Silicon Values

Silicon Values:The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism

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How Google, Facebook and Amazon threaten our Democracy

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. 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.

Reviews

  • one of the leading scholars on Internet control and censorship.

    Boston Globe
  • 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.

    Adam Greenfield, author of Radical Technologies
  • For years, Jillian York has been at the forefront of defending freedom of expression online. Her new book unpacks how Silicon Valley corporations have gained more control over speech than the most ambitious of governments and how ill-prepared they often are to use that power in ways that are just and fair. Entertaining, deeply informative and often very personal, Jillian's journey into the world of online speech reflects on deep questions about how we should treat one another and who makes rules for societies in our digital world.

    Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor, UMass Amherst and co-founder Global Voices