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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