The paradoxes of journalism, and the best way to (not) DeleteFacebook
Italian newspaper Repubblica interviewed Evgeny Morozov about the Cambridge Analityca scandal, and the related #deletefacebook case. Both the printed and the online version of the interview illustrate the pervasiveness and dangers of Big Data and Big Tech in more than one way. This is the paper version:
Corporations harvesting Big data are bad for you. But please do not pay with cash
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Half of that page tells is about how dangerous the big corporations that track and profile every our actions are. The other half is filled by an invitation to pay with some of the most tracking and profiling payment methods around, instead of cash.
The (paywalled) digital version of the interview, instead, is on a website filled with Google ads and Facebook “Like” buttons. Facebook is having a bad moment, but even the media are in quite a corner, aren’t they?
About “Deleting Facebook”: in the interview, Morozov says that “the current situation can be turned upside down only by taking back to ourselves the control of infrastructures”. I beg to disagree on that. Asking for nationalization or any (self) regulation of Facebook is pointless. The only way out is to make infrastructures like Facebook obsolete.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
To this end, I have already shared more than a million words on this blog, without any paywall or user tracking, and am sharing the next million through a newsletter, also without any paywall.
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