The Carr Center recently hosted an event at the JFK Jr. Forum, "A Dialogue with the World: Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?," featuring Maria Ressa, the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and CEO of Rappler; Professor Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice President for the European Commission's "A Europe fit for the digital age" and Commissioner for Competition; and Baroness Beeban Kidron, UK House of Lords and leading global advocate for children's rights online and the Age Appropriate Design Code.
The event was co-hosted by the Institute of Politics at HKS and was recently covered in Harvard Magazine. To learn more about their discussion on surveillance capitalism, artificial intelligence, and their impacts on human rights, read the excerpt below from Harvard Magazine and check out the full article on their website.
Excerpt
"Most people can be intimately known, near instantly, in ways unimaginable just a few years ago—through the large-scale collection of data from wireless devices they keep close. 'These are devices that we think of as extensions of our powers and capabilities,' said Carr Center for Human Rights director Mathias Risse at a Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) forum on September 20. 'If you are anything like me,' he continued, 'these devices are the first thing we touch in the morning and the last thing we touch at night. And all the wireless data emanating from these devices is processed for commercial purposes.'
"Absent rules against the collection of such private data, its exploitation has made a few individuals and corporations fabulously wealthy, in a process aptly described by Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism.” Risse, who will co-direct with Zuboff a new Carr Center [fellowship] program, 'Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?,' said that 'the future of our living arrangements is shaped by companies that are not in business to advance visions of the common good, but that are in business—as one is in business—to make profits.' That this is among the reasons, he continued, these topics have become human rights issues with a global dimension."