Image: Kencf0618, CC BY-SA 3.0

A few years ago after the 2008 financial crash Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone described Goldman Sachs, that great titan of financial capitalism, as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Fast forward almost ten years and you could say the same, and much worse, about surveillance capitalism, according to Shoshana Zuboff author of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

This time though the squid is even bigger and it is jamming its blood funnel, via smart phones, smart TVs, tablets & soon even smart homes, into every last nook and cranny of our individual & collective privacy.