Shoshana Zuboff’s Response to Martin Schulz: The New Weapons of Mass Detection

I’ve been holding my breath since the Guardian broke its first Snowden story on June 5, 2013 revealing the NSA’s bulk collection of phone data.  There is a tragic deja vu for me. In 1988, when Google founder Larry Page was fifteen years old and the word “internet” was at least ten years away from public recognition, I published In the Age of the Smart Machine.  The book was based on a decade of fieldwork inside a range of newly computerizing workplaces. During those  years I watched each group succumb to the same pattern. Computer systems that offered rich new learning opportunities at all levels of the firm were  hijacked by a narrow economic model and a managerial ideology of unilateral control.