Benign convenience helped surveillance capitalism escape political debate

Evidence

“I’d rather see an ad for cute shoes that I am going to like than see ads for a bunch of ugly stuff I don’t want,” one student said in an early class. In our discussions, we came to call this the “cute shoes problem” because it encapsulates one of the main reasons why surveillance capitalism and the AI revolution were able to sneak up on us with so little debate. Many of us do appreciate a certain level of automated customization, especially algorithms that suggest music, books, and people who might interest us. And at first, the stakes seemed low: Is it really a big deal if we see ads and suggestions based on our interests and tastes? Or if chatbots help clear our email backlogs? — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘doppelganger’ device from earlier chapters: other Naomi’s vaccine-passport claims later in this paragraph are grounded in the same cute shoes logic. — connects to: Privacy protections are structurally incompatible with surveillance capitalism’s accumulation logic — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 601; Varian’s benign telematics prose conceals surveillance capitalism’s coercive power — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 681; Surveillance capitalism operates quietly through ambient technology that bypasses our awareness — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1200 (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘cute shoes problem’ as a named concept for the mechanism by which data extraction was normalized.