In this article, we focus on the increasingly popular market-libertarian critique that proposes individual control, ownership, and ability to commodify one’s personal data as an answer to corporate data extraction, derivation and exploitation schemes. We critique the claims that personal data markets counterbalance corporate digital capitalism on two grounds. First, these markets do not work economically and therefore are unable to address the exploitative aspect of surveillance capitalism. Second, the notion of personal data markets functions ideologically because it reduces the critique of surveillance capitalism to the exploitation of consumers and conceals the real objective of data capitalists such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple to not (just) exploit audiences but to create worlds that create audiences.

We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

To understand the damage being wrought by Big Tech, we must recognize a vast, sinister matrix that not only exploits markets and human frailty, but steals our very selves as fuel for the machine. It's what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism" — and it’s not just Facebook, or even just the tech companies. It’s, increasingly, and broadly, the economic world we live in.

Are we stuck with Surveillance Capitalism? This blog post describes...

Alternatives that keep the amazing wonders that are consumer technologies in 2020, but don’t invade our privacy, don’t spread misinformation, give us back a measure of control over our electronic lives, don’t set us up for manipulation and help rather than hurt our mental health.

People love convenience and Amazon has prospered by obsessing about how to anticipate our wants before we’re even aware of them. Here is a very detailed news column on how and why Amazon collects data about you.

Cory Doctorow published How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism - available to read for free on Medium (109min read)