It’s redundant, at this point, to state how intimately tethered to the cybersphere we are. For whatever meaningful or trivial aspect of contemporary human life—labor and commerce, relationships and sex, fitness and health, culture and entertainment—there is an app, site, or tool that promises to optimize our pursuit of it, thus maximizing our chances at self-realization. In exchange for the algorithm’s guidance, we cede data that map out our lives—our live locations, daily routines, spending habits, search histories, conversations—and thus consent to a “new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.”

Defined by Shoshana Zuboff as “as significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth,” surveillance capitalism is establishing itself as the “dominant logic of accumulation of our age.” Given its scope, hold, and voracity, it is difficult to imagine a more relevant issue to gather around, analyze, and respond to with rigor and creativity.

For Centro’s first Talking Circle, With Our Heads in The Cloud, we will convene to discuss life under surveillance capitalism, critically engage with work by Tung-Hui Hu, Shoshana Zuboff, and others, and collectively gain practical knowledge that can help us navigate it more astutely. The series will be marked by two sessions held on consecutive Saturdays in October 2024.