Surveillance-capitalism theory understates what digital platforms actually do

Evidence

Both Zuboff and Durand treat Big Tech as monopoly capitalists whose digital platforms (e.g. Facebook, Amazon) function like utilities (e.g. electricity providers, water and sewage corporations, railway networks or phone companies), except that Big Tech use the cloud to harvest our data so as to boost their monopoly power over us. While sympathetic to their thesis, I was convinced that a lot more was going on than Silicon Valley capitalists merely boosting their market power over us by means of cloud-based surveillance. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 905

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Zuboff and Durand’s surveillance capitalism theses; this is the reader’s whole research area per their reading purpose. — connects to: Digital protest platforms covertly harvest signatories’ data for commercial profit — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 911; Pokémon Go functioned as a covert surveillance-capitalism apparatus to herd players toward commercial locations — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1000; Ubiquitous networked computing constitutes an unprecedented form of power unlike prior totalitarianism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1265 (+5 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 905

Broader Connections

• Surveillance capitalism feeds on the social transformations it causes #complicates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1104
• Surveillance capitalism operates through Big Other to engineer behavior rather than souls #complicates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1196