Browsing by Subject "futurology"

Tiedekunta/Osasto – Fakultet/Sektion – Faculty Faculty of Social Sciences Laitos – Institution – Department Department of Social Research Tekijä – Författare – Author Sandberg Markus Roy Rikhard Työn nimi – Arbetets titel – Title Surveillance capitalism in the context of futurology: An inquiry to the implications of surveillance capitalism on the future of humanity Oppiaine – Läroämne – Subject Social and Public Policy Työn laji – Arbetets art – Level Master's Thesis Aika – Datum – Month and year 18.5.2020 Sivumäärä – Sidoantal – Number of pages 105 Tiivistelmä – Referat – Abstract This dissertation owes its research topic largely to Shoshana Zuboff's book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: A fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. The work ushers in a novel theory of the contemporary strain of capitalism and posits a shift from neoliberalism to surveillance capitalism. The origins and ramifications of this phenomenon will be at the focus of this thesis. In the review of relevant literature, the background and the commitments of futures studies as a field are eclectically touched upon by the aid of both scholarly work and science fiction. Concomitantly, the concept of surveillance capitalism is unfurled and welded to Yuval Noah Harari's notion of dataism. Harari's thoughts on humanity's past and future shall also furnish the overhead projector for my interpretation of surveillance capitalism. Imagination, the foremost forte that Homo Sapiens enjoys the monopoly of in the known universe, is singled out as the main theatre of war, as it is the area where surveillance capitalism is carrying out its most crippling strafe. The raison d'etre for this treatise is lent support to by virtue of a once-over of popular futurology, as I seek to sort out, where and why the discipline has gone off at a tangent and detracted from acute matters, divagating into disputes over synthetic intelligence that echo theological dialectics. I propose the problematization that this befuddles the human agency at the core of surveillance capitalism and thus works as an adjuvant to it. In the third compartment a précis of the history of Sohail Inayatullah's causal-layered-analysis method as well as its viability and pertinence to this dissertation is presented. The boon and bane of CLA as an epistemology is audited as the reader is familiarized with the stratum-superpositioning approach which shall inform this thesis passim before the analysis itself is presented. In the summarization surveillance capitalism is sized up from top to bottom, accompanied by a cursory contemplation apropos of the question to what degree surveillance capitalism is equipped to emblematize capitalism in the first place, or perhaps rather something altogether outré. Avainsanat – Nyckelord – Keywords Surveillance capitalism Futurology Dataism