Work in the era of Surveillance Capitalism: why we need to take back ownership of our personal data

Speaker: Tim Dunlop

September 12th, 6.30 PM

Upstairs at Tandem Bar, 127 King St Newtown

Refreshments Provided

As users of various social media platforms and other types of online interaction, our personal data is extracted from us, for free, by us, and is being turned into the biggest fortunes in human history by a few corporations. This data extraction is allowing private firms and governments to monitor and control us, blurring the line between work and home, work and leisure, while putting downward pressure on wages and conditions. Current practices of data extraction are also concentrating wealth and therefore undermining democracy itself. In this talk, author Tim Dunlop will talk about the way in which new technologies are affecting not just the way we work, but how we even understand what work is. He will offer some ways we can respond to this brave new world of data extraction and surveillance capitalism.

Bio

Tim Dunlop is an author and speaker who began working life as founder of one of the first video stores in Melbourne, back when BETA was cutting edge technology. He received a PhD in Communications and he has taught at the University of Canberra, Swinburne University, and the University of Melbourne. He has lived in London and Washington DC, and in the US he became interested in online technologies as agents of social change. He was an early political blogger and wrote a seminal text (The New Front Page) on the changes wrought to journalism by digitisation. He has subsequently written two other books (Why The Future Is Workless and The Future of Everything) dealing with the future of work and other aspects of the tech revolution. He is committed to the idea of bottom-up democratic reform and his writing reflects that commitment. His most recent book is an edited volume (with Elise Klein and Jennifer Mays), Implementing Basic Income in Australia.