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Too Smart
Book

Too Smart

How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World

Jathan Sadowski
MIT Press, 2020
First Edition: 2020

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Editorial Rating

10

Qualities

  • Eye Opening
  • Bold
  • Hot Topic

Recommendation

Jathan Sadowski’s searing, alarming exposé reveals how smart technology will soon achieve domination of human life. Technocratic organizations use smart devices to extract data from people’s bodies, homes and interactions with police and government agencies. Everything you do becomes a source of value they aggregate, analyze and sell to insurance companies, retailers and surveillance enterprises. Governments and corporations use data to control you using covert and overt behavior-modification methods. Sadowski issues an urgent call to action to collectivize data and resist corporate encroachment.

Take-Aways

  • “Smart tech” is a pervasive and powerful presence in human lives.
  • Data are a form of capital; those with the most data possess the most power.
  • Digital capitalism reduces people to “data streams.”

About the Author

Jathan Sadowski is a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He writes on the politics of technology for publications including The Guardian, OneZero, and Real Life.

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