Shoshana Zuboff
Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
About the Author
Shoshana Zuboff is chaired professor at the Harvard Business School. She lives in Maine with her husband and two children.
Image credit: Professor Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School. By Michael D. Wilson - CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75532952
Works by Shoshana Zuboff
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019) 2,087 copies, 39 reviews
The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2004) 130 copies, 1 review
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoe Dog, The Everything Store [3 book collection] (2019) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Zuboff, Shoshana
- Birthdate
- 1951
- Gender
- female
- Short biography
- Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita, Harvard Business School. She is the author of In The Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her BA from the University of Chicago.
- Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Maine, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- Maine, USA
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Reviews
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
[The] bare facts of surveillance capitalism necessarily arouse my indignation because they demean human dignity. The future of this narrative will depend upon the indignant citizens, journalists, and scholars drawn to this frontier project; indignant elected officials and policy makers who understand that their authority originates in the foundational values of democratic communities; and, especially, indignant young people who act in the knowledge that effectiveness without autonomy is notshow more
effective, dependency-induced compliance is no social contract, a hive with no exit can never be home, experience without sanctuary is but a shadow, a life that requires hiding is no life, touch without feel reveals no truth, and freedom from uncertainty is no freedom.
This book is an incendiary work of immense scholarly and literary significance.
With admiral restraint, Zuboff painstakingly dismantles, analyses, and lays bear the machinations of one of the greatest challenges that faces humanity in this century. We have be come not the product, as is so often said, but the raw material of an entirely novel industry. This industry's speed of ascent and adaptation and especially of innovation has left individuals and governments alike, completely unable to meaningfully understand, let alone reign-in, the advance of this all-pervading entity that increases its penetration into our lives and our communities with every passing minute.
This book articulates the uncomfortable gut-feeling, the uneasy sense of cognitive dissonance, that I've felt about the level of access companies generally, but especially Alphabet and Facebook, have to my life and every piece of information living that life generates. I understand now why my no-choice participation in this new economy has generated these feelings, in all their expanded and terrifying entirety.
While at times bombastic, and others poetic, and others still cool and clinical; the amount of research, time, and passion for humanity itself that went into the construction of this work has paid off. This work is a significant achievement, and an important moment that we can look back on to see whether we as a species can rise to overcome this new challenge, or whether this will be little but foreshadowing of the future we allow to follow.
If you're alive right now, you owe it to yourself to read this. show less
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
This will be a long review, so let me summarise it with tweet-like succinctness: ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ is Black Mirror for people who hate fun. I definitely mean that as a compliment. It synthesises and analyses a wide range of ideas I’ve come across in leisure and work reading during the past few years, mostly in articles online. As fragments, those ideas filled me with concern and confusion. Combined into the clear and systematic structure of a book, they fill me with show more dread, but the alleviation of confusion is very powerful. Zuboff sets out a convincing and shocking analysis of the recent turn global capitalism has taken towards intensive data-gathering, behavioural prediction, and pervasive surveillance. While I think it could have been equally effective at slightly shorter length, that is probably influenced by the unwieldiness of the hardback I got from the library. I really appreciated the measured pace and excellent explanations. Zuboff coins a number of useful descriptive phrases, none more helpful than that in the title. The vagueness of ‘late capitalism’ has always irritated me; ‘surveillance capitalism’ has a punchy accuracy. Zuboff is a great writer, with a consistent ability to identify key points without becoming reductive or sensationalist:
Zuboff centres her overall enquiry into surveillance capitalism on three fundamental questions: who knows? Who decides? And who decides who decides? The answers are disquieting, to say the least. It amazes me that so many people I know seem unconcerned about the amount of data the big five tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) have about them and how it is used. Not only do these firms have far more data about us than we can readily understand, its individual value is irrelevant in comparison to the value of it all in aggregate. Zuboff uses the term ‘economies of scale and scope’ for this. Big data is valuable because machine learning models require vast amounts to produce useful results. For work reasons, I recently taught myself data mining and basic machine learning in R. It was alarming to realise how easy to use yet fundamentally opaque big data analytics are. Neural networks aren’t really analogous to human brains in structure or function. The real similarity is that in neither case is it known why you get the result you do. Moreover, like human brains, neural networks makes mistakes. However their mistakes are very different to those of humans, and generally depend on how much data they’ve been trained on and what forms it took.
Zuboff does not discuss such technicalities. If you want an introduction to machine learning, I suggest this youtube video. She is, rightly, more interested in the data that google and others gather to feed machine learning models, which then predict our behaviour in order to sell us stuff. Once limited to your computer, the imperative to gather more and more behavioural data increasingly invades daily life via the internet of things:
Zuboff is especially good at explaining how it came to this: how big tech seized a specific historic moment when neoliberal economics, the war on terror, and advances in information technology converged. The big five’s tactics for avoiding regulatory control or even admitting what they actually do are set out chillingly well. While all this has certainly been discussed before, it is expressed especially well here. A slew of short articles over years are hard to distil sense from, whereas this book sets out the situation with admirable clarity. Chapter eleven lists characteristics that have allowed surveillance capitalism to take root, despite the fact that the Western population consistently claim to value privacy. The range and impact of these characteristics certainly makes sense of how we got here: lack of precedent, declaration as invasion, historical context, fortifications, the dispossession cycle, dependency, self-interest, inclusion, identification, authority, social persuasion, foreclosed alternatives, inevitabilism, the ideology of human frailty, ignorance, and velocity.
The most novel part for me was an exploration of the philosophy underlying surveillance capitalism. Since big tech aggressively avoids articulating such a thing, based on the spurious claim that data is totally neutral, this was especially interesting. Zuboff labels it instrumentalism and contrasts it powerfully with totalitarianism:
I particularly appreciated the link Zuboff made with behavioural economics and its rejection of the rationality assumption, while keeping all the other reductive and dubious assumptions of free market economics. The ‘nudge’ ethos of behavioural modification to optimise outcomes is entirely consistent with surveillance capitalism. Whenever I’ve read behavioural economics books over the years, the same questions come to mind: first off, why are you so amazed to have discovered very basic psychology? Secondly, whose behaviour are you nudging, why, and for whose benefit? This idea of nudging or tuning behaviour is deeply unsettling and contains potentially massive hidden contradictions, quite apart from its ethical implications. What if two companies in the big tech oligopoly try to push behaviour in different directions? Surely the vague aspiration of making the world run more smoothly and efficiently (whatever that means and for whom) is in conflict with the anger and violence social media stokes in politics?
I was slightly surprised that only towards the end of the book does Zuboff broach the corrosive political effects of social media, such as the spread of fake news and an adversarial, reductive, and angry political culture. In a way, she hardly needs to. The prior chapters set this up well, by explaining the ‘radical indifference’ that big tech has for the actual content it feeds to its users. The only aim is to increase revenues via a business model of maximising attention and engagement on the platform(s). If divisive, dangerous, and totally inaccurate material gets clicks and comments, then that’s good enough for facebook and google. They take zero responsibility for the consequences this has on politics, culture, and society, despite profiting massively from them. I’m actually glad this wasn’t mentioned earlier in the book, as it’s so depressing that it would have pulled focus from the economic and philosophical foundations beneath the surface.
As has probably become clear, I consider this a deeply thought-provoking and helpful book that has made my view of the world we live in a little clearer. That is the pinnacle of what you can hope for in non-fiction, in my view. Nonetheless, I didn’t agree with every word of it. Zuboff treats surveillance capitalism as a successor to industrial capitalism, stating several times that the latter wrecked the environment and now the former is wrecking the human soul. While I don’t disagree with this, I think surveillance capitalism is also making it much harder to deal with the consequences of industrial capitalism (which still exists as well! Smart phones don’t just manifest from the aether). Action to deal with climate change has been derailed by reactionary populist politics and a false equivalency between scientific research and conspiracy theories. The complex and long-term nature of environmental problems is totally unsuited to the acceleration and superficiality of social media. Moreover, surveillance capitalism is still capitalism, thus all about economic growth, increasing consumption, and wasteful energy use. I think these links should have been acknowledged a little more. Much like financial capitalism, surveillance capitalism is a parasite upon industrial capitalism; will it drain its host until they both die, I wonder?
I think the weakest material is in the final chapter, which considers how young people are growing up with pervasive internet surveillance that stunts their sense of self. This is more speculative and lacks the rigor and conviction of the other chapters. Which is not to say that I find the concept uninteresting or unimportant. Here, though, it is treated as something of an afterthought. The psychological effects of constant connectivity and a norm of performative content sharing, especially on children, deserve their own books. Mixing macro and micro-level analysis can be risky; this is a macro book and that is its great strength.
It is salutary to compare ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ with Paul Mason’s [b:Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future|24878857|Postcapitalism A Guide to Our Future|Paul Mason|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1437580637l/24878857._SY75_.jpg|44526761], which I read in 2015. Mason covered some similar ground, but drew very different conclusions that now appear remarkably naive. The contradictions that he suggested would bring down neoliberalism are resolved by surveillance capitalism. Mason wrote, and I agreed when I read it, that big tech’s control over data was fragile and unsustainable. I no longer believe that; the past four years have seen consolidation and expansion of google and facebook’s control over data. Over the same period, it has become evident that such data can be put to dangerous purposes with a total absence of democratic accountability. According to free market economic theory, the infinite supply of data should make it worthless. Quite the opposite occurs, as data becomes more and more valuable as its scale and complexity increases, because it can be used to make quicker and more accurate behaviour predictions, and to influence behaviour. Certainly not in a free market, though. Google, amazon, and facebook are in unassailable economic positions. Any company that tries to compete is bought by them.
The only threats to their dominance come from outside the market: regulation, essentially. Breaking up their monopolistic positions is part of public discourse, for example the proposals of Elizabeth Warren, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in the US. As with oil companies, though, there is great reluctance to face the fundamental problem: their business model. Oil companies have no place in any world that takes climate change seriously, because we must stop burning oil. Likewise, pervasive surveillance and data gathering have no place in any world that values privacy. Reliance on secretive behavioural monitoring and modification should also stop, but a ban on them seems even further away than a ban on burning oil. At present they appear inextricably linked with the internet, just as energy systems seems inextricably linked with fossil fuels. In both cases, the two developed interdependently, but their linkage isn't inevitable. The possibility exists of other energy systems and other forms of internet. To my mind, the first step to imagining better is understanding the flaws in what we have.
I am more pessimistic and negative about social media than most people I know, quite possibly most people in general. While it can have positive consequences, the fact that it is optimised by a handful of companies to take our data and sell us shit makes it fundamentally flawed. The internet has a lot of potential to bring people together; social media as currently constituted is more likely to push them further apart. I wonder whether Trump could have become president without twitter and facebook? Frankly I doubt it. The irony of my posting this on a social media site owned by amazon is not lost on me; this is how we live now. ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ takes the reader beyond the endless noise of twitter et al in an attempt to explain the underlying theory and structure of 21st century capitalism. I found it an invaluable guide that solidified ideas I already had, as well as introducing new concepts and raising new questions. Be warned: I’m probably not going to shut up about this one for a long while. Probably best to read it now, so you can make up your own mind. show less
Surveillance capitalism’s ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts. Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organisation and presentation of the world’s information. One man at facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks.
Zuboff centres her overall enquiry into surveillance capitalism on three fundamental questions: who knows? Who decides? And who decides who decides? The answers are disquieting, to say the least. It amazes me that so many people I know seem unconcerned about the amount of data the big five tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) have about them and how it is used. Not only do these firms have far more data about us than we can readily understand, its individual value is irrelevant in comparison to the value of it all in aggregate. Zuboff uses the term ‘economies of scale and scope’ for this. Big data is valuable because machine learning models require vast amounts to produce useful results. For work reasons, I recently taught myself data mining and basic machine learning in R. It was alarming to realise how easy to use yet fundamentally opaque big data analytics are. Neural networks aren’t really analogous to human brains in structure or function. The real similarity is that in neither case is it known why you get the result you do. Moreover, like human brains, neural networks makes mistakes. However their mistakes are very different to those of humans, and generally depend on how much data they’ve been trained on and what forms it took.
Zuboff does not discuss such technicalities. If you want an introduction to machine learning, I suggest this youtube video. She is, rightly, more interested in the data that google and others gather to feed machine learning models, which then predict our behaviour in order to sell us stuff. Once limited to your computer, the imperative to gather more and more behavioural data increasingly invades daily life via the internet of things:
The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product or service as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying. Where you might least expect it, products of every sort are remade by the new economic requirements of connection and rendition. Each is reimagined as a gateway to the new apparatus, praised for being ‘smart’ while traditional alternatives are reviled for remaining ‘dumb’. It is important to acknowledge that in this context, ‘smart’ is euphemism for rendition: intelligence that is designed to render some tiny corner of lived experience as behavioural data. Each smart object is a kind of marionette; for all its ‘smartness’, it remains a hapless puppet dancing to the puppet master’s hidden economic imperatives.
Zuboff is especially good at explaining how it came to this: how big tech seized a specific historic moment when neoliberal economics, the war on terror, and advances in information technology converged. The big five’s tactics for avoiding regulatory control or even admitting what they actually do are set out chillingly well. While all this has certainly been discussed before, it is expressed especially well here. A slew of short articles over years are hard to distil sense from, whereas this book sets out the situation with admirable clarity. Chapter eleven lists characteristics that have allowed surveillance capitalism to take root, despite the fact that the Western population consistently claim to value privacy. The range and impact of these characteristics certainly makes sense of how we got here: lack of precedent, declaration as invasion, historical context, fortifications, the dispossession cycle, dependency, self-interest, inclusion, identification, authority, social persuasion, foreclosed alternatives, inevitabilism, the ideology of human frailty, ignorance, and velocity.
The most novel part for me was an exploration of the philosophy underlying surveillance capitalism. Since big tech aggressively avoids articulating such a thing, based on the spurious claim that data is totally neutral, this was especially interesting. Zuboff labels it instrumentalism and contrasts it powerfully with totalitarianism:
Totalitarianism operated through the means of violence, but instrumentarian power operates through the means of behavioural modification, and this is where our focus must shift. Instrumentarian power has no interest in our souls or any principle to instruct. There is no training or transformation for spiritual salvation, no ideology against which to judge our actions. [...] It is profoundly indifferent to our meanings and motives. Trained on measurable action, it only cares that whatever we do is accessible to its ever-evolving operations of rendition, calculation, modification, monetisation, and control. [...] Totalitarianism was a political project that converged with economics to overwhelm society. Instrumentarianism is a market project that converges with the digital to achieve its own unique brand of social domination.
I particularly appreciated the link Zuboff made with behavioural economics and its rejection of the rationality assumption, while keeping all the other reductive and dubious assumptions of free market economics. The ‘nudge’ ethos of behavioural modification to optimise outcomes is entirely consistent with surveillance capitalism. Whenever I’ve read behavioural economics books over the years, the same questions come to mind: first off, why are you so amazed to have discovered very basic psychology? Secondly, whose behaviour are you nudging, why, and for whose benefit? This idea of nudging or tuning behaviour is deeply unsettling and contains potentially massive hidden contradictions, quite apart from its ethical implications. What if two companies in the big tech oligopoly try to push behaviour in different directions? Surely the vague aspiration of making the world run more smoothly and efficiently (whatever that means and for whom) is in conflict with the anger and violence social media stokes in politics?
I was slightly surprised that only towards the end of the book does Zuboff broach the corrosive political effects of social media, such as the spread of fake news and an adversarial, reductive, and angry political culture. In a way, she hardly needs to. The prior chapters set this up well, by explaining the ‘radical indifference’ that big tech has for the actual content it feeds to its users. The only aim is to increase revenues via a business model of maximising attention and engagement on the platform(s). If divisive, dangerous, and totally inaccurate material gets clicks and comments, then that’s good enough for facebook and google. They take zero responsibility for the consequences this has on politics, culture, and society, despite profiting massively from them. I’m actually glad this wasn’t mentioned earlier in the book, as it’s so depressing that it would have pulled focus from the economic and philosophical foundations beneath the surface.
As has probably become clear, I consider this a deeply thought-provoking and helpful book that has made my view of the world we live in a little clearer. That is the pinnacle of what you can hope for in non-fiction, in my view. Nonetheless, I didn’t agree with every word of it. Zuboff treats surveillance capitalism as a successor to industrial capitalism, stating several times that the latter wrecked the environment and now the former is wrecking the human soul. While I don’t disagree with this, I think surveillance capitalism is also making it much harder to deal with the consequences of industrial capitalism (which still exists as well! Smart phones don’t just manifest from the aether). Action to deal with climate change has been derailed by reactionary populist politics and a false equivalency between scientific research and conspiracy theories. The complex and long-term nature of environmental problems is totally unsuited to the acceleration and superficiality of social media. Moreover, surveillance capitalism is still capitalism, thus all about economic growth, increasing consumption, and wasteful energy use. I think these links should have been acknowledged a little more. Much like financial capitalism, surveillance capitalism is a parasite upon industrial capitalism; will it drain its host until they both die, I wonder?
I think the weakest material is in the final chapter, which considers how young people are growing up with pervasive internet surveillance that stunts their sense of self. This is more speculative and lacks the rigor and conviction of the other chapters. Which is not to say that I find the concept uninteresting or unimportant. Here, though, it is treated as something of an afterthought. The psychological effects of constant connectivity and a norm of performative content sharing, especially on children, deserve their own books. Mixing macro and micro-level analysis can be risky; this is a macro book and that is its great strength.
It is salutary to compare ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ with Paul Mason’s [b:Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future|24878857|Postcapitalism A Guide to Our Future|Paul Mason|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1437580637l/24878857._SY75_.jpg|44526761], which I read in 2015. Mason covered some similar ground, but drew very different conclusions that now appear remarkably naive. The contradictions that he suggested would bring down neoliberalism are resolved by surveillance capitalism. Mason wrote, and I agreed when I read it, that big tech’s control over data was fragile and unsustainable. I no longer believe that; the past four years have seen consolidation and expansion of google and facebook’s control over data. Over the same period, it has become evident that such data can be put to dangerous purposes with a total absence of democratic accountability. According to free market economic theory, the infinite supply of data should make it worthless. Quite the opposite occurs, as data becomes more and more valuable as its scale and complexity increases, because it can be used to make quicker and more accurate behaviour predictions, and to influence behaviour. Certainly not in a free market, though. Google, amazon, and facebook are in unassailable economic positions. Any company that tries to compete is bought by them.
The only threats to their dominance come from outside the market: regulation, essentially. Breaking up their monopolistic positions is part of public discourse, for example the proposals of Elizabeth Warren, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in the US. As with oil companies, though, there is great reluctance to face the fundamental problem: their business model. Oil companies have no place in any world that takes climate change seriously, because we must stop burning oil. Likewise, pervasive surveillance and data gathering have no place in any world that values privacy. Reliance on secretive behavioural monitoring and modification should also stop, but a ban on them seems even further away than a ban on burning oil. At present they appear inextricably linked with the internet, just as energy systems seems inextricably linked with fossil fuels. In both cases, the two developed interdependently, but their linkage isn't inevitable. The possibility exists of other energy systems and other forms of internet. To my mind, the first step to imagining better is understanding the flaws in what we have.
I am more pessimistic and negative about social media than most people I know, quite possibly most people in general. While it can have positive consequences, the fact that it is optimised by a handful of companies to take our data and sell us shit makes it fundamentally flawed. The internet has a lot of potential to bring people together; social media as currently constituted is more likely to push them further apart. I wonder whether Trump could have become president without twitter and facebook? Frankly I doubt it. The irony of my posting this on a social media site owned by amazon is not lost on me; this is how we live now. ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ takes the reader beyond the endless noise of twitter et al in an attempt to explain the underlying theory and structure of 21st century capitalism. I found it an invaluable guide that solidified ideas I already had, as well as introducing new concepts and raising new questions. Be warned: I’m probably not going to shut up about this one for a long while. Probably best to read it now, so you can make up your own mind. show less
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
I have finally finished reading Shoshana Zuboff’s epic book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It’s an impressive work that ties together a lot of trends into a very spooky picture of where we are headed when intimate data about each of us is used as the raw material for prediction and control.
What started as search and social platforms without much of a business model were transformed by the accidental discovery that the data trails we leave behind whenever we go online – show more “behavioral surplus” – is extraordinarily valuable. The more engaged we are online, the more these companies know about us, and the more they know, the more they can sell predictions of our behavior for people who want to modify it. The old saw about free platforms – if it’s free, you’re the product – isn’t quite true. You’re not the product, you’re the site of raw material extraction, and that extraction isn’t just to sell ads, it’s to provide the means of control to anyone who will profit from it.
That Fitbit your employer paid for? It feeds information to insurers that can use to change your behavior and reduce costs – or charge you more if you don’t comply. Google drove into our neighborhoods with camera-equipped cars to capture images of our communities and create detailed maps that will be useful for routing their self-driving cars and even planning entire cities where everything will be connected and everyone’s life experience moment by moment can be rendered as data. As Zuboff puts it, “It’s not the car; it’s the behavioral data from driving the car. It’s not the map, it’s the behavioral data from interacting with the map. The ideal here is continuously expanding borders that eventually describe the world and everything in it, all the time” (132).
We tend to think of this as an invasion of personal privacy, but to Zuboff this is a stealth usurpation of our freedoms. By insinuating themselves into our lives and keeping their operations and goals secret, these capitalists use interventions to “nudge, tune, herd, manipulate, and modify behavior in specific directions by executing actions as subtle as inserting a specific phrase into your Facebook news feed, timing the appearance of a BUY button on your phone, or shutting down your car engine when an insurance payment is late” (202). As they roll out wearable devices, “smart” homes, and “smart” cities all designed around capturing and using data, we will have no places of refuge. We’ll be nudged relentlessly in the kind of value-free behavior modification people were disturbed by when B. F. Skinner originally touted it.
What makes Zuboff particularly indignant is that this is not the kind of capitalism where benefits and risks are shared. These companies not only see the workings of a hand that is invisible to us, they guide it for their benefit and, in so doing, control us in what she calls “a coup from above.” Apparently she originally titled the book Master or Slave? – you can see the planned cover displayed in the Worldcat library record which grabbed the pre-publication image and didn’t update it. It sounds like a lost Ayn Rand novel, and that’s what brings me to my reservations.
It’s not just that the book is repetitive and too emotively indignant (this is a case where the old saw “show, don’t tell” might have been good editorial advice), it’s the fundamental argument that I can’t entirely buy. First, I’m not as convinced as she appears to be that capitalism before what she astutely calls the “neoliberal source code” of surveillance capitalism was so wonderfully balanced and just, that if we just had the right restore point we’d be fine.
Second, and more importantly, this week (the internet-broadcasted mass murder in New Zealand) has demonstrated how little control these platforms actually have over their rendered data-subjects. YouTube, Facebook, and other internet platforms were so thoroughly manipulated by a white supremacist terrorist that the companies were unable to stop the spread of a hateful message (and damage to their reputations). They gave a killer and his online wolf pack the tools, then couldn’t stop his message from getting out.
The story at the moment isn’t that we’ve had a coup from above, it’s that we’ve allowed reckless corporations to monetize speech with very few limits, algorithmically amplifying voices shouting “fire” on a crowded planet and making plenty of money doing it. We’ve allowed these surveillance capitalists to carry out endless experiments on all of us to perfect the tools of persuasion without insisting they simultaneously understand and contain the risks. The trouble isn’t just that they want to control us, but that they are unwilling to take responsibility and instead use their billions to fend off regulation while continuing feckless experimentation. They may aspire to total control, but meanwhile their control is dangerously shambolic and criminally careless.
Zuboff concludes “if democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades, it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us . . . the human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own life and authorship of one’s experience” (521). We certainly should heed her warning, but as chilling as the idea of being controlled by giant corporations is, the immediate problem is demanding they figure out how to deal with lawless behavior they’ve encouraged. We must find the civic will and means to insist they give a damn about what happens when their powerful tools of persuasion can be used indiscriminately by anyone who masters their tools, whether state actors, corporate owners, home-made YouTube stars, or violent extremists bent on turning mass murder into mass spectacle.
(Reposted from Inside Higher Ed) show less
What started as search and social platforms without much of a business model were transformed by the accidental discovery that the data trails we leave behind whenever we go online – show more “behavioral surplus” – is extraordinarily valuable. The more engaged we are online, the more these companies know about us, and the more they know, the more they can sell predictions of our behavior for people who want to modify it. The old saw about free platforms – if it’s free, you’re the product – isn’t quite true. You’re not the product, you’re the site of raw material extraction, and that extraction isn’t just to sell ads, it’s to provide the means of control to anyone who will profit from it.
That Fitbit your employer paid for? It feeds information to insurers that can use to change your behavior and reduce costs – or charge you more if you don’t comply. Google drove into our neighborhoods with camera-equipped cars to capture images of our communities and create detailed maps that will be useful for routing their self-driving cars and even planning entire cities where everything will be connected and everyone’s life experience moment by moment can be rendered as data. As Zuboff puts it, “It’s not the car; it’s the behavioral data from driving the car. It’s not the map, it’s the behavioral data from interacting with the map. The ideal here is continuously expanding borders that eventually describe the world and everything in it, all the time” (132).
We tend to think of this as an invasion of personal privacy, but to Zuboff this is a stealth usurpation of our freedoms. By insinuating themselves into our lives and keeping their operations and goals secret, these capitalists use interventions to “nudge, tune, herd, manipulate, and modify behavior in specific directions by executing actions as subtle as inserting a specific phrase into your Facebook news feed, timing the appearance of a BUY button on your phone, or shutting down your car engine when an insurance payment is late” (202). As they roll out wearable devices, “smart” homes, and “smart” cities all designed around capturing and using data, we will have no places of refuge. We’ll be nudged relentlessly in the kind of value-free behavior modification people were disturbed by when B. F. Skinner originally touted it.
What makes Zuboff particularly indignant is that this is not the kind of capitalism where benefits and risks are shared. These companies not only see the workings of a hand that is invisible to us, they guide it for their benefit and, in so doing, control us in what she calls “a coup from above.” Apparently she originally titled the book Master or Slave? – you can see the planned cover displayed in the Worldcat library record which grabbed the pre-publication image and didn’t update it. It sounds like a lost Ayn Rand novel, and that’s what brings me to my reservations.
It’s not just that the book is repetitive and too emotively indignant (this is a case where the old saw “show, don’t tell” might have been good editorial advice), it’s the fundamental argument that I can’t entirely buy. First, I’m not as convinced as she appears to be that capitalism before what she astutely calls the “neoliberal source code” of surveillance capitalism was so wonderfully balanced and just, that if we just had the right restore point we’d be fine.
Second, and more importantly, this week (the internet-broadcasted mass murder in New Zealand) has demonstrated how little control these platforms actually have over their rendered data-subjects. YouTube, Facebook, and other internet platforms were so thoroughly manipulated by a white supremacist terrorist that the companies were unable to stop the spread of a hateful message (and damage to their reputations). They gave a killer and his online wolf pack the tools, then couldn’t stop his message from getting out.
The story at the moment isn’t that we’ve had a coup from above, it’s that we’ve allowed reckless corporations to monetize speech with very few limits, algorithmically amplifying voices shouting “fire” on a crowded planet and making plenty of money doing it. We’ve allowed these surveillance capitalists to carry out endless experiments on all of us to perfect the tools of persuasion without insisting they simultaneously understand and contain the risks. The trouble isn’t just that they want to control us, but that they are unwilling to take responsibility and instead use their billions to fend off regulation while continuing feckless experimentation. They may aspire to total control, but meanwhile their control is dangerously shambolic and criminally careless.
Zuboff concludes “if democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades, it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us . . . the human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own life and authorship of one’s experience” (521). We certainly should heed her warning, but as chilling as the idea of being controlled by giant corporations is, the immediate problem is demanding they figure out how to deal with lawless behavior they’ve encouraged. We must find the civic will and means to insist they give a damn about what happens when their powerful tools of persuasion can be used indiscriminately by anyone who masters their tools, whether state actors, corporate owners, home-made YouTube stars, or violent extremists bent on turning mass murder into mass spectacle.
(Reposted from Inside Higher Ed) show less
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
Zuboff puts to rest one of the most nauseating clichés “If its free – You are the Product” an expression born out of neo liberal capitalistic paradigm and repeated by imbeciles in 21st century ; the new version “Its free – You are the chewed up carcass – The “Product” ; was your unique experience , now extracted by highly pervasive algorithms” .
A new virulent form of capitalism which puts Marx’s original critique “reduction of the human to a mere cog – desperate to show more find real meaning in life” to shame; for this time it’s not Nature in the cross-hairs ; its Human Nature .
Tech behemoths tracking every move of the modern ape from the ubiquitous social media platforms to smart homes to smart toothbrushes; mapping every behavioral aspect and selling it off the highest bidder for this data . Effects of two decades of unbridled invasion of privacy is most evident on “generation Z” Humans whose identity is highly susceptible to market forces ; which may be the latest version of Instagram , imposing a new form totalitarian conformity which focuses on creating a little more predictable , a little more docile ape .
I thoroughly enjoyed this book ; from use of Lacanian concepts like Big Other ( the machine ) & the Gaze to Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism to BF Skinner’s behavioral modification studies used by as a basis of algorithms which is further exacerbated by Congress appalling lack of understanding of how opaque things are to the general public with no regulation or laws in sight . show less
A new virulent form of capitalism which puts Marx’s original critique “reduction of the human to a mere cog – desperate to show more find real meaning in life” to shame; for this time it’s not Nature in the cross-hairs ; its Human Nature .
Tech behemoths tracking every move of the modern ape from the ubiquitous social media platforms to smart homes to smart toothbrushes; mapping every behavioral aspect and selling it off the highest bidder for this data . Effects of two decades of unbridled invasion of privacy is most evident on “generation Z” Humans whose identity is highly susceptible to market forces ; which may be the latest version of Instagram , imposing a new form totalitarian conformity which focuses on creating a little more predictable , a little more docile ape .
I thoroughly enjoyed this book ; from use of Lacanian concepts like Big Other ( the machine ) & the Gaze to Hannah Arendt’s totalitarianism to BF Skinner’s behavioral modification studies used by as a basis of algorithms which is further exacerbated by Congress appalling lack of understanding of how opaque things are to the general public with no regulation or laws in sight . show less
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