Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

摘要

In her groundbreaking book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff sounds the alarm on the dangers global society faces from the ways in which the information technology industry increasingly controls our behavior as individuals (Zuboff, 2019). In her telling and the critiques of other like-minded Cassandras, the FANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) are using the yottabytes of data they have on us to nudge us into behaviors that are commercially lucrative to them, whether that involves buying products and services or simply spending more and more time on the networks they own and operate. Whether one believes there is deliberative manipulation going on or not, it is objectively true that the internet is consuming us. Between 2000 and 2018, according to the Annenberg School at the University of California, the time that Americans spent online increased from 9.4 to 23.6 h a week (Chafee, 2018). This is not an exclusively American phenomenon. According to the UK's communications regulator OfCom, the average Briton spends an entire day per week online, with 20 per cent of the population spending more than 40 hours per week interacting with an internet-connected device (Hymas, 2018).