The Crypto-Surveillance Capitalism Connection

While Crypto Twitter bickers and fights, leaving competing coin projects and blockchain startups to defend each others' counter-allegations of centralizing misdeeds, the real centralizing power-mongers of our digital economy have been pillaging our data and reshaping humanity into an instrument of their domination.

That's the alarming, bold conclusion of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power," the recently released mega-tome by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff.

I especially think it's critical reading for the crypto community, where people will feel both vindicated and challenged by Zuboff's thesis.

How, truly, is blockchain any better than GAFA? How do we ensure that it doesn't fall for the same pattern of what Zuboff calls "Behavioral surplus extraction?" A general public that's increasingly anxious about their invaded privacy and lost personal agency deserves such questions answered.

Zuboff's instincts are liberal, and she takes a very hard view of raw market power.

While Zuboff's no fan of unfettered market capitalism and doesn't think much of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who's a darling of many bitcoin fans, there's much that lines up here with the crypto world's cypherpunk vision of freedom.

A blockchain solution for breaking down surveillance capitalism would naturally be a technological one, embracing the power of math and cryptography to design a new digital topography of trust that disempowers the centralized middleman and creates human agency within a decentralized system.

Zuboff's task is to get us beyond the pre-existing frames of reference that constrain our ability to define the unprecedented - as when people at the start of the last century described cars as "Horseless carriages."

Where people like Zuboff matter is that, right or wrong, their words stir discourse and debate.

That's one potential answer to surveillance capitalism.