> [!summary] Progressive Summary > The following post from Nicole Civita of Ecogather convinced me to pick up this book: > This morning, I came across a very useful passage distinguishing three similar sounding (and related) but importantly distinct concepts: > > 1) Individuation: the lifelong exploration of self-development (not a creature to modernity; supported by rituals and rites of passage) > > 2) Individualism: shifts all the focus and responsibility for success of failure on to a mythical, atomized, isolated individual, in a life-state of perpetual competition, disconnected from relationships, community or society. (A creature of modernity, conducive to colonial and industrial societies, supercharged by neoliberalism capitalism) > > 3) individualization: the sense of the human being as “an individual”; the conceptual and moral conflation of human personhood and the individual.(entitlement to self-determination, a consequence of processes of modernization over several centuries and an outgrowth of widespread individualism) > > These distinctions, as I’ve just articulated, are heavily informed by the writing of Shoshanna Zuboff who argues, in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism, that “individualization” set the stage upon which surveillance capitalism “made its debut” and has achieved a near totalizing “success”. > > Im sure I’ll have more to say as I go further into her descriptions of the “‘collision’ between centuries-old historical processes of individualization that shape our experience as self determining individuals and the harsh social habitat produced by a decades old regime of neoliberal market economics in which are sense of self-worth and needs for self determination or routinely thwarted.” She argues that the pain and frustration of this contradiction “sent us careening toward the Internet for sustenance and ultimately bent us to surveillance capitalism’s draconian quid pro quo.” # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Chapter One - Home of Exile in the Digital Future > Home or exile? Lord or subject? Master or slave? These are eternal themes of knowledge, authority, and power that can never be settled for all time. There is no end of history; each generation must assert its will and imagination as new threats require us to retry the case in every age. > We celebrate the networked world for the many ways in which it enriches our capabilities and prospects, but it has birthed whole new territories of anxiety, danger, and violence as the sense of a predictable future slips away. # Quotes # References