The vision of tracking people traces back to a 1950s Galapagos tortoise experiment
Evidence
Futuristic as this may sound, the vision of individuals and groups as so many objects to be continuously tracked, wholly known, and shunted this way or that for some purpose of which they are unaware has a history. It was coaxed to life nearly sixty years ago under the warm equatorial sun of the Galapagos Islands, when a giant tortoise stirred from her torpor to swallow a succulent chunk of cactus into which a dedicated scientist had wedged a small machine. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 633
Categorization
- CANDY: A memorable, almost fable-like opening — a scientist tagging a tortoise as the origin story of tracking humans.
- QUESTION: Which scientist and which Galapagos experiment is she referring to — likely the pioneering radio tracking work of the late 1950s?
- XREF: connects to: Willing personal tracking normalizes tracking as infrastructure in less voluntary domains — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 415
Broader Connections
- Willing personal tracking normalizes tracking as infrastructure in less voluntary domains
#expands(0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 415