https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... e-facebook
The thing that really leaps out at me
Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.
Only since 2001. The changes since then have been so vast, but at the same time the depth of history there is so shallow; we're just at the very beginning of whatever the fallout is going to look like, we don't know anything about what the scale is going to be.
Geeks used to talk a lot about a technological singularity, but instead we got a sociological one, and it is sucking. The word "hubris" comes strongly to mind for me, re: predictions from that era.
