Surveillance Valley by Yasha Levine – review
Yasha Levine, an American investigative reporter of Russian extraction, was born in the Soviet Union. His background is in a certain kind of fashionable radicalism, set on exposing liberal hypocrisy from an anticapitalist perspective. One of his previous books was entitled The Corruption of Malcolm Gladwell, which portrayed the celebrated New Yorker writer as a shill for big pharma and the tobacco industry.
His polemical method is to assemble all the supporting evidence he can find for his thesis and skirt round or dismiss anything that gets in its way. His latest book targets the tech industry, which, let's face it, is a massive and deserving target. But he's less concerned about surveillance capitalism per se than what he sees as a weaponised front in the west's battle for hegemony and control.
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