It’s like an episode of Black Mirror: how the Internet became a capitalist hellscape
It’s like an episode of Black Mirror: how the Internet became a capitalist hellscape

Author(s): Sonja Žakula
Subject(s): Anthropology, Social Sciences, Media studies
Published by: Етнографски институт САНУ
Keywords: internet; cyborgs; social networks; monetization of user data
Summary/Abstract: This paper represents a largely autoethnographic account of how the World Wide Web has changed over the last, roughly, ten years, from the perspective of a digital native who also happens to be an anthropologist. It is a kind of freeze frame of the current state of affairs online that aims to point out how the revolutionary dream of Web 2.0 was hijacked for corporate profit through the monetization of user data. It considers concerns about privacy and surveillance as well as some of the bodily aspects of the relationship between humans and technology, and ultimately offers some suggestions for a way out of our current predicament.

• Details
• Contents