Finished reading: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff 📚

Because, ya know, I needed to reaffirm the horror of it all. 🤓

I have way more thoughts than I feel like writing down. And since very few of them are nice or happy anyway, I’ll skip most of them for now.

Zuboff is ardent (and absolutely correct) about the disorienting world that the surveillance capitalists — from Google on down the line — are creating more-or-less unimpeded, but she leaves you with a bit of an anxious disorientation, too. Democracy, individuality, personal freedom, community, even resistance — although these words and ideas are peppered throughout the book, they lack any flesh-and-bone quality.

Fortunately, those aren’t the things I read it for, and my own anti-surveillance project now enjoys some fresh vigor.

My new mantra, jumping off one of Zuboff’s subheadings, is Be the friction you hope to see in the world. The world needs more friction than it currently and increasingly avoids, and that will require more unpolished faith, and more gritty resurrections. And if you plan on doing any of this yourself, you might take heart from a quote from Karl Jaspers which I am once again thrown back upon:

The truly real takes place almost unnoticed, and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed. . . . Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing their existences by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline.