The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power \( PDFDrive.com \).mobi by Shoshana Zuboff

Author:Shoshana Zuboff
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

III. Pokémon Go! Do!

It had been a particularly grueling July afternoon in 2016. David had directed hours of contentious insurance testimony in a dusty New Jersey courtroom, where a power surge the night before had knocked out the building’s fragile air-conditioning system. Then the fitful Friday commute home was cursed by a single car disabled by the heat that turned the once-hopeful flow of traffic into sludge. Finally home, he slid the car into his garage and made a beeline for the side door that opened to the laundry room and kitchen beyond. The cool air hit him like a dive into the ocean, and for the first time all day he took a deep breath. A note on the table said his wife would be back in a few minutes. He gulped down some water, made himself a drink, and climbed the stairs, heading for a long shower.

The doorbell rang just as the warm water hit his aching back muscles. Had she forgotten her key? Shower interrupted, he threw on a tee and shorts and ran downstairs, opening the front door to a couple of teenagers waving their cell phones in his face. “Hey, you’ve got a Pokémon in your backyard. It’s ours! Okay if we go back there and catch it?”

“A what?” He had no idea what they were talking about, but he was about to get educated.

David’s doorbell rang four more times that evening: perfect strangers eager for access to his yard and disgruntled when he asked them to leave. Throughout the days and evenings that followed, knots of Pokémon seekers formed on his front lawn, some of them young and others long past that excuse. They held up their phones, pointing and shouting as they scanned his house and garden for the “augmented-reality” creatures. Looking at this small slice of world through their phones, they could see their Pokémon prey but only at the expense of everything else. They could not see a family’s home or the boundaries of civility that made it a sanctuary for the man and woman who lived there. Instead, the game seized the house and the world around it, reinterpreting all of it in a vast equivalency of GPS coordinates. Here was a new kind of commercial assertion: a for-profit declaration of eminent domain in which reality is recast as an unbounded expanse of blank spaces to be sweated for others’ enrichment. David wondered, When will this end? What gives them the right? Whom do I call to make this stop?

Without knowing it, he had been yanked from his shower to join the villagers in Broughton, England, who had taken to their streets in 2009 protesting the invasion of Google’s Street View camera cars. Like them, he had been abruptly thrust into contest with surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives, and like them he would soon understand that there was no number to call, no 911 to urgently inform the appropriate authorities that a dreadful mistake had blossomed on his lawn.

Back in 2009,

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