Archives for August 2022

Quoted from: Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto and the War for our Wallets, Brett Scott, Vintage Publishing, 2022, ISBN: 9781847925879.

When describing the rise of automated surveillance capitalism, it is easy to point out its various dangers, but something more subtle drives my own discomfort. It is the pervasive feeling of inauthenticity that accompanies it. It is that tremor of emotional conflict a person feels when — in full knowledge of how Amazon is taking over the world — they nevertheless sense the futility of resistance, and find themselves with their finger on the ‘Buy’ button…

We have blindly stumbled into systems that exploit our short-term desires to the detriment of our longer ones, and they break and disrupt our lives if we attempt to pull back from them. Rather than crawling to Utopia, then, large-scale markets crawl towards concentrating production and consumption into pure conglomerations of profit-seeking, represented most acutely by transnational corporations. While the individuals who work within this conglomeration can feel many things, the financial and corporate sector as an institutional complex is unable to ‘feel’ anything except profit, so our systems are running away with us, like a centrifuge spinning ever faster. [Read more…]