Every tap, swipe and click we make on our phones, tablets and laptops is being recorded by big tech firms. This is often called surveillance capitalism – a network of products and services we use every day which sucks up large quantities of data about us and then sells it on to advertisers at huge profits. It’s garnering increasing concern from citizens and regulators around the world, but should we care as Christians? Why have tech companies made their products so addictively hard to put down and stop tapping, swiping and clicking? In this episode we think through more of the implications of living in a non-private digital village in the 21st century, and we also ponder the implications of the more deceptive and destructive aspects of addictive digital technologies. What are some initial efforts believers have made to carve out space for family time and spirituality in our disembodied always-on world.
In each episode of Matters of Life and Death, brought to you by Premier Unbelievable?, John Wyatt and his son Tim discuss issues in healthcare, ethics, technology, science, faith and more. John is a doctor, professor of ethics, and writer and speaker on many of these topics, while Tim is a religion and social affairs journalist. We talk about how Christians can better engage with a particular question of life, death or something else in between.
Every tap, swipe and click we make on our phones, tablets and laptops is being recorded by big tech firms. This is often called surveillance capitalism – a network of products and services we use every day which sucks up large quantities of data about us and then sells it on to advertisers at huge profits. It’s garnering increasing concern from citizens and regulators around the world, but should we care as Christians? Why have tech companies made their products so addictively hard to put down and stop tapping, swiping and clicking? In this episode we think through more of the implications of living in a non-private digital village in the 21st century, and we also ponder the implications of the more deceptive and destructive aspects of addictive digital technologies. What are some initial efforts believers have made to carve out space for family time and spirituality in our disembodied always-on world.
• Subscribe to the Matters of Life and Death podcast: https://pod.link/1509923173
• If you want to go deeper into some of the topics we discuss, visit John’s website: http://www.johnwyatt.com
• For more resources to help you explore faith and the big questions, visit: http://www.premierunbelievable.com
Resources and links
“A new economic order build around aggregating human experience as raw material for hidden commercial practices of prediction, behavioural manipulation and sales, resulting in unprecedented concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power in the hands of private companies.”
Surveillance capitalism: the hidden costs of the digital revolution, Jonathan Ebsworth, Samuel Johns, Michael Dodson, Cambridge Papers June 2021
The Question of Surveillance Capitalism, Nathan Mladin and Stephen Williams, in The Robot will see you Now: Artificial Intelligence and the Christian Faith, ed John Wyatt and Stephen Williams, SPCK, 2021
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books, 2019
Atlas of AI: Power politics and the planetary costs of artificial intelligence, Kate Crawford, Yale University Press, 2021
Irresistible: The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked, Adam Alter, Penguin, 2017
Hooked: how to build habit forming products, Nir Eyal, Penguin, 2019
Weapons of Math Destruction, Cathy O’Neil, Penguin, 2017