Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores how digital technology is transforming societies, political systems, and economies around the world. Examines the origins of surveillance and data assessment and the political, economic, and ethical challenges automated technologies present by focusing on contemporary cases and their effects in communities around the world. Students with credit for IS 319 under this topic may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

As many as three billion people around the world now use smart phones. In many parts of the world, social media apps have become the dominant way that people produce and consume knowledge. These AI-assisted communication tools, from smart speakers to social media apps, feed on human experience. Using machine learning they claim life experience as surplus data that can be turned into prediction products. These products are in turn sold to advertisers or, in some cases, policing agencies in order to predict and shape the behaviour of targeted populations. This new frontier of the global economy, what Shoshana Zuboff names “surveillance capitalism,” is producing a new political and economic reality. Because of its interlinkages between global fields of power projected by states such as the United States and China, and private-public transnational corporations, such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Huawei and Hikvision, this new economic and political formation demands a response from social scientists who are deeply embedded in communities around the world.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

This course will examine the emergence and effects of surveillance capitalism from a number of international contexts.

• Students will develop a basic understanding of how digital capitalism first emerged in North America.
• They will examine how digital technology is reshaping social life in places such as China, India, Palestine/Israel, Ukraine/Russia, Indonesia, Philippines and elsewhere.
• Students will develop an understanding of the role of military science and geopolitics in the development of advanced technologies and digital economies.
• They will explore the way surveillance capitalism is connected to other economic formations such as racial capitalism and colonialism.
• And we will consider ways in which these systems can be hacked and transformed by democratic movements.
• Together these perspectives and modes of analysis will help students develop nuanced views of the contemporary global economy and international politics.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

All readings will be made available online.

REQUIRED READING NOTES: