Invitation to a live public debate --- LogicLounge with Cory Doctorow: Surveillance Capitalism is not a Rogue Capitalism

The 18th instalment in the public lecture series LogicLounge with Cory Doctorow will take place on July 21, 2020. Due to the COVID-19, instead of Los Angeles, the venue of this admission-free discussion hosted by the 32nd International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV 2020) is virtual Zoom room.

The term surveillance capitalism was broadly defined by the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff as a market form where the products are the data about our behaviour. Specifically, the market of the surveillance capitalism is not interested in the data which we give away by pressing the consent button. The most important information which the tech companies are collecting about us, the behaviour date, is something which we are never asked to share or agree to. The data about our behaviour leads to predictions about what we might want and do in the future and, more and more, ways to shape who we are.

However, what if Big Tech's ability to command billions for ads has more to do with cornering markets and eking out marginal gains through targeting, with stale data being mostly useless for commercial purposes — but still full of juicy kompromat for greedy state surveillance agencies?

This public discussion is led by Cory Doctorow, a science fiction novelist, journalist, and technology activist, working as a special advisor for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Cory Doctorow believes that the discussion about the power of behavioural advertising to influence behaviour is to underplay the role that technological monopoly and state surveillance play in both the decay of public discourse and governmental complacency when it comes to corporate surveillance.

The lack of the trust in the ability to govern global actors such as big tech corporations is not rooted only in the use of the free market claims to hold off regulators from tech's sphere of influence. There seems to be a knowledge gap between computer scientists, CEOs, and politicians, which is feeding our fear for the future of the liberal democracy, as well as for our own private life. One of the aims of this LogicLounge is to offer a meeting space where experts together with the members of the public, try to articulate our position towards the technological tools which impact on our liberties and socio-economic status is revolutionary.

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Free Registration
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LogicLounge with Cory Doctorow: Surveillance Capitalism is not a Rogue Capitalism
DATE: 21 July 2020
TIME: 8 AM (PDT), 5 PM (CEST)
VENUE: Virtual (Zoom)
ADMISSION FREE REGISTRATION: To get the link to the Zoom room of the talk and Q&A with Cory Doctorow we require attendees to register via the following registration form:
https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9AwAiQSmTj2ZjaIsIoTr5A

The LogicLounge with Cory Doctorow is free of charge, due to the host – CAV 2020, and the organizers Aina Niemetz and Mathias Preiner of Stanford University, and the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms at TU Wien (VCLA).

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About the LogicLounge series
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The series of public lectures LogicLounge continues to bring together the general public and the experts from the fields of logic, philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and artificial intelligence. Since its inception at the Vienna Summer of Logic in 2014 – the largest event in the history of logic – the series has since been traveling between Vienna and the venue of the CAV (International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification), where it has already become a regular event in honor of Prof. Helmut Veith (1971-2016).

Mihaela Rozman, MA
Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms
Technische Universität Wien - TU Wien
Fakult für Informatik (E192-04)
Favoritenstraße 9-11, A-1040 Wien
Telefon: +43 1 58801 184806
Email: mihaela.rozman@tuwien.ac.at
Web: www.vcla.at
Facebook & Twitter: @vclaTUwien

The Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms (VCLA) is an initiative of Technische Universität Wien – TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology). Located at the Faculty of Informatics of TU Wien, the Center is promoting international scientific collaboration in logic and algorithms. Moreover, the VCLA outreach activities are aimed towards raising aspirations of young people for academic pursuits and to raise awareness on the impact of the research done in the areas of logic, philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and artificial intelligence among the general public alike.

This release was published on openPR.