Important, NYT "The Coup We Are Not Talking About"
We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
By Shoshana Zuboff
Dr. Zuboff, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-surveillance-society-technology.html
(such a relevant article - trying hard to pick out four paragraphs to post. Too bad about the paywall - essential reading)
snip
The horrific depths of Donald Trump’s attempted political coup ride the wave of this shadow coup, prosecuted over the last two decades by the antisocial media we once welcomed as agents of liberation. On Inauguration Day, President Biden said that “democracy has prevailed” and promised to restore the value of truth to its rightful place in democratic society. Nevertheless, democracy and truth remain under the highest level of threat until we defeat surveillance capitalism’s other coup.
The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.
The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.
The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.
In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
snip
= new reply since forum marked as read
here are a few of the top reader comments
This is one of the most outstanding commentaries the New York Times has published in a very long time. Highest praise to Professor Zuboff and the newspaper.
One of the best things about it is zeroing in on the core issues, something that Times opinion pieces sometimes fall short of doing.
This interpretation of recent political events in the context of the growth of surveillance capitalism is the best way to understand the evil of social media that I, at least, have ever read.
Implementing Professor Zuboff's program (Let's get started!) would mean the end of Facebook--at least, Facebook as we know it--as well as smaller, but (at least by degree) equally evil, social media.
Now, what better outcome can you possibly imagine, than that?
_________________________
The corporate surveillance state is no doubt a terrifying behemoth. I am surprised this piece did not make reference to the panopticon, an idea a century and a half old now. Solving the effects of the unrestricted gathering of ephemeral behavioral data and its use to precision-target messages to individuals is going to a be a very difficult quandary to solve.
However, the town-square problem has a much easier solution: Repeal Section 230, the publication immunity it enshrines for online service providers (and nobody else) is directly responsible for the scale of misinformation. Section 230 is not freedom of speech, it is freedom from liability for speech to an extent never before granted by American jurisprudence.
I say this as a Silicon Valley software engineer with a great deal of technical understanding of these systems. Section 230 has lived long past its hero days and has now become the villain. Let the chips fall where they may. You're not allowed to shout "fire" in a crowded movie theater - but you are on Facebook. That needs to change, and repealing Section 230 altogether will force social media companies to return to democratic standards of behavior with the same legal standards of liability as any publisher, like the NYT or WSJ or even Fox News.
++++++++++++++
Brilliant. Incisive. Terrifying. Not necessarily in that order.
Shoshana Zuboff’s book, title noted above at the end of her epic & essential analysis, provides a much more detailed exploration and explanation of the mechanics of the #SurveillanceState in which we have now all been ‘suddenly’ immersed. As Naomi Klein put it: “Everyone needs to read (Zuboff’s) book as an act of digital self-defence.” [yes, Canadian spelling! 
]
Zuboff is this era’s Rachel Carson: “Zuboff’s book is the information industry’s Silent Spring” — Chris Hoofnagle, UC Berkeley
Amen to that. The truth shall make us free! Thank you Ms. Zuboff!!! And thank you New York Times for providing her this platform. Please consider removing the paywall barring this article from immediate access by the masses.
Every citizen needs to read it. And act on it. Now.
Sorry. Maybe I didn't sleep well and am overly cranky, but that is not the kind of writing I would expect in the NYT. It was a cardinal rule one did not break in my advanced writing courses.
No offense to NRaleighLiberal, but this is a "thing" with me with respect to some writers, whose pomposity subsumes any credible argument.
The horrific depths of Donald Trump’s attempted political coup ride the wave of this shadow coup, prosecuted over the last two decades by the antisocial media we once welcomed as agents of liberation. On Inauguration Day, President Biden said that “democracy has prevailed” and promised to restore the value of truth to its rightful place in democratic society. Nevertheless, democracy and truth remain under the highest level of threat until we defeat surveillance capitalism’s other coup.
The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.
The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.
The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.
In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Dr. Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and a former Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Dr. Zuboff's work is the source of many original concepts including 'surveillance capitalism', 'instrumentarian power', 'the division of learning in society', 'economies of action', 'the means of behavior modification', 'information civilization', 'computer-mediated work', the 'automate/informate' dialectic, 'abstraction of work', and 'individualization of consumption'.
take another word
like 'racism' in an article about racism
or 'COVID-19' in an article about COVID-19
and count how many times they are used
especially in a series of paragraphs that are drilling down about the concepts involved
I think the issue is that you are the one for whom 'epistemic' is a new word and therefore it sticks out for you, plus it appears you are not all that familiar with academic writing, even in a less formal manifestation like this.
The NYT article uses 'epistemic' 36 times.
Here is another article, this one from Frontiers in Psychology. It uses 'epistemic' 233 times, spread out from start to finish.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02278/full
in the medical field where new terms are introduced all the time.
I do note your insult, however, but you are quite wrong.
Good writers do NOT do this.
It would, however, get you a flunking grade at any reputable university writing program and your peer-reviewed manuscript rejected--but go on thinking as you do. I'm sure you will be very successful. 
Please go try it! I'll enjoy from the sidelines.
