<nettime> James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review


The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review – we are 
the pawns
Tech companies want to control every aspect of what we do, for profit. A 
bold, important book identifies our new era of capitalism
By James Bridle
Sat 2 Feb 2019, The Guardian


The alarm beside your bed rings, triggered by an event in your calendar. 
The smart thermostat in your bedroom, sensing your motion, turns on the 
hot water and reports your movements to a central database. News updates 
ping your phone, with your daily decision whether to click on them or 
not carefully monitored, and parameters adjusted accordingly. How far 
and where your morning run takes you, the conditions of your commute, 
the contents of your text messages, the words you speak in your own home 
and your actions beneath all-seeing cameras, the contents of your 
shopping basket, your impulse purchases, your speculative searches and 
choices of dates and mates – all recorded, rendered as data, processed, 
analysed, bought, bundled and resold like sub-prime mortgages. The 
litany of appropriated experiences is repeated so often and so 
extensively that we become numb, forgetting that this is not some 
dystopian imagining of the future, but the present.

    While insisting their technology is too complex to be legislated, 
companies spend billions lobbying against oversight

Originally intent on organising all human knowledge, Google ended up 
controlling all access to it; we do the searching, and are searched in 
turn. Setting out merely to connect us, Facebook found itself in 
possession of our deepest secrets. And in seeking to survive 
commercially beyond their initial goals, these companies realised they 
were sitting on a new kind of asset: our “behavioural surplus”, the 
totality of information about our every thought, word and deed, which 
could be traded for profit in new markets based on predicting our every 
need – or producing it. In a move of such audacity that it bears 
comparison to the enclosure of the commons or colonial conquests, the 
tech giants unilaterally declared that these previously untapped 
resources were theirs for the taking, and brushed aside every objection. 
While insisting that their technology is too complex to be legislated, 
there are companies that have poured billions into lobbying against 
oversight, and while building empires on publicly funded data and the 
details of our private lives they have repeatedly rejected established 
norms of societal responsibility and accountability. And what is 
crucially different about this new form of exploitation and 
exceptionalism is that beyond merely strip-mining our intimate inner 
lives, it seeks to shape, direct and control them. Their operations 
transpose the total control over production pioneered by industrial 
capitalism to every aspect of everyday life.

The extraction is so grotesque, so creepy, that it is almost impossible 
to see how anyone who really thinks about it lives with it – and yet we 
do. There’s something about its opacity, its insidiousness, that makes 
it hard to think about, just as it’s hard to think about climate change, 
a process that will inevitably undo society as we currently understand 
it, yet is experienced by many of us as slightly better weather. 
Likewise the benefits of faster search results and turn-by-turn 
directions mask the deeper, destructive predations of what Shoshana 
Zuboff terms “surveillance capitalism”, a force that is as profoundly 
undemocratic as it is exploitative, yet remains poorly understood. As 
she details in her important new book, ignorance of its operation is one 
of the central strategies of this regime, and yet the tide is turning: 
more and more people express their unease about the surveillance economy 
and, disturbed by the fractious, alienated and trustless social sphere 
it generates, are seeking alternatives. It will be a long, slow and 
difficult process to extricate ourselves from the toxic products of both 
industrial and surveillance capitalism, but its cause is assisted by the 
weighty analysis provided by books such as this. Combining in-depth 
technical understanding and a broad, humanistic scope, Zuboff has 
written what may prove to be the first definitive account of the 
economic – and thus social and political – condition of our age.

Zuboff is no stranger to this territory. In her 1988 book In the Age of 
the Smart Machine, she addressed at the moment of their appearance in 
the business world many of the issues that have come to achieve 
dominance in our everyday life. Embedded within a large pharmaceutical 
company in the 1980s, she observed first-hand how new tools for internal 
communication, first welcomed by employees as novel social spaces in 
which they could better converse, plan and access information, were 
gradually recognised as tools for management intrusion and control. 
Aspects of employees’ personal experience that were implicit and private 
suddenly became explicit and public, were exposed to scrutiny and made 
the basis for evaluation, criticism and punishment. Now it is the 
interiors of all our lives that are exposed to invisible overseers, who 
do not merely profit from our actions, but increasingly control their 
every expression.

    Players think they are playing one game – collecting Pokémon – while 
they are in fact pawns in an entirely different one

Consider the apparently benign game Pokémon Go, both a ridiculous and a 
transparent example of the link between behavioural surplus and physical 
control. While its initial players lauded the game for its incitement to 
head outside into the “real world”, they in fact stumbled straight into 
an entirely fabricated reality, one based on years of conditioning human 
motivation through reward systems, and designed to herd its users 
towards commercial opportunities. Within days of the game’s launch in 
2016, its creators revealed that attractive virtual locations were for 
sale to the highest bidder, inking profitable deals with McDonald’s, 
Starbucks and others to direct Pokémon hunters to their front doors. The 
players think they are playing one game – collecting Pokémon – while 
they are in fact playing an entirely different one, in which the board 
is invisible but they are the pawns. And Pokémon Go is but one tiny 
probe extending out from Google and others’ vast capabilities to tune 
and manipulate human action at scale: a global means of behaviour 
modification entirely owned and operated by private enterprise.

The efficacy of Pokémon Go in impelling and directing human behaviour 
recalls nothing so strongly as the psychologist BF Skinner’s development 
of operant conditioning, and Skinner is one of many figures Zuboff 
evokes, implicates and critiques in her narrative. Skinner developed and 
perfected a technology of behaviour modification in living organisms, 
and extrapolated from it a politics rooted in total social control. 
Published in 1971, his incendiary treatise Beyond Freedom and Dignity 
prescribed a future of behavioural modification and redirection which 
rejected the very idea of freedom, replacing it with guaranteed outcomes 
and individual conformity. But while the targets of operant conditioning 
in the 20th century were always construed as “them” – enemies, prisoners 
and social misfits – and its implications were the subject of revulsion 
and rejection by a public fearful of “mind control”, the targets of the 
same logic today are all of us, and its possibilities have been embraced 
at the highest level, from the boardrooms of the most powerful 
corporations to governments seeking to both “nudge” their populations 
towards “better” decisions, and to surveil their inner moods and desires 
for any signs of deviance, dissent or radical intent.

For Zuboff, this dread force is not merely a higher expression of 
capitalism, but a perversion of it, and while some might regard that as 
special pleading, she is at pains to clarify where it differs from more 
equitable and mutually beneficial forms. As a consequence of placing her 
analysis within economic theory and a wider history of both capitalism 
and totalitarianism, she introduces a number of useful terms into the 
discussion which do much to move it forward. Much of the debate around 
Google, Facebook and their ilk, for example, has been framed in terms of 
privacy – as mere control over information about the self – and while 
many of these arguments are venerable and well-articulated, they’ve also 
been mostly lost. It seems people are very willing to give up their 
private information in return for perceived benefits such as ease of 
use, navigation and access to friends and information. Zuboff recasts 
the conversation around privacy as one over “decision rights”: the 
agency we can actively assert over our own futures, which is 
fundamentally usurped by predictive, data-driven systems. Engaging with 
the systems of surveillance capitalism, and acquiescing to its demands 
for ever deeper incursions into everyday life, involves much more than 
the surrender of information: it is to place the entire track of one’s 
life, the determination of ones path, under the purview and control of 
the market, just as Pokémon Go players are walked, lit by their glowing 
screens, straight through the doors of shops they didn’t even know they 
wanted to visit.

When this logic of invisible coercion is applied to the social sphere, 
its implications become even more disturbing. The belief that human 
behaviour can be perfectly modelled, predicted and controlled entrains 
as a consequence the collapse of equitable relations between individuals 
and trust in institutions, and the substitution of algorithmic certainty 
for any semblance of participatory, democratic society. There is no 
appeal to collective, contestable decision-making or to responsible 
business practices under this purported perfection of human behaviour. 
Surveillance capitalism, run as the code for everyday life, erases both 
free will and free markets – an outcome as horrifying to confirmed 
believers in “good old” capitalism, such as Zuboff, as to those of us 
who weren’t so sure about the original in the first place.

What is hinted at throughout the text, and made explicit in Zuboff’s 
closing insistence that subsequent generations must face up to this 
epochal challenge to the future, is that such utopian schemes are 
destined to fail. As experience has shown, the world – life itself – is 
cloudy, contingent and defined by change. As horrifying as the 
surveillance capitalists’ view of a totally controlled, perfectly 
articulated and error-free future might be, the inevitable failure of 
its vision, and the resultant violence – already evident in our 
fractured worldviews, competing fundamentalisms, weakening of social 
bonds, and distrust of one another – is perhaps more so. The work begins 
in demolishing the framework of this world order, but it continues in 
the establishment and enactment of new and better futures.

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is published by Profile (£25).
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