Project Liberty

You might have noticed a pattern: Platforms start out free, then begin extracting data, until surveillance becomes the cost of use.​

This is surveillance capitalism, which Harvard Business School scholar Shoshana Zuboff defines as the “claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.”

“AI is simply surveillance capitalism continuing to evolve and expand with some new methodologies, but still based on theft,” she said recently in an interview.

Take a moment and think about all the things you’ve asked of a chatbot.

Were they intimate questions? Did you share sensitive information? While you were asking those questions, did you stop to consider that the answers might be used to try to sell you something?

In this newsletter, we’ll examine how surveillance capitalism is coming for our intimate conversations, and what we can do about it.