Ordinary people must proclaim their right to the future
Evidence
“The bankers may not know it,” Fito Montes reflected, “but the future will need the past. It will need these marble floors and the sweet taste of my gypsy cakes. They treat us like figures in a ledger, like they are reading the number of casualties in a plane crash. They believe the future belongs only to them. But we each have our story. We each have our life. It is up to us to proclaim our right to the future. The future is our home too.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 176
Categorization
- SEED: The contrast between ‘figures in a ledger’ and personal stories is a vivid framing device for an essay on how quantification erases lived experience in the digital economy.
- ADDENDUM: Speaks to how sacrifice/economic contempt imposes losses on ordinary people — the reader’s own project on sacrifice and grief/love as stabilizers of stratified societies.
- XREF: connects to: Freedom of will is the necessary foundation for civilization — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1041; Other people open or close the future that my freedom requires — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 86; The right to the future tense frames collective self-determination against surveillance — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1698 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- The right to the future tense frames collective self-determination against surveillance
#expands(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1698 - Other people open or close the future that my freedom requires
#expands(0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 86 - The speculative imagination keeps the future open to change by collectively owning its indeterminacy
#expands(0.78) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 249 - Future literature mobilizes people toward predetermined ends
#complicates(0.75) — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 747 - Statolatry must be criticised so civil society becomes self-governing and spontaneous
#contradicts(0.72)