Your weekend food is here. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Minority Report are at your disposal

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: how personal data commodified and used for profit-making

Actually, this is one of the books to read nowadays by Shoshana Zuboff. Here is a brief definition of surveillance capitalism: “…addressing the process of commodifying personal data with the core purpose of profit-making.” As an American scholar, she argues that neither privacy nor antitrust regulations provide sufficient protection from the unprecedented practices of surveillance capitalism.. Her book originates the concept of ‘instrumentarian power’, in contrast to totalitarian power. Instrumentarian power is a result of surveillance capitalist operations which threaten individual autonomy and democracy. “…consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification…” claimed Zuboff.

Minority Report: how to predict crimes before they happen

What would you think if the crimes were predicted before they were committed? Minority Report by Steven Spielberg is after question. The film takes place in the year 2054 and John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is a precrime chief and tries to predict crimes with the help of his gesture-based, transparent, screenless and holographic 3D computer. He grabs clues and arranges them in mid-air, inspiring the vision for augmented reality and virtual reality. One day it is forecasted that Anderton will commit a murder himself in the next 36 hours. Worse, Anderton doesn’t even know the victim. He decides to get to the mystery’s core by finding out the ‘minority report’ which means the prediction of a colleague that “might” tell a different story and prove Anderton innocent. The budget of the movie was USD 102 million and global box office hit USD 358 million.

Here is the official trailer of the film:

By the way you can see other “One book, one movie” series here:

One book, one film: Brotopia and Metropolis:

One book, one film: “Steve Jobs” and “Steve Jobs”