News/Insights – Joao Vieira da Cunha

Cool new free book on surveillance capitalism

Soshana Zuboff’s latest book is about surveillance capitalism. It is an eye-opening interpretation of how technologies are used as invisible but highly effective means for power. You can see her discuss the book in the video below.

This month, Cory Doctorow who is a science fiction writer but also a prominent thinker on technology and society posted a free book titled ‘How to destroy surveillance capitalism’ which provides a different interpretation that I think nicely complements that offered by Zuboff. Makes for a great read.

If you like the book, consider subscribing Doctorow’s Pluralistic newsletter, which is the best that I have seen so far for people interested in tech and society.

What do your tweets say about you?

Type a twitter handle in this site and find out what your tweets say about you (or someone else). May be a nice tool for reverser surveillance in job search. Analyze your future boss’s (or company’s) twitter account to decide whether to take that job. Pic is of my own twitter account :-O

Neoliberal Bot

I find people that offer quick fixes and spread out self-help advice to be very harmful. When these people are academics and should know better, they are evil. I just found a great account on twitter that captures the how empty all of this self help advice actually is. Make sure you follow @lifeadvicebot

Cool books: ‘Relating to things’

My main drive to do research is to understand what are the deep mechanisms at work around me. I feel that if I can at least see all of this hidden processes, I can carve some more agency in my life. A recently published book, called “Relating to Things: Design, Technology and the Artificial” offers amazing new insights about our relationship with things. I found it fascinating. I’ll let the book introduce itself:

We relate to things and things relate to us. Emerging technologies do this in ways that are interesting and exciting, but often also inaccessible or invisible. In Relating to Things, leading design researchers and philosophers respond to issues raised by this situation – inquiring into what it means to live with and relate to things that can actively relate to us, and that relate to each other in ways that do not involve us at all.
Case studies include Amazon’s Alexa, the Internet of Things, Pokémon Go and Roomba the robot vacuum cleaner. Authors explore everything from the care work undertaken by objects, reciprocal human/machine learning, technological mediation as a form of control, and what it takes to reveal things that tend to be hidden and that often (by design) conceal the ways in which they use us.”

I am Kimi

Kimi Raikonen left Ferrari F1 a few days ago. He was Ferrari's last F1 champion. However, Kimi was never considered one of the greats. The team and the fans snubbed him in relation with whomever he partnered with at Ferrari. Nevertheless, neither Sebastian Vettel nor Fernando Alonso who are considered much better than him were able to win a title with Ferrari F1. I feel like Kimi. I have some good results, but never got real credit for my accomplishments. Never considered a peer by my colleagues from MIT. Nevertheless, like Kimi still races, I still write and publish. For the love of the game.