The great debate of the 20th century was how much of our collective life should be controlled by the market. The great debate of the 21st century will be how much should be directed and controlled by digital systems.

“We cannot allow ourselves to become the playthings of alien powers, subject always to decisions made for us by entities and systems beyond our control”

For nearly all of the history of humanity we have lived as an unmonitored species whose deeds were largely forgotten. We are becoming a watched species whose every action, at least in theory, is becoming recordable and retrievable. Those who do the monitoring wield enormous power: a power that is increasingly hard to contest. Imagine the horror of trying to interact with a face-recognition system that does not recognise that you are you. Or look at how the ability to record your past, to rate you as if you were on TripAdvisor, is used in China where local governments are compiling digital records of citizens so the trustworthy can roam where they will while malcontents are confined. In an age where our every action can be harvested as data and used against us, Jamie Susskind’s book makes crucial reading.

Read More at The Guardian

Read the rest at The Guardian