith codes … then print the cards, configure the machines, train the staff, and continuously maintain the fragile systems every two weeks on site in the concentration camps.”

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust.

“International Business Machines, and its president Thomas J. Watson, committed genocide by any standard.”

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust.

“It was never about the antisemitism. It was never about the National Socialism. It was always about the money. Business was their middle name.”

Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust.

“I found it terrifying … her letter made me take a look at the work I was doing and say, ‘Why? What am I contributing to?’”

Elizabeth Wood, ex-IBM employee.

“When the president-elect follows through on his repeated threats to create a public database of Muslims, what will IBM do? Your letter neglects to mention.”

Elizabeth Wood, ex-IBM employee.

“IBM would not work on this hypothetical project … Our company has long-standing values and a strong track record of opposing discrimination against anyone on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. That perspective has not changed, and never will.”

IBM spokesman, quoted by The Hill.

“IBM does not have much information about this period … We are a technology company, we are not historians.”

IBM spokesperson Carol Makovich

“In 2016, the Danish national police and intelligence services signed an 84-month contract with Palantir … for a predictive technology package meant to identify potential terrorists.”

Ali Winston, Type Investigations

“…the program uses law enforcement data like license plate reader records, CCTV video, and police reports to make predictions about individuals’ likelihood to commit terrorism.”

Ali Winston, Type Investigations

“…Denmark’s national legislature had to pass an exemption to the European Union’s data protection regulations in order to purchase Palantir’s software.”

Ali Winston, Type Investigations

Vision Fund: $100B venture capital fund

$45B from Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia

Source: How SoftBank ate the world, Wired UK

“Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn, Sharp and Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala … also committed a further $20 billion”

João Medeiros, Wired UK

“Our view is that companies need to scale first. Once you scale, you’ll get everything else right. ”

Rajeev Misra, CEO, Vision Fund

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Edward Abbey

“It’s really about data and the merger of human and machine in this notion of the singularity and artificial intelligence … Data runs across almost every one of our companies.”

Jeffrey Housenbold, Managing Partner, Vision Fund

“That’s Masayoshi Son’s vision: a future where every time that we use our smartphone, or call a taxi, or order a meal, or stay in a hotel, or make a payment, or receive medical treatment, we will be doing so in a data ­transaction with a company that belongs to the SoftBank family. And, as Son likes to say …”

João Medeiros, Wired UK

“Whoever controls data controls the world.”

Masayoshi Son, Chairman, SoftBank

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have the same business model.

People Farming

Venture Capital, Startups, Exits, Clouds, Unicorns, and Ray Kurzweil’s Church of Exponential Growth.

The Problem

The Solution

We, the people, must own and control the data.

In theory

Corporations?

Nations?

“British Digital Corporation”

Cities?

“…deploying socialised big data and artificial intelligence in the interests of citizens.”

You?

Yes

Data about us, is us.

This is a battle for personhood.

In practice

Regulate & Replace

Regulate

GDPR

General Data Protection Regulation

“We are largely unaware of the impact algorithmic ranking has on people’s choices because we have no way of looking under the hood. Algorithms are trade secrets.”

Marietje Schaake, MEP

Data protection

General Data Minimisation Regulation

1. If your data and algorithms can be kept on your device, they must be.
2. Any device that holds your data must be end-to-end encrypted.
3. Only you hold the keys and you control who the ends are.

GDMR

Institutional Corruption

“Google alone spent more than twenty-one million dollars on lobbying last year … much of it to stave off regulation… Aral Balkan put this in perspective…”

The New Yorker

“I wake up every morning and I fight regulation, it’s what I do, it’s my job.”

Eric Schmidt, then-Executive Chairman, Google & Alphabet, Inc. to me @ Claire de Rouen bookshop, 2013

Nordic Privacy Arena

“The Facebook keynote was by Nicolas de Bouville whose previous job was at the French data protection office (CNIL)”

ar.al/2019/01/11/i-was-wrong-about-google-and-facebook-theres-nothing-wrong-with-them-so-say-we-all/

Source: copyleftcof.org/sponsors

Source: Mozilla Firefox

Technological Regulation

Social Regulation

“When I joined Facebook in 2016 … people would stop and say, ‘It’s so cool that you worked for Facebook.’ That’s not the case anymore … It made it hard to go home for Thanksgiving.”

Former product manager at Facebook, quoted in Wired

“If we ever become too evil, we won’t find anyone to work for us.”

Eric Schmidt, then-Executive Chairman, Google & Alphabet, Inc. to me @ Claire de Rouen bookshop, 2013

Replace

Stopgaps

What’s missing

(what I’m working on)

?

THINK small

Small Technology are everyday tools for every people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.

small-tech.org

?

Tincan

ar.al

Post

Hello, this is my first public post… I can also talk privately to other people who have their own sites.

Developer tools

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