User Profile

Gersande La Flèche

gersande@millefeuilles.cloud

Joined 2 years ago

💬 they/them ; iel/lo

🍵 Lots of nonfiction, literary fiction, poetry, classical literature, speculative fiction, magical realism, etc. English, French, and many translations.

📖 Beaucoup de non-fiction, de fiction littéraire, de poésie, de classiques, de spéculatif, de réalisme magique, etc. Lecture en anglais et en français, et beaucoup de traductions.

💌 Find me on Mastodon: silvan.cloud/@gersande

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Gersande La Flèche's books

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

Push and pull, suggest, nudge, cajole, shame, seduce: Google wants to be your copilot for life itself. Each human response to each commercial prompt yields more data to refine into better prediction products. (..). The stakes are high in this market frontier, where unpredictable behavior is the equivalent of lost revenue.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by  (18%)

avatar for gersande Gersande La Flèche boosted
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

I knew it was bad, but ... wow

5 stars

I had no idea this book was this large when I borrowed it from a library. It somehow hit my list and came up in rotation. It's 700 pages, but just over 500 pages of content. The rest is reference material, notes and bibliography.

The author does a fantastic way of describing the recent history of data surveillance and how it's been monetized. We aren't really the product, but are the objects where raw material is mined for prediction engines that attempt to figure out how we will act or nudge us to act.

The first part deals with big tech. There's a part about totalitarianism, then moving into recent psychology and how all these are tied together.

Expect 10-15+ hours of reading with this. Value!

This made me and keeps me thinking. Wonderful book, but probably not for all.

avatar for gersande Gersande La Flèche boosted
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

Vital Analysis; Uninspiring Dreaming

3 stars

I've been making my way through this (audio)book for a year or so. I realised some 15 hours in that it didn't make sense because the files weren't organised correctly (my bad). Because I listened to bits and pieces out of order, I had to work extra hard to get the concepts, which I'm glad for now even though it sucked. Zuboff's analysis here is fantastic. Her breakdown of the machinations of "surveillance capitalism" is one of the most significant contributions to understanding how this particular "species" of capitalism works that I think we are likely to get this half of the twenty-first century. And "we" sure need it.

The book falls short on political solutions however, and the way it's written was frustrating to say the least. Zuboff's faith in markets, even market capitalism, knocks more creative solutions out of her grasp reacting to attacks on liberal democracy, rather …

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Hardcover, 2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

As competition intensifies, surveillance capitalists learn that extracting human experience is not enough. (..). New automated protocols are designed to influence and modify our behaviour at scale as the means of production is subordinated to a new and more complex means of behaviour modification.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by  (Page 2)

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Hardcover, 2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

For all of Google's technological prowess and computational talent, the real credit for its success goes to the radical social relations that the company declared as facts, beginning with its disregard for the boundaries of human private experience and the moral integrity of the autonomous individual.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by  (Page 2)

Dense language snowballing a little here.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Hardcover, 2019, Public Affairs) 4 stars

"Shoshana Zuboff, named "the true prophet of the information age" by the Financial Times, has …

That surveillance capitalism is a logic in action and not a technology is a vital point because surveillance capitalists want is to think that their practices are inevitable expressions of the technologies they employ.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by  (2%)