Audrey Watters: Surveillance Is Not Good for Children and Other Living Things

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1. SomeDAM Poet says:

   October 27, 2019 at 10:10 am

   It’s the tech industry — again.

   These are the folks who also thought it was fine and dandy to business with young girl trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

   Coincidence?

   You tell me.

   Reply
   • Yvonne says:

     October 27, 2019 at 10:15 am

     No coincidence, SomeDAM Poet. These vultures just got even bolder re: their GREED.

     Reply
2. SomeDAM Poet says:

   October 27, 2019 at 10:20 am

   “Mr. Epstein then meandered into a discussion of other prominent names in technology circles,” Stewart wrote. “He said people in Silicon Valley had a reputation for being geeky workaholics, but that was far from the truth: They were hedonistic and regular users of recreational drugs. He said he’d witnessed prominent tech figures taking drugs and arranging for sex.”
   https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-moguls-jeffrey-epstein-connected-bill-gates-elon-musk-2019-8

   In 2011, Jeffrey Epstein Was A Known Sex Offender. The Leaders Of Amazon, Google, And Tesla Dined With Him Anyway.
   https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-bezos-musk-billionaires-dinner

   And of course, there is the whole sordid MIT/Epstein affair

   The tech moguls are worshipped by a large swath of our pulace but many of them are sociopaths who don’t give a damn about the outcomes of their experiments on our society.

   Reply
   • ciedie aech says:

     October 27, 2019 at 1:26 pm

     recognizing the full irony of becoming a tech giant who then becomes so rich that he believes he must intervene into and try to control social activity is that it takes a certain myopic self-involvement and lack of larger awareness to create the product which made the tech giant a giant

     Reply
     • SomeDAM Poet says:

       October 27, 2019 at 3:48 pm

       Geek Gods

       Oracles of today
       Geek gods hold the sway
       Zuckerbergs and Gates’
       Sealing all our fates

3. peggydobbins says:

   October 27, 2019 at 11:34 am

   I didn’t read the article, but I’m inclined to disagree with the headline “Surveillance is not good for children and other living things.” This based on my conviction that living conscious that what I say and do may be known by the FBI and my grandchildren has not been bad for me.

   During the late 1970’s I became increasingly paranoid that I was under surveillance because: I was still respected as a founder in the last 1960s of the Women’s Liberation Movement by women who had become famous as leaders in the 1970s of Second Wave American feminism, from which I had been marginalised and had, in response, returned to the South where I taught Capital by Marx at the University of Alabama, invited students and workers from the Goodrich rubber plant in my home for Marxist study groups led by members of the Black Workers Congress and the Communist Labor Party, and also to meet a series of friends of friends visiting the South to recruit for a series of new Marxist-Leninist Communist Parties. Enough strange things happened to make me suspect that some of those friends of friends had been FBI, CIA or whatever. I had read about Cointelpro, and had in the early 1960s interned with USIA and dated guys who conveyed they were CIA.

   I dispelled my paranoia by carrying a tape recorder with me everywhere, tape recording every conversation on the phone, one to one, or in any group with the admonition: This is for the archives. Don’t say anything you don’t want the FBI or your great grandchildren to hear. I tape recorded continuously from Jan 21, 1980, Reagan’s inauguration, until Dec 31, 1984, when I had expected his administration to end. I haven’t brought peace and socialism to the world, but I have done some good transparently. Whether anyone paid by my government was surveilling me, I don’t know. I’ve continued the habits I formed then although I am almost entirely certain that by now I do nothing significant enough for anyone to consider a threat to their secret ambitions for themselves and/or American projects they believe best for the rest of us.

   Reply
4. Linda says:

   October 27, 2019 at 5:35 pm

   One substantial measurement of workers which is obsessive can be stopped by the public. The American economy, when it moved away from manufacturing became a service economy. Each time you are asked to evaluate a service provider, refuse. It’s intentionally made difficult for us to say no. It’s presented as something positive. We feel we will be rewarding the worker who is helpful to us. But, consider what it is like to be the employee, measured by every customer. Resist and find a way to tell companies that there will be no more input for their vast machine of evaluative surveillance.
   We know from the unilateral decisions of the tech monopolists, pharmaceutical companies, etc. that our input has no significance beyond a threat of punishment for employees with whom we interface.

   One day of protest – a day when absolutely no evaluation input is given for the services we buy would send a powerful message.

   Reply

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