When Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was published in 2019, public unease with the power of Big Tech found its Rosetta Stone, an opus that simultaneously described, confirmed and named the transformation of democracy’s public spaces into profit-making realms controlled by digital mega-corporations. Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, spoke to TIME at length a few days after Twitter announced its sale to Elon Musk, and the European Union approved a landmark law intended to reign in Big Tech. This interview has been edited for clarity:
TIME: In the space of a two days this month, the richest man in the world bought Twitter and the European Union approved the most significant effort to regulate Big Tech to date, the Digital Services Act. Where do you see things?
Zuboff: These are the bookends of past and future that define our situation today. More than two decades ago American lawmakers turned over the new networked information spaces of our digital age to private companies. Mr. Musk is the beneficiary of this misguided past. It means that we have no laws to prevent one person from owning a significant chunk of our information space and doing whatever he chooses. The consequence is that the whole world is forced to obsess over one individual: “What will Mr. Musk do?” We have become painfully aware that the way these information spaces are engineered, owned and operated has a material effect on our lives, our societies, and on the viability of our democracies.
Thanks to the historic developments in the E.U., that old story is no longer the whole story. The new legislation known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) is the second bookend and it points us toward a different future. Mr. Musk no longer faces a free ride in a lawless space. The DSA leads a democratic resurgence…
Source : time
