What happens to society when human beings are reduced to data points? What happens when our behavior, our movements, our relationships, and our obsessions are all tracked with near perfect precision? What happens when that information is indexed for the purpose of selling us products and influencing our political viewpoints all under the guise of "building community" and "making information free." Well, look around. That's the world you live in. Tech monopolies have built trillions of dollar ...
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Techmonopolies Podcasts
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"have you ever heard of a penny strike?"
1:08:33
1:08:33
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1:08:33
Now, more than ever, as we work from home, gather with friends on social media, shop for groceries online, it feels like this tsunami of digital dependence and loss of personal privacy will wash over everything. That once these companies (and now governments) storm the beaches of our minds, they will not give those positions back peacefully. But th…
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"We can find anybody within three square meters"
1:57:46
1:57:46
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1:57:46
This argument about efficiency feels like it has seeped into every aspect of our society. We give up more and more of ourselves to tech companies because we want to use our time as efficiently as possible. We structure our economy in such a way that the entire success of our nation is determined by whether the growth of our Gross Domestic Product i…
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This week's episode of Everything They Know was supposed to be about a hypothetical dark future, where we've done nothing to rein in Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, where algorithmic prediction has gotten to 100% and has created perfect echo-bubbles for each of us, where authoritarian techno-governments and their cronies control every aspect …
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"Is Twitter the same as what you do?"
1:04:24
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1:04:24
In previous episodes we've looked at this issue of tech dominance from several angles. We've seen how they gather data, what they can do with it, how they make money from it, and how social media allows them to muddy the water and shape the narrative. You may have asked yourself along the way, "how can they do this? Why doesn't the government do an…
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"I sold. I'm out. I don't want anyone to remember I was doing that."
1:07:47
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When I got on Facebook in 8th grade, it was worth somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million. By the time I was a junior in college, studying abroad in Senegal and forced to have a much more limited Internet experience, it was worth $50 billion. Today, it's worth about $550 billion, the 5th most valuable company in the world. How did they do it? Wel…
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We hear "data breach" or "data leak" or "they're gathering our data" and don't stop to consider what that really means. We've accepted that there's nothing really we can do about it anyway, so why fuss? "Does it really matter? Who cares! Well, I don't have anything to hide." We've all heard those statements, maybe even said them ourselves. But thos…
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We seem to have collectively accepted that we're going to keep playing this rigged game of data harvesting because the playing of the game itself placates us, giving us just enough of that beautiful dopamine-serotonin-oxytocin combo to get us to keep pulling the lever on the slot machine. There are thousands of entities that have thousands of piece…
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We hear the words "they have your data," or "they're selling your data," or "they're keeping my data" and we think of it as some ethereal thing that has no merit to our lives. The results of this theft are hidden from us, and in many cases, on purpose. This episode, I sat down with Tim Shea, a data scientist with a political background, to understa…
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Think about where we were technologically just 10 years ago, when everybody was really excited about our utopian tech-driven future. Netflix used to mail you DVDs, now they spend $15 billion a year feeding their content algorithms. Google used to cutely offer you the "i'm feeling lucky" option, now they predict your searches before you finish typin…
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Before Big Tech was the bad guy, we all had dreams of a digital utopia brought about by the democratizing power of the Internet. What happened? I spoke to Judy Estrin about her decades of experience as an innovator in Silicon Valley, and what she thinks might have happened to lead us astray. Then, I sat down with Andrew Keen, one of the earliest In…
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What happens to society when human beings are reduced to data points? What happens when our behavior, our movements, our relationships, and our obsessions are all tracked with near perfect precision? What happens when that information is indexed for the purpose of selling us products and influencing our political viewpoints all under the guise of "…
…
continue reading
