The debate around social media has changed beyond recognition since those early days. To say it hasn't always been easy is an understatement, but it should be hard. The products we make have a huge impact, so we have the responsibility to build them in a way that protects privacy and keeps people safe.

Shoshana Zuboff

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Awareness requires a rupture with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience are called into question and revised.

Shoshana Zuboff
rupture awareness world
Technology makes the world a new place. by Shoshana Zuboff

Technology makes the world a new place.

Shoshana Zuboff
new-places technology world

Earlier generations of machines decreased the complexity of tasks. In contrast, information technologies can increase the intellectual content of work at all levels. Work comes to depend on an ability to understand, respond to, manage, and create value from information.

Shoshana Zuboff
technology tasks intellectual

Life is good when you live from your roots. Your values are a critical source of energy, enthusiasm, and direction. Work is meaningful and fun when it's an expression of your true core.

Shoshana Zuboff
life-is-good fun meaningful

Technological change defines the horizon of our material world as it shapes the limiting conditions of what is possible and what is barely imaginable. It erodesassumptions about the nature of our reality, the "pattern" in which we dwell, and lays open new choices.

Shoshana Zuboff
technology change reality

Technology represents intelligence systematically applied to the problem of the body. It functions to amplify and surpass the organic limits of the body; it compensates for the body's fragility and vulnerability.

Shoshana Zuboff
fragility technology body
As information technology restructures the work situation, it abs... by Shoshana Zuboff

As information technology restructures the work situation, it abstracts thought from action.

Shoshana Zuboff
information technology action
Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reprodu... by Shoshana Zuboff

Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.

Shoshana Zuboff
accepted choices practice

My teenage children watched Senator Clinton on the Today Show, mouths agape. They attended our local caucus with me and saw hundreds of our friends and neighbors gathered in the elementary school gym on that Sunday afternoon, despite an ugly Maine snowstorm. They listened to the thoughtful searching debates and saw us cast our votes. How could anyone suggest we didn't know exactly what we were doing? 'What's the point of electing someone who doesn't believe in the American people?' they asked. 'If she wants to ignore us now when she's only a candidate, what will she do as the President?'

Shoshana Zuboff
teenage believe children

The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker's body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers' intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.

Shoshana Zuboff
pain skills work

If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamicsthat present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.

Shoshana Zuboff
division-of-labor technology challenges

Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.

Shoshana Zuboff
power spiritual faith

Skilled workers historically have been ambivalent toward automation, knowing that the bodies it would augment or replace were theoccasion for both their pain and their power.

Shoshana Zuboff
pain knowing work

Computerization brings about an essential change in the way the worker can know the world and, with it, a crisis of confidence inthe possibility of certain knowledge.

Shoshana Zuboff
essentials work knowledge

Labor came to humanity with the fall from grace and was at best a penitential sacrifice enabling purity through humiliation. Laborwas toil, distress, trouble, fatigue--an exertion both painful and compulsory. Labor was our animal condition, struggling to survive in dirt and darkness.

Shoshana Zuboff
sacrifice struggle fall

Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn't. Without the layeredrichness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.

Shoshana Zuboff
engagement light reality

I've lived in a preindustrial (rural Argentina) as well as an industrial world. You experience a different sense of time in a community that works the land. Human relationships aren't professionalized or contractualized; family and friends take primacy. Life has much more continuity than discontinuity. There's a great deal of poetry in everyday life.

Shoshana Zuboff
community land time

Every century or so, fundamental changes in the nature of consumption create new demand patterns that existing enterprises can't meet.

Shoshana Zuboff
patterns demand fundamentals

It looks like the age of the mass is behind us and the age of the individual is upon us. The chasm that now exists between new people and old organizations is destroying economic value and inhibiting the emergence of a new chapter of capitalism aligned with the needs of this new society. The new purpose of commerce is to provide the tools, platforms, and relationships, digital or human, that enable individuals to live the lives they choose.

Shoshana Zuboff
economic-value organization people

The civilizing process has increased the distance between behavior and the impulse life of the animal body.

Shoshana Zuboff
distance animal life