Why Silicon Valley Loves Coronavirus
Matthew Cole, Tribune Mag, le 25 mars 2020
▻https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/03/why-silicon-valley-loves-coronavirus
The imperative of the crisis to work from home and socially isolate “is a perfect opportunity for companies to become the digital businesses they have wanted to be,”
The global coronavirus lockdown has shifted millions of people offices to working from home, a change that could be permanent. This shift has significantly increased internet traffic and digital mediation. According to security company Cloudflare, general traffic is up between 10 and 20 percent and peak traffic is up nearly 13% since early February in the US alone. Most of the increase in traffic comes from consumer video services with teleconferencing and gaming increasing 300% and 400% respectively. In the UK, BT’s chief technology and information officer Howard Watson, said there have been record amounts of traffic, peaking at 17.5 terabits per second with normal weekday traffic averaging around 4 to 5 terabits per second. Data usage is already up 30% for Vodafone’s 18 million customers and is likely to rise as the government’s strategy follows that of its European neighbours. We have no ownership and very minimal control through GDPR about what data is collected on our digital activity.
Given the fact that lockdowns are in place in many countries and home-working is the new normal, it should come as no surprise that certain tech companies are set to benefit from this crisis. Shares in Zoom, a video conferencing platform, were up 74% this year, while the S&P 500 was down 21% in the biggest sell-off since the financial crisis of 2008.
There is a datafication imperative for organisations that entails the surveillance of people, places, processes, things, and relationships among them.The modern company aims to extract all data, from all sources (machine, worker and consumer alike), by any means possible (often circumventing laws). The operation of data analytic methods tends to be opaque or unintelligible to employees. The massive increase in digitally-mediated working and social activity has given tech companies an opportunity to capture data on workers’ behavioural and situated knowledge. Such data can reveal things about individuals that they themselves aren’t aware of. The capture of data on workflows, communication, emotional reactions undermines both workers’ control over their labour processes as well as consumer privacy. There are very limited social protections in this digital space and even less enforcement. This makes it difficult to secure the informed consent of the employee based on GDPR guidelines and even more difficult to leverage data as part of collective bargaining.
As Thomas Piketty recently noted, datafication and automation makes “the question of who controls the machines and owns the patents and the income flow associated with these properties becomes more and more important.”
We need to own or destroy the machines.
#coronavirus #fascistovirus #surveillance
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