Silicon Values Lib/E: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to the contemporary front line of misinformation, Jillian York charts the war over our digital rights. In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian York looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations' desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech? How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest? Who regulates the censors? In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data.

About the Author :
Jillian C. York is international activism director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She is also a founding member of the feminist collective Deep Lab. She has been covering questions of surveillance and freedom since the 2000s. She was named by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 intellectuals on social media. She has written for the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Foreign Policy. She is based in Berlin. Megan Tusing is an actor and audiobook narrator based in New York City. She developed a love of storytelling and a passion for language at a young age when first introduced to William Shakespeare, which eventually led her to pursue a career in acting. She has appeared on stage, in films, and on such television programs as Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order: CI, Blue Bloods, and Person of Interest. She holds a BA in theater from James Madison University and is a proud member of SAG-AFTRA.

Review :

"The internet has never been the utopia of free and equal expression its ideologues would have us believe it is. Jillian York's vivid reportage shows us that the power to determine who gets to use it to speak, and under what circumstances, is now more concentrated--and less accountable--than ever before."