Digital Surveillance: Like clueless guinea pigs

Even the mavens of Silicon Valley are occasionally right. And so: the production, accumulation, and analysis of traces left by the digital devices does produce real benefits. Following the logic of the Peace Dividend – a popular slogan of the early 1990s, which held that decreased military spending would promote economic growth – we can speak of the Surveillance Dividend: the idea that the Internet of Things and Big Data and the inevitable disruption of the entire universe by a handful of Californian start-ups will yield economic abundance, political emancipation, universal prosperity.