Nightly Nuance - February 15, 2021

Hello, my friends. I know the Senate trial is very much on everyone's minds. Sarah and I are processing that together and will share our conversation with you on tomorrow's podcast. Today, I find myself thinking so much about how we got here, and I want to spend some time on what Dr. Shoshana Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism." 

Dr. Zuboff appears in The Social Dilemma, and her thinking about January 6 came to me via The Markup, an excellent newsletter on social media and politics from Julia Angwin. In the Markup and in a January 29th editorial in the New York Times, Dr. Zuboff discusses the "epistemic coup" we're living through. 

This is a little dense if philosophy isn't your jam, but I think it's such a powerful framework for understanding...basically everything that's happening right now. 

"Epistemic" means relating to knowledge--what we do know and what we can know. Dr. Zuboff says the epistemic coup is playing out in 4 stages: 

1. A usurping of epistemic rights -- meaning, things we've always taken for granted (like expressions on our faces) are now being bought and sold without our permission 

2. An extreme form of social inequality -- this is the one that blows my mind. There is an enormous gap between what I can know as an individual and what can be known about me because of all the data being collected on my behavior in the world. 

3. This is where January 6 falls -- episodic chaos. Disinformation poisons social discourse and creates alternate information universes for us. 

4. Epistemic dominance -- meaning democratic governance is replaced by computational governance. 

All of this is helping me process how we got her, find more grace and space for my fellow citizens who are breaking my heart (because they, and I, and all of us are basically lab rats in an enormous technological experiment -- that's not all of who we are, but it's a part of it), and think about what reforms and rights and laws we need to dig us out. I hope you find it helpful, too. 

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