Brian Holmes on Fri, 8 Feb 2019 03:32:37 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019, 9:00 AM Felix Stalder <[email protected] wrote:

I found Mozorov's massive review more interesting.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov

Yes I totally agree. Morozov presents the most important Marxist analyses that Zuboff doesn't bother to reference - exactly the ones that have been nettime mainstays for 20 years. He also shows the narrowness of an account centered only on corporate consumerism, remarking that the resistance and transformation Zuboff calls for 

" will not win before both managerial capitalism and surveillance capitalism are theorized as “capitalism”—a complex set of historical and social relationships between capital and labor, the state and the monetary system, the metropole and the periphery—and not just as an aggregate of individual firms responding to imperatives of technological and social change. "

That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth reading. It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but it's fascinating at points and hopefully gets better as you go. Morozov has written the perfect intro for a critical read of what might become a landmark book- if the situation it describes does not again suddenly change beyond recognition, as it easily could.

Best, Brian 

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