Cats are smart, but not a great choice if you want an animal that takes to training reliably. Watch a cat circus online, and what's so touching is that the cats are clearly making their own minds up about whether to do a trick they've learned, or to do nothing, or to wander into the audience.

Cats have done the seemingly impossible: They've integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge. There is no worry that some stealthy meme crafted by algorithms and paid for by a creepy, hidden oligarch has taken over your cat. No one has taken over your cat; not you, not anyone.

Oh, how we long to have that certainty not just about our cats, but about ourselves! Cats on the internet are our hopes and dreams for the future of people on the internet.

Meanwhile, even though we love dogs, we don't want to be dogs, at least in terms of power relationships with people, and we're afraid Facebook and the like are turning us into dogs. When we are triggered to do something crappy online, we might call it a response to a "dog whistle." Dog whistles can only be heard by dogs. We worry that we're falling under stealthy control.

This book is about how to be a cat. How can you remain autonomous in a world where you are under constant surveillance and are constantly prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history, which have no way of making money except by being paid to manipulate your behavior? How can you be a cat, despite that?

The title doesn't lie; this book presents ten arguments for deleting all your social media accounts. I hope it helps, but even if you agree with all ten of my arguments, you might still decide to keep some of your accounts. That's part of your prerogative, being a cat.

excerpt from Ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now, by Jaron Lanier

As the headquarters of India's software and computer service industries, as well as a major center for the manufacture of military aircraft, Bangalore (population 6 million) prides itself on its California-style shopping malls, golf courses, nouvelle cuisine restaurants, five-star hotels, and English-language cinemas. Dozens of tech campuses display logos for Oracle, Intel, Dell, and Macromedia, and local universities and technical institutes graduate 40,000 skilled workers and engineers each year. Bangalore advertises itself as a "prosperous garden city," and its southern suburbs are indeed a middle-class Shangri-la. Meanwhile, draconian urban renewal programs have driven underprivileged residents from the center to the slum periphery, where they live side by side with poor migrants from the countryside. An estimated 2 million poor people, many of them scorned members of the scheduled castes, squat in 1000 or so fetid slums, mostly on government-owned land. Slums have grown twice as fast as the general population, and researchers have characterized Bangalore's periphery as "the dumping ground for those urban residents whose labour is wanted in the urban economy but whose visual presence should be reduced as much as possible."

Half of Bangalore's population lacks piped water, much less cappuccino, and there are more ragpickers and street children (90,000) than software geeks (about 60.000). In an archipelago of 10 slums, researchers found only 19 latrines for 102.000 residents. Solomon Benjamin, a Bangalore-based consultant for the UN and the World Bank, reports that "children suffered heavily from diarrhoea and worm infestations, a high proportion were malnourished, and infant mortal ity rates in the slums were much higher than the state average." By the millennium, moreover, India's and Bangalore's neoliberal bubble had burst: although software continued to grow, "employment prospects in almost all other sectors, especially the public sector, have shrunk rapidly or face unstable prospects. Thus the granite, steel and tinted glass offices in Bangalore, most of them belonging to software companies, pose a stark contrast to ill-maintained factories facing falling orders and tighter credit conditions." Ruefully, a leading Western economic consultant was forced to concede that "Bangalore's high tech [boom] is a drop in the bucket in a sea of poverty."

excerpt from Planet of slums, by Mike Davis

Do ponto de vista vantajoso do capitalismo de vigilância e dos seus imperativos económicos, o mundo, o "eu" e o corpo reduzem-se ao estatuto permanente de objectos, desaparecendo na corrente sanguínea de um novo e titânico conceito de mercado.

A máquina de lavar dele, o pedal do acelarador do carro dela e a flora intestinal do leitor colapsam numa única dimensão de equivalência, transformados em bens informacionais, sujeitos a desagregação, reconstituição, indexação, navegação, manipulação, análise, reagrupamento, previsão, produção, compra e venda: em qualquer lugar, a qualquer hora.

excerto de A era do capitalismo de vigilância, de Shoshana Zuboff (Relógio d'Água)

Khashdrahr stopped translating and frowned perplexedly. "Please, this average man, there is no equivalent in our language, I'm afraid".

"You know", said Halyard, "the ordinary man, like, well, anybody - these men working back on the bridge, the little man, not brilliant but good-hearted, plain, ordinary, everyday kind of person".

Khashdrahr translated.

"Aha", said the Shah, nodding, "Takaru".

"What did he say?"

"Takaru", said Khashdrahr. "Slave".

"No Takaru", said Halyard, speaking directly to the Shah. "Citizen".

He grinned happily, "Takaru-Citizen, Citizen-Takaru".

"No Takaru!", said Halyard.

Khashdrahr shrugged. "In the Shah's land there are only the Elite and the Takaru".

excerpt from Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

Kuwait’s constitution says that every person has the right to a job, so in some places 20 people are employed for one person’s job. In South Korea, they work so much that a policy has been introduced to turn off computers at the end of the day so that employees can’t work any more. In the US, they give up over 500 million holiday hours each year, while Amazon’s drivers are trying to form a union. Meanwhile, robots are poised to take over most jobs and put the rest of us out of work. Work is so crucial to our identity and what we spend our waking hours on that it is barely noticed anymore. A lot has happened since a group of Puritan priests invented the concept of work ethic in the 1600s, and in the 21st century the very concept of work is in many ways disintegrating. A perfect situation for a filmmaker like Swedish mastermind Erik Gandini, who travels the world to explore what the concept of work means today – if it means anything at all.

Watch trailer here