We live under a digital feudalism. The digital feudal lords, like Facebook, give us some land and say: ‘You can have it for free. Cultivate it.’ And we cultivate it exhaustively. At the end of it all, our feudal lords return for the harvest. This is a surveillance and exploitation of all communication. The system is extremely efficient. No one protests against it, because the system exploits freedom itself.
Surveillance capitalism transforms capitalism itself. Platforms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon constantly monitor and manipulate us in order to maximize their profits. Every click is registered and analysed. We are controlled like puppets on algorithmic strings. At the same time, we feel free. There is a dialectics of freedom here: freedom turns into serfdom.
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We live under a digital feudalism. The digital feudal lords, like Facebook, give us some land and say: ‘You can have it for free. Cultivate it.’ And we cultivate it exhaustively. At the end of it all, our feudal lords return for the harvest. This is a surveillance and exploitation of all communication. The system is extremely efficient. No one protests against it, because the system exploits freedom itself.
Surveillance capitalism transforms capitalism itself. Platforms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon constantly monitor and manipulate us in order to maximize their profits. Every click is registered and analysed. We are controlled like puppets on algorithmic strings. At the same time, we feel free. There is a dialectics of freedom here: freedom turns into serfdom.
—Byung Chul Han
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