Silicon Values

The Future of Free Speech under Surveillance Capitalism

Hardcover, 285 pages

English language

Published July 10, 2021 by Verso Books.

ISBN:
978-1-78873-880-4
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OCLC Number:
1157938799

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4 stars (4 reviews)

How Google, Facebook and Amazon threaten our Democracy

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to the contemporary front line of misinformation, Jillian C. York charts the war over our digital rights. She looks at both how the big corporations have become unaccountable censors, and the devastating impact it has had on those who have been censored.

In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian C. York looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations’ desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. …

1 edition

Pretty good on history, but rather weaker on analysis

3 stars

Pretty good coverage of the last dozen or so years in social media, particularly on the Arab Spring. Rather weaker on analysis, though. Didn't really seem to question the capitalist motives of the social media companies (e.g., claiming that 'moderation doesn't scale' rather than that companies just don't want to pay for it) and rather more inclined to a US view on free speech than I felt comfortable with.

Review of 'Silicon Values' on 'LibraryThing'

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One of the stickiest issues we face is how to fix the internet so it isn’t a democracy-threatening amplifier of disinformation and a tool to incite racist, fascist hate and violence. It’s an old problem. While John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace argued against any curbs on speech online, appealing to the naïve yet foundational myth that speech, like markets, would regulate itself wisely out of enlightened self-interest, there has never been a prelapsarian Internet where there was no garbage to take out. Email wouldn’t function without some spam controls, and platforms have had to learn how to limit the spread of child pornography and unauthorized sharing of copyrighted material, however imperfectly, because the legal costs of not doing so were significant. The harder job is deciding what speech is unacceptable when the scale of these platforms is global and vast and both Mammon and mischief drive …

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4 stars
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4 stars