This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Elon Musk won’t save the world from Big Tech – new laws will

By:   []

Date: 2022-05 

“Our job is to work politically… Forget about getting Elon Musk or any other guy to do something better rather than worse. Turn to your lawmakers... Because the failure here is a failure of law.”

This was the argument put forward by American author and academic Shoshana Zuboff in a live discussion, ‘Can we stop Big Tech getting inside our heads?’, hosted by openDemocracy last night.

Zuboff said we should focus not on trying to convince a few powerful individuals to better curate the platforms they own, but on addressing the broader power they have over society – and holding them accountable.

She explained: “We do not have the rights and the laws and the institutions to assure that these information spaces are used in ways that advance democracy and democratic ideals and human-to-human communications in ways that are tied to our rights and our choices.”

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Using Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an example, Zuboff, the author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, said we are witnessing the presence of a “new power”.

“Old power has various subspecies; totalitarianism, authoritarianism, autocracy, all somewhat different political structures that have consequences. New power is what I call ‘instrumentarian power’... They do not show up at our homes banging on the doors in the dead of night to drag us to the Gulag or the camp. They do not point a gun at our temples and threaten our families.”
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/elon-musk-big-tech-shoshana-zuboff-susie-alegre-panel-live-discussion/
[2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
    
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