Tech Giants & Democracy | Shoshana Zuboff, Bim Afolami, Angela Eagle, and Joanna Kavenna

Shoshana Zuboff, Bim Afolami, Joanna Kavenna, and Angela Eagle debate the power and peril of the tech giants.

Watch the full debate at https://iai.tv/video/metropolis-untam...

The digital and tech giants began with cute logos and hip slogans, but are rapidly morphing into a 21st Century version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, growing into the largest corporations the world has ever seen. Many now see them as malevolent monopolies, with massive largely untaxed profits that manipulate our behaviour for their own benefit.

Even if we wanted to escape their vision of the future, are they now too strong to be stopped? Does their power and influence signal the loss of control of national governments to global corporations? Or is it still possible for governments to fight back? And if so how?

#tech #democracy #debate

Shoshana Zuboff is an author and scholar, and previously Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Zuboff is credited with originating concepts including 'surveillance capitalism', 'instrumentarian power', 'the division of learning in society', 'economies of action', 'the means of behavior modification', 'information civilization', 'computer-mediated work', the 'automate/informate' dialectic, 'abstraction of work' and 'individualization of consumption'.

Bim Afolami is a British Conservative Party politician. He has served as the Member of Parliament for Hitchin and Harpenden constituency since the 2017 general election. Before he became an MP, Afolami worked as a corporate lawyer at Freshfields and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and then at HSBC.

Angela Eagle is a Labour Party politician who has been the Member of Parliament for Wallasey since the 1992 general election. She previously worked for the CBI and Confederation of Health Service Employees trade union.

Joanna Kavenna is author of several critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction, and writing that has appeared in The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The New York Times. She has held the Alistair Horne Fellowship at St Antony’s College Oxford and the Harper-Wood at St John’s College Cambridge.

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