finally finished “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” last night. It’s a bloody grim read, but it ends with an Orwell quote - from a 1946 book review. The book’s (The Managerial Revolution) main thesis was that the world would be totalitarian at the end of WWII, ending with a technocracy of sorts - managers above and slaves below. 1/?
Orwell said “It will be seen that at every point Burnham (the author) is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now, the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice”
“In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible” 4/4
Anyway basically the point is that Surveillance Capitalism seems inevitable from where we’re standing now (as did Nazi Europe in 1940), and it probably will be if we don’t do anything to get rid of it. But if we reject it, then it’s not inevitable and can be condemned to the history books.
side note: “you have got brain problems: it’s cowardice!” is a pretty sweet own
In the book (written in 1940), the author basically said that a Nazi victory was inevitable. As the Red Army scored key successes, the author wrote supplemental notes saying “actually it will be a Soviet victory and Russia will rule the world” 2/?