Surveillance capitalism and systemic digital risk
The imperative to collect and connect and the risks of interconnectedness
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5260429 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dean Curran (0000-0002-8771-1141, University of Calgary, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Big Data & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2053-9517 • E-ISSN: 2053-9517 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/20539517231177621 |
| OpenAlex | W4378231474 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 31 |
Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism provides a powerful analysis of the emergence of surveillance capitalism as a particular type of informational capitalism. Many of the important impacts of this project of creating larger and more integrated systems of 'behavioural surplus' are captured powerfully by Zuboff; yet as different risk and organisational scholars such as Beck, Perrow, and Vaughan have argued, integrated systems often do not function as intended. While the imperfection of these systems may raise the possibility that surveillance capitalism may not be as bad as Zuboff suggests, there is also a way in which these systems not functioning as intended can make surveillance capitalism an even more dystopian possibility. In this vein, this paper asks: what are the consequences when the tools of a surveillance capitalist society break down? This paper argues that it is by thinking through Zuboff's framework that we can identify the systemic fragility of a surveillance capitalist society. This systemic fragility emerges through how surveillance capitalism generates imperatives towards the maximal collection of data for exploitation, which in turn generates a corresponding imperative to connect all aspects of life. Both of these imperatives, of collect and connect, in turn create an immensely fragile digital system, which has vast ramifications throughout social life, such that small imperfections and gaps in the system can magnify risk throughout society
Business · Capitalism · Capitalist system · Dystopia · Economics · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Law · Smart Cities and Technologies
Surveillance Capitalism and Governmentality Foucault in the Age of Digitization
Data Sovereignty and the Digital Economy
Surveillance Capitalism
Metcalfe’s Law and its inversion
Algorithmic Mediation and the Transformation of Everyday Life
ChatGPT, a colonialist agent of lifeworlds
Data extraction in dockless bikeshare
Don’t Fear Artificial Intelligence, Question the Business Model
Global finance at risk
The Costs of Connection
The Curse of Bigness
The World of Consumption
The Googlization of Everything
Systemic risk in banking ecosystems
The Black Box Society
The (In)Security of Smart Cities
Smart Cities
Datafication, dataism and dataveillance
Condemned to connection? Network communitarianism in Mark Zuckerberg’s “Facebook Manifesto”
The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism
Data-driven governance, smart urbanism and risk-class inequalities
Social Media
Risk society
Enabling Exploitation
Capitalism without Surveillance
Risk, innovation, and democracy in the digital economy
The Dark Side of Organizations
The Emergence of Global Systemic Risk
All that is solid melts into code
Connecting risk
| Unique citing works | 8 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 7 |