Latest news with #TheAgeofSurveillanceCapitalism
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Twin City Issues Report Exploring the Impact of AI on the Digital Landscape
The Digital Attention Crisis: Navigating AI's Influence Minneapolis, Saint Paul , March 24, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- a leader in connecting communities within the Minneapolis and Saint Paul area, today released a report that delves into the profound impact of AI on the digital landscape. As AI-powered algorithms increasingly dictate online behavior, businesses and individuals face unprecedented challenges in maintaining control over their digital presence. The report is available today via the Twin City Digital Attention Crisis The report highlights the dramatic rise in digital consumption, with doom scrolling increasing by 40% since 2023. Users now spend over seven hours daily engaging with AI-curated content, a trend that raises significant concerns about mental health and social media addiction. The American Psychological Association reports that social media addiction rates are now comparable to traditional substance abuse metrics. The report shows that AI's role in manipulating user engagement is evident, as platforms employ real-time dopamine feedback loops to keep users engaged longer. This manipulation extends to search engines, where AI-driven results prioritize AI-optimized content, reshaping traditional SEO strategies. "The digital landscape is evolving rapidly, and it's crucial for businesses and individuals to understand the implications of AI-driven content curation," says Clayton Johnson, CEO of "We must advocate for transparency and ethical AI use to regain control over our digital interactions." As awareness of AI's influence grows, cultural leaders and digital professionals are pushing back against algorithmic control. Literature and media, such as "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" and "The Social Dilemma," have sparked conversations about AI's role in shaping digital behavior. Meanwhile, music and digital art projects like HyperPrompt's "Attention Economy" highlight the dangers of algorithmic addiction. Leaders face the dual challenge of protecting human-centric values while harnessing AI's potential for growth. As AI reshapes the digital landscape, enterprises must strike a careful balance—leveraging advanced technologies to drive efficiency, personalization, and competitive advantage, without sacrificing user trust and ethical responsibility. The report urges forward-thinking companies to proactively align their marketing and content strategies with the evolving, AI-first environment stand to dominate their industries. By emphasizing transparency, responsible policy use, and genuine user empowerment, these organizations will not only differentiate themselves but also establish lasting connections built on authenticity and integrity. Twin City's report states that now is the moment for businesses to step forward as champions of responsible innovation. By embracing AI-driven tools ethically and strategically, enterprises can reclaim control over digital experiences, ensuring technology empowers and enhances human potential rather than diminishing it. The goal of the report is to show that the future belongs to those who use AI to elevate human interactions, foster meaningful engagement, and build sustainable, trusted relationships with customers and communities alike. Read the full report on the Twin City City MarketingAbout Twin City Discover the best of the Twin Cities. Whether you live here or are new to Minneapolis and Saint Paul seven county area, you can find everything you need to connect and succeed. Press inquiries Twin City Clayton Johnsonclayton@ 2585 Hamline Ave N #CRoseville, MN 55113 Sign in to access your portfolio
Los Angeles Times
27-02-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Forget thought crime. People are incarcerated for dream crime in this near-future novel
It's overwhelming to think of how carefully tracked we are by private interests at this point in time: what we buy, what we watch, what we search online, what we want to know about other people — and who we know and how well. Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' describes the perfect storm of extractive profit-seeking and privacy erosion that drives so much of contemporary life. When it comes to today's corporations, she explains, our lives are the product, and the power that's accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogates our basic rights in ways that we have not yet figured out how to fight through collaborative action. Our ability to mobilize, she suggests, 'will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.' You can feel the influence of these concerns in Laila Lalami's powerful, richly conceived fifth novel about pre-crime, 'The Dream Hotel' — out March 4. Set in the near future, the book's corporatized reality is slightly more twisted than ours but entirely plausible, a place where private greed has resulted in a disturbing bureaucracy with no true due process. As the novel opens, Moroccan American mother and archivist Sara Hussein is in Madison, a 120-bed 'retention' center near Los Angeles, run by a private company, where, in the interests of crime prevention, people whose dreams have marked them as high-risk for committing crimes are kept under steady, intrusive observation. According to the powers that be, Sara is being held because she dreamed of killing her husband. And while she refuses to believe this means something bigger, she also worries about all the holes in her knowledge; throughout the novel, Lalami plays out the shiftiness and uncertainty of reality when dreams are given more predictive weight than facts to stunning effect. Sara has been inside so long — at the start of the book, 281 days — that communication from her husband has slowed, and she fears that he has started to believe she is guilty. When a new woman is admitted to the facility, her naive assumptions about how the system works — the result of ignorance that seems at first to mirror our own — counter Sara's experience-driven awareness of problems. After having twins, and struggling to get enough sleep, Sara had agreed to surgery that outfitted her with a neuroprosthetic — the private company's promise was that you could feel rested after shorter periods of sleep, but under the principles of surveillance capitalism, its reach has since expanded into people's private, inner lives and become a basis for what amounts to incarceration, though it's not labeled such. 'Once dreams became a commodity, a new market opened — and markets are designed to grow. Sales must be increased, initiatives developed, channels broadened.' We'll later discover that, in line with surveillance-capitalist impulses, the company is not only watching but also cultivating product placement in dreams. Here, rendering this edge-of-nightmare world, Lalami skates along at the height of her powers as a writer of intelligent, complex characters. By training, Sara is a historian of postcolonial Africa, and her career has been spent as a digital archivist at the Getty Museum. She maps what she knows of archives to the operation of algorithms, understanding that the latter work according to search terms provided by a human with limited knowledge, and that, therefore, its method for seeking out pre-crime is profoundly fallible. The book kicks off with Lalami's clever marketing language for the dream surveillance device: 'You're a good person; if you were in a position to stop disaster, you probably would.' By flattering people's sense of themselves as good, as wanting to stop crimes against women and children — not so different from the curtailment of civil liberties after 9/11, where the risks of terrorism were treated on balance as drastically more significant than preserving individual freedoms — the device has become normalized. What makes use of the device so insidious is not simply the monitoring, of course, but that trivial actions, and even non-actions, mere thoughts, lead inexorably to nightmarish scenarios. The retention center has procedures that purportedly adhere to due process, but as in Franz Kafka's 'The Trial' or Vladimir Sorokin's 'The Queue,' where bureaucracy stands in the way of getting anywhere, every time it seems like Sara's time in the facility is about to be over, something trivial occurs to push her hearing date back, or to otherwise deny her release. Unlike those atmospheric novels in which the central authority in the bureaucracy remains inaccessible, Lalami not only renders Sara relatable through mentions of mundane things like hiking with her husband or caring for babies but also builds the perspectives of some of the villains of the piece with nuance. It's not only the claustrophobia of an enclosed space with strangers or control-seeking authorities but time itself that creates the feeling of dread. Lalami writes, 'Each day resembles the one that came before it, the monotony adding to the women's apprehension and leading them to make decisions that damage their cases.' The novel takes a fascinating turn, one that calls up Zuboff's insights that we haven't yet developed forms of collaborative action to counter surveillance capitalism, when Sara realizes that she and other retained people do have a tool to fight back, namely the work they do while incarcerated. It's a clever progressive pivot that tamps down the dystopian vibes that support the original premise of the book. At one point, Sara looks at a mural and notices that the laborers depicted are watched by a painted foreman, 'and later by the artist in his studio, and later yet by her, the process transforming them from people into objects.' But, even in its awareness that subjectivity is stripped away when people are treated as data points, the novel refuses a grim understanding of how people might become damaged in their behavior toward one another while under surveillance (changes to behavior seen in East Berlin, North Korea, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and other places in the world that have fallen to totalitarianism). Rather, as with her other novels, there's a softhearted universalism to Lalami's treatment of surveillance capitalism. Hers is one in which humans retain the ability to trust one another enough to forge working solidarities and authentic collaborations. Although it relies on a speculative technology for its plot, 'The Dream Hotel' is astounding, elegantly constructed, character-driven fiction. Lalami's realistic approach to Sara and others, inflected with leftist politics and history, elides any sharp division we might imagine about where we've been and what we face ahead. 'Maybe past and present aren't all that different,' Sara thinks at a critical moment. 'The strange thing — the amazing thing, really — is that we've managed to find workarounds to surveillance.' Within the latter part of the novel, it's not the stuff of tragedy or alarm about the human condition we encounter, but surprising, unadulterated hope. Felicelli is a novelist and critic who served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle from 2021-24.
