Written by Mihalis Kritikos,
‘The European Union represents humanity’s best hope to prevent lawless, unprecedented computational concentrations of knowledge and power from becoming as irreversible and poisonous to our societies as the toxic concentrations of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere have become to our earth.’ That was one the main statements made by Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and award-winning author of
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, at the STOA Annual Lecture 2020 that took place (virtually) on 9 December 2020. This year’s Annual Lecture, ‘Digital human rights and the future of democracy: Lessons from the pandemic’, was dedicated to the memory of the first Head of the STOA Secretariat, Richard (‘Dick’) Holdsworth. It focused on the disruptive effects of the digital revolution upon democracy and examined the challenges associated with the growing datafication and p