[alphonsegaston]

Labor organization with the express aim of putting an end to Surveillance Capitalism.

Google and Facebook can’t withstand a sustained disruption of their workforce, which is why they spend so much time paying lip service to social issues. They have to create a constant illusion of concern for rights and justice to prevent their employees from actually demanding them.

[HumanDrivenDev]

> Labor organization with the express aim of putting an end to Surveillance Capitalism.

The article is talking about the extensive surveillance of an authoritarian government that heads a planned economy. What does it have to do with capitalism?

[hedora]

Regulatory capture is a dominant force in western capitalism. To the extent that is “planning” the economy, the article could be talking about the US. We certainly have a more extensive surveillance apparatus.

From what I can tell China keeps most of its oppression inside its borders, at least compared to the US.

Look up forced labor in immigrant prisons, or the 1,000,000 current cholera cases in Yemen / estimated 7,000,000 victims of famine coming soon — the US is actively working to expand that humanitarian disaster as you read this.

Also there are 100,000’s of legal immigrants we’re planning to send back to failed economies and war zones. All of that is happening today. If you go back a decade for more context, you can add torturing civilians to death, establishing narco states, etc, etc.

I was going to add “funding terrorism” to my list of past events, but I just remembered we’re actually in the middle of active military strikes that are meant to help Al Qaeda ground forces.

All of these violations of basic human rights were very profitable to campaign donors.

To make it worse, from what I can tell, some members of our congress think it is appropriate to let the president replace the head of the FBI with a yes-man specifically to block an investigation into the president’s ties with organized crime and foreign powers. That will give him some degree of legal impunity, and also control of a massive domestic surveillance apparatus (much of which consists of commercial entities).

How did this happen? Trump hired a foreign-owned company (Cambridge Analytica) to use the tools of surveillance capitalism to squeak through the electoral college with a record-low percentage of the popular vote.

Sorry for the long-winded answer, but that roughly summarizes the state of survelliance capitalism in 2018, and what it has to do with the article.

[alphonsegaston]

Thank you.

[mr_spothawk]

Labor organization is one option, that I think is widely unattractive to this industry.

What about Labor Disorganization. Simply stop working in "the industry". Simply stop accepting ego-stroking emails from recruiters. Simply stop playing their shitty game. Quit, quit, quit.

Stop buying new shit. Pay down your debts. Get away from consumption & move towards genuine ownership of the means of our own production.

Use some fucking bitcoins and stop paying taxes to a corrupt and oppressive regime.

[freshhawk]

Agreed. But the hard problem is "How do you sell tech workers on labor organization being necessary".

The whole culture depends on pampering and aggrandizing tech workers as individual heroes for whom collective action would only hold them back. You have to overthrow the entire mainstream worldview about employment in tech before you can get a foothold on that front.