The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

Ideas: Does big date kill competition? Prog Bar: 0.01% progress: 0.01

She argues that the new tech firms are a new form of capitalism, as they draw their profit from the data they generate instead of from the users. Her main problem is the ability of the tech firms to not only monitor, but also influence (nudge) the behaviour of its customers. This gives the ability to advertisers to not only buy ad spaces but to generate outcomes. I see why this is of concern to her. It makes advertising much more powerful than before, but I don’t see a fundamental difference in structure. There are still no strictly deterministic outcomes but just statistical influences. This is the same as normal advertisement, just more powerful. She does make a decent argument against nudging in general, which I am pretty sympathetic towards. Still, except for some maybe appropriate criticisms of the user agreements, I don’t really see the problem. She further makes the interesting argument that competition does not work anymore when big data is involved. This is interesting. Big data provides huge economies of scale, which might shift the equilibrium between advantages and disadvantages of size towards larger firms. This might then increase margins and therefore lower the consumer welfare.

She compares the approach of actively trying to change behaviour to B.F. Skinners research, whom she knew personally. She says that this is the kind of influencing behaviour Skinner dreamed of.