{"id":53798,"date":"2018-10-25T07:30:48","date_gmt":"2018-10-25T05:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hiig.de\/?p=53798"},"modified":"2023-03-28T17:11:08","modified_gmt":"2023-03-28T15:11:08","slug":"the-price-of-connection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hiig.de\/en\/the-price-of-connection\/","title":{"rendered":"The price of connection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shifts in our communication infrastructures have reshaped the very possibilities of social order driven by markets and commercial exploitation. Some people even regard this as a new form of capitalism. Focused on data extraction rather than the production of new goods, \u201csurveillance capitalism\u201d generates intense concentrations of power over extraction and threatens core values such as freedom. Two years ago, Nick Couldry<\/strong> discussed what might be the \u201cprice\u201d of this transformation in an article for the Democracy Futures<\/a> series, a joint global initiative<\/a> with the Sydney Democracy Network<\/a>. On the occasion of his lecture in Berlin on 20 November<\/a>, we decided to crosspost this text.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sign up for Couldry’s lecture: Colonised by data \u2013 the hollowing out of digital society<\/a><\/p>\n

Imagine, if you can, a period long before today\u2019s internet-based connectivity. Imagine that, in that distant time, the populations of every country were offered a new plan. The plan would involve linking up every space of social interaction, most sites of work, a large proportion of private moments of reflection, and a significant proportion of family interactions.<\/p>\n

Once linked up miraculously, all these diverse spaces of human life would be transposed onto a single seamless plane of archiving, monitoring and processing.<\/p>\n

This link-up, those populations are told, would have some remarkable consequences. Each one of those once separate sites could be connectable in real time to every other. The contents of what went on there would become linkable to and from everywhere.<\/p>\n

Less good perhaps, every site would, in principle, be monitorable from every other and would be so monitored by institutions with the appropriate infrastructure. Better, perhaps, this seamless plane of connection would provide the basis for building new types of knowledge about the human world, which would never before have been linked as a totality in that way.<\/p>\n

Can we imagine those populations accepting such a proposal without hesitation? Probably not. Yet this, in crude outline, is the world we are being asked to celebrate today.<\/p>\n

Over the past 30 years, shifts in our communication infrastructures have enabled large-scale attempts to reshape the very possibilities of social order in the interests of market functioning and commercial exploitation.<\/p>\n

Some see this as a new \u201csurveillance capitalism\u201d<\/a>. This is focused on data extraction rather than the production of new goods, thus generating intense concentrations of power over extraction and threatening core values such as freedom.<\/p>\n

I agree, but how does this threat work exactly? And what might be the \u201cprice\u201d of this transformation along dimensions that economists cannot count?<\/p>\n

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