WOULD ORWELL HAVE PUT A 'LIKE' TO ZUCKERBERG?

摘要

Sushanna Zuboff, professor at the Harvard Business School, is known for having outlined, in a number of important works, some essential characteristics of the economy in the age of Big Tech, even in the more disturbing implications connected to the ability to influence behavior and choices of individuals through social media and artificial intelligence techniques. In his new book1, she develops these issues especially with reference to the business model of Google and Facebook. The analysis of these topics is paramount to detect the future of world economy.Companies have always collected customer information to improve the effectiveness of their commercial offer and from the moment radios and televisions reached every house, advertising has become part of everyday life. However, with the spreading of smartphones and tablets, and the development of social networks, there has been a qualitative leap. The fundamental difference in the relationships between consumers and companies of this era is that the ability to extract information (what the author calls the "behavioral surplus") goes beyond any possibility of control, because it passes through every daily gesture, including walking or sleeping (smartphone track movements as well as the hours of sleep). The never-before-experienced ways of gathering information have caught individuals and authorities completely unprepared so that "Surveillance capitalists quickly realized that they could do anything they wanted, and they did" (p. 16). The success of this business model is based on the fact that consumers receive free services (e-mail, maps, translations) in exchange for their data. In fact the free services are offered as a magnet for personal data.