Big Tech S3E1: Cory Doctorow on the True Dangers of Surveillance Capitalism

November 26, 2020

Listen to this week’s new episode of Big Tech, where science fiction author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow talks about how monopoly power, not mind control, is the force behind Big Tech.

Where does the tech industries’ power lie? Are they “mind-control” platforms, as some have described them, capable of influencing everything from consumer choices to election results, or does their true threat to society lie in market concentration?

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author, activist and journalist. Doctorow’s latest book, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, argues that big tech’s purported powers of manipulation and control, peddled to advertisers and based on an overcollection of our data, are essentially an illusion. “Being able to target cheerleaders with cheerleading uniform ads does not make you a marketing genius or a mind controller. It just makes you someone who’s found an effective way to address an audience, so that even though your ad may not be very persuasive, you’re not showing an unpersuasive ad to someone who will never buy a cheerleading uniform,” Doctorow explains.

Doctorow’s view is that the threats to society that big tech present are far less sinister than tech critics such as Shoshana Zuboff and Tristan Harris make them out to be. Rather, the big fives’ monopolistic practices are the real issues to wrestle with.