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The Problem Isn’t Just Facebook; It’s “Surveillance Capitalism”

Jennifer Cobbe openDemocracy
Big Brother Monitoring Image The latest Facebook personal data revelations provide a window into the future we have sleepwalked into, the era of Surveillance Capitalism. The sins of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica must spark demands for a much wider debate about the role of surveillance in our increasingly digital society.

Friday Nite Videos | November 3, 2017

Portside
Law & Oranger. Fats Domino | Ain't That A Shame. Time Travel in Fiction. John Kelly Has Lost the Benefit of the Doubt. Silicon Valley Answers to Congress Amid the Russia Probe.

Black Lawmakers Hold a Particular Grievance With Facebook: Racial Exploitation

Yamiche Alcindor New York Times
Rep. Barbara Lee: “Now look at Facebook allowing ads by the Russian government to create this kind of environment. That’s a problem. I don’t know if they’re even aware of the history and how dangerous allowing the promotion of division and racial animosity and racial hatred can be.”

Monopoly Men

K. Sabeel Rahman Boston Review
After an eventful summer in Silicon Valley, there is blood in the water. At stake is democracy itself.

Facebook Users Are Not the Customers But the Product (Long-Read)

John Lanchester London Review of Books
John Lanchester reviews three books on social media with a focus on Facebook, the colossal social networking corporation that now has two billion active monthly users. And, as Facebook has grown its users’ reliance on it has also grown. Facebook is an advertising company, but it is also a surveillance business that knows far, far more about its users than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. John Lanchester is “scared of Facebook.”

The Bernie Sanders Show is interactive TV talk for the era of Facebook activism

Adam Gabbatt The Guardian
The Bernie Sanders show, which is filmed in the Democratic party’s DC-based studio, is atypical in ways beyond just presentation. Sanders has decided to bypass traditional media and broadcast exclusively on Facebook. And it is attracting – to borrow a Sandersism – a huge audience.

labor

Tech Workers Should Unionize

Hamilton Nolan Gawker
The fact that your company gives you good free lunches and shuttles to work and nice paycheck does not change the fact that you could get more by negotiating together, as a union. Anyone smart enough to get a job at Google is smart enough to grasp these facts.
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