Today: Surveillance Capitalism (and Web3?)

(and welcome to 2022)

It’s too late to say Happy New Year, so happy February! A few quick notes.

Twitter Spaces today on ‘Surveillance Capitalism’:

Josh Sisco has a great article (paywalled; thread here) reporting that the FTC’s draft privacy “rules appeared to reflect some of the themes from Harvard University professor Shoshana Zuboff’s book, 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.'“

I’ve long argued that the FTC’s enforcement-driven approach to privacy enables emergent order and that trading that approach for a rules-based approach may have some benefits but many downsides.

But Zuboff’s book doesn’t operate at that level of specificity. It is more polemical than practical. And it largely speaks to the already-convinced. Still, there is something to learn from Surveillance Capitalism - which is why Jim Harper and I wrote a paper on the themes of the book.

Today, at noon, we are talking about that paper on Twitter Spaces. We’ll talk about what real and imagined problems exist with the internet and whether Web3 or blockchain applications offer an alternative. Register now for a reminder!