Podcast 522 – “Surveillance Capitalism and the IoT”

Guest speaker: Cory Doctorow

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations are by Cory Doctorow.]

“This world of computers exists in a principle-free environment. The Internet of Things is the Internet of absolute, self-serving bullshit.”

“The Internet of Things needs principles.”

“The real struggle here, it's not making computers free, it's making people free. The reason we want to save computers is not because computers are more important than racial justice, or gender equity, or getting rid of homophobia and transphobia, or the climate. The reason we want to make computers free and open is because we cannot win those fights without a few and open information infrastructure.”

“Considered atomically, one thing at a time all the things computers can do, we live in an age of unparalleled wonders. But all civilizations fall, and we have the shared responsibility to the civilizations that come after us to build the infrastructure that will lead to a future in which technology exists to server its users, not destroy their lives in service to surveillance capital, and the global war on terror, and self-serving bullshit so noxious that you can see it from orbit.”

“No one puff [of a cigarette] is going to give you cancer, but statistically given enough puffs you're getting a tumor. If that tumor erupted with the drag there would be no second drag. The reason people smoke is because the tumors happen years later. And the reason people give up their private information is because the privacy stuff that bites them in the ass almost always happens years and years later too.”

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Books by Cory Doctorow
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org)