The price of connection: ‘surveillance capitalism’
The problem is not so much someone reading my emails, but the collection of metadata. In any case, if the mere existence of such power contradicts liberty, why were we not already offended by the commercial power to collect data on which powerful nation-states were merely piggy-backing? The answer is that surveillance capitalism threatens an aspect of our freedom so basic that we are not used to defending it.
…freedom is impossible without the self having some space of autonomy where it can be in a reflective relation with itself. In a world where our moment-to-moment existence is already being tracked and (according to some) better understood by external data-processing systems, the very idea of an independent space of subjectivity from which one can have “freedom” collapses.
[Read full article at The Conversation site]
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