Famiglia: THERIDIIDAE

Nome comune:

Nome scientifico: Kochiura aulica (C.L.Koch, 1838)

Global distribution (WSC 2021): Cape Verde Is., Canary Is., North Africa, Europe, Turkey, Caucasus, Iran

GPS (Neapolis):

37.073379, 15.278956

Caratteristiche anatomiche: Ragno di piccole dimensioni, dai 3,5 ai 4,5 mm, ha un prosoma giallognolo con la zona centrale più scura e un opistosoma bianco con un tipico disegno marrone.

Comportamento: Ragno che costruisce tele a groviglio alle estremità di piante arbustive. Rispetto ad altri ragni, i quali se disturbati abbandonano la loro ragnatela per mettersi in fuga, la K.aulica ha una buona resistenza al disturbo, infatti se il ramo su cui ha costruito la ragnatela viene percosso, lei si rifugia al centro della piccola tela e attende che il trambusto cessi.

Anatomical features: a small spider, 3.5 to 4.5 mm in size, it has a yellowish prosoma with a darker central area and a white opisthosoma with a typical brown pattern.

Behaviour: Spider which builds tangle webs at the ends of shrubby plants. Compared with other spiders which, if disturbed, abandon their webs and flee, the K.aulica has good resistance to disturbance. If the branch on which it has built its web is shaken, it takes refuge in the centre of the small web and waits for the discomfort to cease.

In our time, surveillance capitalism repeats capitalism’s “original sin” of primitive accumulation. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of claiming work (or land, or wealth) for the market dynamic as industrial capitalism once did, surveillance capitalism audaciously lays claim to private experience for translation into fungible commodities that are rapidly swept up into the exhilarating life of the market. Invented at Google and elaborated at Facebook in the online milieu of targeted advertising, surveillance capitalism embodies a new logic of accumulation. Like an invasive species with no natural predators, its financial prowess quickly overwhelmed the networked sphere, grossly disfiguring the earlier dream of digital technology as an empowering and emancipatory force. Surveillance capitalism can no longer be identified with individual companies or even with the behemoth information sector. This mutation quickly spread from Silicon Valley to every economic sector, as its success birthed a burgeoning surveillance-based economic order that now extends across a vast and varied range of products and services.
…

The competition for surveillance revenues bears down on our bodies, our automobiles, our homes, and our cities, challenging human autonomy and democratic sovereignty in a battle for power and profit as violent as any the world has seen. Surveillance capitalism cannot be imagined as something “out there” in factories and offices. Its aims and effects are here … are us.
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Larry Page is credited with a different and far more insightful answer to the question, “What is Google?” … ruminat[ing], “If we did have a category, it would be personal information.…The places you’ve seen. Communications….Sensors are really cheap….Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data….Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”
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Industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and threatens to cost us the earth. An information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature, especially the hard-won capacities associated with self-determination and moral autonomy that are essential to the very possibility of a democratic society. The industrial legacy of climate chaos fills us with dismay, remorse, and fear. If surveillance capitalism remains unchallenged as the dominant form of information capitalism in our time, what fresh legacy of damage and regret will be mourned by future generations?

Shoshana Zuboff, "Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action," New Labor Forum

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