Jacinta González is not an angel or venture capitalist. She is not a scientist or a technologist. She doesn’t have a Ph.D. in AI or quantum mechanics. She is not an entrepreneur who founded the next unicorn startup. Yet Jacinta’s decade-long first-hand experience of surveillance, and the system and technology that supports it, is as eye-opening as any expert’s. A point of view that is much needed to take us out of our often utopian tech-bubbles dominated mostly by narratives created in the marketing departments of Silicon Valley. That is why I was very happy to have Jacinta González on Singularity.FM. I hope you find her as interesting, illuminating, and informative as I did.

During this 2h interview with Jacinta González, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: the inception story behind her activism; how military technology gets normalized for domestic use; ICE – its purpose and modus operandi; how I almost didn’t make it to singularity university; Palantir and why it is “mission-critical” to ICE; how Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other Big Tech companies sell and profit from surveillance; the role of data-brokers such as Thompson-Reuters; Peter Thiel as the founding father of the modern surveillance industry; Sean Gourley and the Nobody Speak documentary; why we should all care about surveillance; search engines and intelligence gathering; why algorithms are Weapons of Math Destruction; Clearview.AI as the most callous and blatant appropriation of personal data for surveillance purposes; Immigration Nation Netflix documentary; what tech workers and people, in general, can do to oppose the system; Mijente and NoTechForIce.

My favorite quote that I will take away from this conversation with Jacinta González is:

Organizing is the key to transforming the system.

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation or become a patron on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/singularityfm

Singularity.FM

Jacinta González on ICE, Palantir, Big Tech and Surveillance

Singularity.FM is the first and best known singularity podcast - the place where we interview the future. 

Singularity.FM is a series of singularity podcast interviews with the best scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, film-makers, philosophers and artists, debating issues such as the technological singularity, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, life-extension and ethics.

Past guests of this singularity podcast include people such as Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hameroff, Marvin Minsky, Aubrey de Grey, Max More, Michio Kaku, Vernor Vinge, Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross and many, many others.