Author(s)/Creator(s)

Kexin Wang
Zhexu Yang

Document Type

Thesis Prep

Date

Fall 12-2022

Keywords

Surveillance, Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, privacy, data, future cities, Apps, social platform

Language

English

Disciplines

Architectural History and Criticism | Architectural Technology | Architecture

Description/Abstract

Our thesis project studies and analyzes the control of Surveillance Capitalism over people’s privacy, and how to make people realize the importance of privacy through the means of an architectural/design narrative. This concept comes from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, which explains how tech companies collect extra data, capture people’s behavioral surplus and sell them to third party customers, such as advertising companies, thus the predictions about people’s preferences accordingly. In this process, technology companies can make tremendous profit by stealing users’ personal information and then selling it to third parties for advertising and prediction products. With the rapid development of technology, big data monitors and collects people’s personal information and privacy indefinitely. In the traditional sense, privacy in buildings only needs physical walls to enclose the space. Now, thanks to big data, privacy is no longer subject to physical boundaries, location, etc. and the limitations of distance. This has become a growing and terrifying contemporary issue, but many people are not aware of its severity and privacy implications. Our thesis aims to design a narrative in which people’s privacy has been completely deprived to the extreme in future cities in order to serve as an apocalypse, warning people of the data panopticon they are living in.

Additional Information

Instructors: Hannibal Newsom & Kiana Memaran Dadgar

Source

submission

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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