Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Brian Holmes]

I agree with David. Chandler's "The Visible Hand" was also written from a
business-school perspective, with a much greater flattening of all the
stakes and a much less critical outlook; but still it's a valuable book for
understanding the vertically integrated corporation, and to use as a foil
when putting forth alternative analyses. We will be stuck with Surveillance
Capitalism for a long time to come; but you could do worse.

It's important to grasp why she says such inane things about "the Apple
miracle," such as:

"The potential significance of Apple’s tacit new logic was never fully
grasped, even by the company itself. Instead, the corporation produced a
steady stream of contradictions that signaled business as usual."

On the one hand this is a relic of her own early Internet enthusiasm:
something pretty much everyone has to cop to. But her variety is different.
She needs to believe there is a potentially good outcome from the corporate
order. At some points she identifies Apple with the Ford Motor Company, as
the inventor of positive forms of mass consumption bringing the fruits of
industry to the people, with a contrast to General Motors that would have
perverted the dream. Without ever mentioning Roosevelt and the New Deal,
she speaks about a gradual overcoming of all the exploitation and injustice
that accompanied the emergence of the mass production system. But this is
as absurd as the idealization of Apple, it doesn't hold up, and often she
will also take Ford as just another of the giant corporations.

The whole thing gets more interesting, but also wierder, when she brings up
Ulrich Beck's notion of the "Second Modernity," characterized by hyperbolic
individualism. Apple is supposed to fulfill the desires of the
self-reflexive individual. She has no critical take on this at all: she
does not see that the forms of individualism that we have now result from
over a centuries' worth of advertising, which repurposed Romantic
aspirational literature as a lure in the market. It's a typically American
thing: you are not locked into the spiral of "individual freedom" with all
its devastatingly repressive consequences; instead there is a paradise out
there somewhere, where you can just take a bite of the forbidden fruit.

All of this culminates in the way that she uses Polanyi's notion of the
double movement. For her it's just shorthand for diffuse social resistance
leading to political reforms. So you would have the initial movement of
surveillance capitalism, then a countervailing movement which at once
"brings us back" to some supposedly just social order (postwar social
democracy?) while it also "bringis us forward" to a Third Modernity of
hyperindividualism fulfilled. This is a total evisceration of Polanyi's
concept, which is not just another way of saying resistance. Instead the
double movement includes an overwhelming reaction to the damage caused by
capitalism - a reaction that ends up being even worse than the problem that
sparked it. Check it out:

"This was more than the usual defensive behavior of society faced with
change; it was a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric
of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization of
production that the market had called into being Two vital functions of
society, the political and the economic, were being used and abused as
weapons in a struggle for sectional interests. It was out of such a
perilous deadlock that in the twentieth century the fascist crisis sprang."

The above is what's happening today. A huge popular reaction is being
fuelled by the abuses of neoliberal capitalism, which are of multiple
orders: economic, cultural, political, environmental. The reaction takes up
the available forms of racism, nationalism, sexism and authoritarianism,
which then mask and distort the reality that capitalist exploitation of the
earth, of labor, of engagement - and indeed of one's very dreams, in the
case of corporations like Apple - is at the root of the whole crisis. The
resentment that is the leading political affect throughout all the Western
societies today is fuelled by hatred of the oligarchs at the head of
Google, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, and a thousand other megabanks and
megacorporations, plus all their yes men in governments around the world -
and yet this resentment misses its own target and puts a wannabe
billionnaire like Trump in charge, in order to make everything still worse.
Zuboff seemingly has no clue about this. She refers to Polanyi over and
over again, but despite a brief and highly dramatic development at the very
end of Part II, she never goes into the specificity of his key concept.

So yeah, like David I think there's a lot to learn from Surveillance
Capitalism. It's a fascinating read, it brings together tons of
fine-grained technological analysis and also some quite interesting theory
- definitely much more than you would expect from Morozov's review. But at
the bottom of it there's a naivete

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Rachel O' Dwyer]

thanks!

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 11:26 AM David Garcia <
d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk> wrote:

> Felix wrote:
>
> > Mozorov puts lots of emphasis on her lack of engagement with other
> > theories of contemporary capitalism and her unwillingness to considers
> > options beyond the market. And, really, not even Wikipedia is ever
> > mentioned (expect as a source once) and Free Software only in relation
> > to Android and Google's strategy to dominate it. Thus, she never asks
> > why such alternatives exist and what could be done to support them. So,
> > the only alternative we get is Apple, the company, as Richard Stallman
> > famously put it, that "made prison look cool”.
>
> I am also reading this large tome in bits and moments.. But so far I
> actually do feel
> there is more engagement other theories of 'contemporary capitalism’ than
> she is being
> given credit for by Mozorov. She goes into some detail on the relevance of
> Hannah Arendt’s
> complication of Marx’s concept of 'primitive accumulation’ (page 99) with
> regard to Google’s
> discovery of the potential for exploitation of the vast quantities of our
> ‘behavioural surplus’
> which they simply seized as the new ‘virgin rain forest’ in the
> permissionless culture
> of Sylicon valley.
>
> Zuboff points out that Arendt complicates both Polanyi and Marx’s
> notion by pointing out that ‘primitive accumulation’ wasnt just "a one
> time primal explosion
> that gave rise to capitalism but a recuring phase in a repeating cycle as
> more aspects of
> the social and natural world are subordinated to the market dynamic.
>
> Zuboff then proceeds to show how David Harvey builds on Arendt’s writing
> with his notion
> of the “accumulation of dispossession”.. In this case of course we are
> being dispossed of our
> own most intimate life spaces..
>
> Coincidentally I was reading an interview with Harvey this morning where
> he asserts
> that “extraction and appropriation of value (often through dispossession)
> at the point
> of realisation is a political focus of struggle as are the qualities of
> daily life”
> hewire.in/economy/david-harvey-marxist-scholar-neo-liberalism
>
> So Zuboff provides useful explanetory and rhetorical tools to more
> aggressively contest
> these new sites of accumulation.
>
> Of course I am quite early and I am sure that many of the flaws spotted
> are accurate
> but lack of engagement with other theories of capitalism doesnt seem to be
> quite correct.
>
> She is certainly able to draw multiple familier threads together with some
> lucidity and anger which is
> an achievement. As well as the ‘guts’ and intellectual confidence to pick
> fights with powerful contemporary
> players whom she identifies as complicit with surveilance capitalism
> (which differentiates her from other
> highly placed scholars of the digital e.g. Manuel Castells).
>
> Although the extreme praise (the new Adam Smith or Marx etc) are probably
> ludicrous
> (so far and I am just a few chapters in) I think there is plenty of value
> to be found in the
> nearly 700 hundred pages.
>
>
>
>
> #  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
> #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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> #  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
>


-- 
http://www.rachelodwyer.com/

+353 (85) 7023779
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[David Garcia]

Felix wrote:

> Mozorov puts lots of emphasis on her lack of engagement with other
> theories of contemporary capitalism and her unwillingness to considers
> options beyond the market. And, really, not even Wikipedia is ever
> mentioned (expect as a source once) and Free Software only in relation
> to Android and Google's strategy to dominate it. Thus, she never asks
> why such alternatives exist and what could be done to support them. So,
> the only alternative we get is Apple, the company, as Richard Stallman
> famously put it, that "made prison look cool”.

I am also reading this large tome in bits and moments.. But so far I actually 
do feel 
there is more engagement other theories of 'contemporary capitalism’ than she 
is being 
given credit for by Mozorov. She goes into some detail on the relevance of 
Hannah Arendt’s 
complication of Marx’s concept of 'primitive accumulation’ (page 99) with 
regard to Google’s 
discovery of the potential for exploitation of the vast quantities of our 
‘behavioural surplus’ 
which they simply seized as the new ‘virgin rain forest’ in the permissionless 
culture 
of Sylicon valley. 

Zuboff points out that Arendt complicates both Polanyi and Marx’s 
notion by pointing out that ‘primitive accumulation’ wasnt just "a one time 
primal explosion 
that gave rise to capitalism but a recuring phase in a repeating cycle as more 
aspects of
the social and natural world are subordinated to the market dynamic. 

Zuboff then proceeds to show how David Harvey builds on Arendt’s writing with 
his notion
of the “accumulation of dispossession”.. In this case of course we are being 
dispossed of our
own most intimate life spaces..

Coincidentally I was reading an interview with Harvey this morning where he 
asserts 
that “extraction and appropriation of value (often through dispossession) at 
the point 
of realisation is a political focus of struggle as are the qualities of daily 
life”
hewire.in/economy/david-harvey-marxist-scholar-neo-liberalism

So Zuboff provides useful explanetory and rhetorical tools to more aggressively 
contest
these new sites of accumulation.  

Of course I am quite early and I am sure that many of the flaws spotted are 
accurate 
but lack of engagement with other theories of capitalism doesnt seem to be 
quite correct.

She is certainly able to draw multiple familier threads together with some 
lucidity and anger which is
an achievement. As well as the ‘guts’ and intellectual confidence to pick 
fights with powerful contemporary 
players whom she identifies as complicit with surveilance capitalism (which 
differentiates her from other
highly placed scholars of the digital e.g. Manuel Castells). 

Although the extreme praise (the new Adam Smith or Marx etc) are probably 
ludicrous 
(so far and I am just a few chapters in) I think there is plenty of value to be 
found in the
nearly 700 hundred pages.

   


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Rachel O' Dwyer]

Can't wait to read these.
I just started it last night but already feel like it's very reductive and
suggests that this mode of extractive capital begins in 2001 with Google
where there's a huge body of theory (autonomist Marxism etc) that explores
the rise of these tendencies from the 1960s/1970s onwards. I'm really
curious to hear everyone's thoughts
Thanks for sharing these here :)


On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 10:13 AM Felix Stalder  wrote:

>
> On 08.02.19 03:27, Brian Holmes wrote:
>
> > That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth
> > reading. It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but
> > it's fascinating at points and hopefully gets better as you go.
> > Morozov has written the perfect intro for a critical read of what
> > might become a landmark book- if the situation it describes does not
> > again suddenly change beyond recognition, as it easily could.
>
> I've read bit and pieces by now, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't
> get better and is in line with her earlier articles and talks you can
> find online.
>
> Mozorov highlighted many of the problematic aspects of her approach,
> which he boils down to her claim that the imbalance of power between the
> individual user and corporations is a novel thing, and that prior to the
> current phase, capitalism worked by making transparent offers to
> rational consumers who would choose from these offers based on their
> own, genuine needs and desires.
>
> Thus her proposals to change the situation are all about restoring this
> individual autonomy, through what she calls "right to the future" (aka
> the ability to change ones life without being restricted by predictions
> based on past behavior) and "right to sanctuary" (which, basically,
> is an elaborate version of 'my home is my castle').
>
> Mozorov puts lots of emphasis on her lack of engagement with other
> theories of contemporary capitalism and her unwillingness to considers
> options beyond the market. And, really, not even Wikipedia is ever
> mentioned (expect as a source once) and Free Software only in relation
> to Android and Google's strategy to dominate it. Thus, she never asks
> why such alternatives exist and what could be done to support them. So,
> the only alternative we get is Apple, the company, as Richard Stallman
> famously put it, that "made prison look cool".
>
> But not only does she barely engage with capitalism, she also does not
> engage with the surveillance as a feature of contemporary life that
> preceded "surveillance capitalism" by decades, if not centuries (a line
> of thinking that stretches from Foucault to David Lyon et al). Strangely
> enough, she also doesn't engage with the history of "behavioral
> modification", which has played a major role in the history of
> capitalism in the last 100 years. This ignorance is necessary to keep
> her basic premise, about the sudden undermining of individual autonomy
> alive.
>
> Of course, there is much to like on the book as well, particularly her
> claim that what we are living through is really a "coup from above: an
> overthrow of the people’s sovereignty." But is this really the result of
> "surveillance capitalism" or, more broadly, of neo-liberalism, as
> post-democracy theory has been arguing since the late 1990s?
>
> Nevertheless, it puts this again into the table and connects it to some
> of the most powerful actors in the economy and it highlights the demands
> for regulation. Which leads Mozorov to the following question:
>
> > Should we accept the political utility of Zuboff’s framework while
> > rejecting its analytical validity? I’d argue that we can proceed down
> > that path only if we understand the price of doing so: a greater
> > sense of confusion with regard to the origins, operations, and
> > vulnerabilities of digital capitalism.
>
> No. We need to come up with a better reading of the current situation
> regarding informational capitalism.
>
> Both Zuboff and Mozorov mention in passing Polanyi, though don't make
> much of it. I think that concept of a fictitious commodity can be
> usefully expanded. So far, this has mainly been done in relation to
> knowledge [1], but this does not work well.
>
> It works better with "engagement" as the commodity form of
> "communication". I tried to develop this idea in a talk recently and
> posted the relevant segment to nettime recently as "Engagement, a new
> fictitious commodity"
>
> https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1901/msg00039.html
>
> To expand a bit on this post: the old settlement between communication
> as a social (non-market) activity and engagement as a commodity, created
> by laws and ethical standards, broke down as new set of corporations
> established a radical market-system for communication. Initially, this
> was seen as a liberation, because the old settlement was unable to cope
> with the rising diversity of cultural/political positions seeking new
> forms of expression. But over time, the pressure

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Felix Stalder]

On 08.02.19 03:27, Brian Holmes wrote:

> That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth 
> reading. It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but
> it's fascinating at points and hopefully gets better as you go.
> Morozov has written the perfect intro for a critical read of what
> might become a landmark book- if the situation it describes does not
> again suddenly change beyond recognition, as it easily could.

I've read bit and pieces by now, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't
get better and is in line with her earlier articles and talks you can
find online.

Mozorov highlighted many of the problematic aspects of her approach,
which he boils down to her claim that the imbalance of power between the
individual user and corporations is a novel thing, and that prior to the
current phase, capitalism worked by making transparent offers to
rational consumers who would choose from these offers based on their
own, genuine needs and desires.

Thus her proposals to change the situation are all about restoring this
individual autonomy, through what she calls "right to the future" (aka
the ability to change ones life without being restricted by predictions
based on past behavior) and "right to sanctuary" (which, basically,
is an elaborate version of 'my home is my castle').

Mozorov puts lots of emphasis on her lack of engagement with other
theories of contemporary capitalism and her unwillingness to considers
options beyond the market. And, really, not even Wikipedia is ever
mentioned (expect as a source once) and Free Software only in relation
to Android and Google's strategy to dominate it. Thus, she never asks
why such alternatives exist and what could be done to support them. So,
the only alternative we get is Apple, the company, as Richard Stallman
famously put it, that "made prison look cool".

But not only does she barely engage with capitalism, she also does not
engage with the surveillance as a feature of contemporary life that
preceded "surveillance capitalism" by decades, if not centuries (a line
of thinking that stretches from Foucault to David Lyon et al). Strangely
enough, she also doesn't engage with the history of "behavioral
modification", which has played a major role in the history of
capitalism in the last 100 years. This ignorance is necessary to keep
her basic premise, about the sudden undermining of individual autonomy
alive.

Of course, there is much to like on the book as well, particularly her
claim that what we are living through is really a "coup from above: an
overthrow of the people’s sovereignty." But is this really the result of
"surveillance capitalism" or, more broadly, of neo-liberalism, as
post-democracy theory has been arguing since the late 1990s?

Nevertheless, it puts this again into the table and connects it to some
of the most powerful actors in the economy and it highlights the demands
for regulation. Which leads Mozorov to the following question:

> Should we accept the political utility of Zuboff’s framework while
> rejecting its analytical validity? I’d argue that we can proceed down
> that path only if we understand the price of doing so: a greater
> sense of confusion with regard to the origins, operations, and
> vulnerabilities of digital capitalism.

No. We need to come up with a better reading of the current situation
regarding informational capitalism.

Both Zuboff and Mozorov mention in passing Polanyi, though don't make
much of it. I think that concept of a fictitious commodity can be
usefully expanded. So far, this has mainly been done in relation to
knowledge [1], but this does not work well.

It works better with "engagement" as the commodity form of
"communication". I tried to develop this idea in a talk recently and
posted the relevant segment to nettime recently as "Engagement, a new
fictitious commodity"

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1901/msg00039.html

To expand a bit on this post: the old settlement between communication
as a social (non-market) activity and engagement as a commodity, created
by laws and ethical standards, broke down as new set of corporations
established a radical market-system for communication. Initially, this
was seen as a liberation, because the old settlement was unable to cope
with the rising diversity of cultural/political positions seeking new
forms of expression. But over time, the pressure to increase profits by
focusing solely on commodity production, and the pressures to operate in
such an environment placed on everyone, began to undermine communication
(as negotiation of shared meaning) more and more, to the degree that
within these radical market systems, almost all non-market element have
been destroyed, and hence, undermining societies ability to communicate.

Hence, we need to ask, what kind of resistance (aka double movement) and
new institutional arrangements do we need to protect and expand our
collective capacity to communicate. There are lots of possible answers
t

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Florian Cramer]

Postscript to my last posting:

I had forgot to mention Constanze Kurz' and Frank Riegers 2011
German-language book "Die Datenfresser: Wie Internetfirmen und Staat sich
unsere persönlichen Daten einverleiben und wie wir die Kontrolle darüber
zurückerlangen" ("The Data-vores: How Internet companies and the state
swallow up our personal data and how we regain control over it"). Both were
Chaos Computer Club speakers and know their subject inside out, in practice
as well as in theory.

What I find exceptional about this book is how it doesn't simply put the
blame on bad corporate ethics and governance, but reconstructs - with a
small startup company as its scenario -, the Internet industry's systemic
necessity of collecting, mining and selling out customer data (under
real-life profitability pressures).

-F


-- 
blog: *https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
*
bio:  http://floriancramer.nl


On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 6:54 PM Florian Cramer  wrote:

> While Zuboff popularized the term "surveillance capitalism" in 2015, she
> wasn't the first person who wrote about it. The underlying issues had
> already been analyzed in Wendy Chun's "Control and Freedom" from 2008.
> Regarding the specific surveillance capitalism of the big social media
> companies, Christian Fuchs' 2011 paper "An Alternative View of Privacy on
> Facebook" strikes me as notable:
>
> "Abstract: The predominant analysis of privacy on Facebook focuses on
> personal information revelation. This paper is critical of this kind of
> research and introduces an alternative analytical framework for studying
> privacy on Facebook, social networking sites and web 2.0. This framework is
> connecting the phenomenon of online privacy to the political economy of
> capitalism—a focus that has thus far been rather neglected in research
> literature about Internet and web 2.0 privacy. Liberal privacy philosophy
> tends to ignore the political economy of privacy in capitalism that can
> mask socio-economic inequality and protect capital and the rich from public
> accountability. Facebook is in this paper analyzed with the help of an
> approach, in which privacy for dominant groups, in regard to the ability of
> keeping wealth and power secret from the public, is seen as problematic,
> whereas privacy at the bottom of the power pyramid for consumers and normal
> citizens is seen as a protection from dominant interests. Facebook's
> understanding of privacy is based on an understanding that stresses
> self-regulation and on an individualistic understanding of privacy. The
> theoretical analysis of the political economy of privacy on Facebook in
> this paper is based on the political theories of Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt
> and Jürgen Habermas. Based on the political economist Dallas Smythe's
> concept of audience commodification, the process of prosumer
> commodification on Facebook is analyzed. The political economy of privacy
> on Facebook is analyzed with the help of a theory of drives that is
> grounded in Herbert Marcuse's interpretation of Sigmund Freud, which allows
> to analyze Facebook based on the concept of play labor (= the convergence
> of play and labor).
> Keywords: Facebook; social networking sites; political economy; privacy;
> surveillance; capitalism"
>
> https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/1/140/htm
>
>
> --
> blog: *https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
> *
> bio:  http://floriancramer.nl
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 1:38 PM Francis Hunger <
> francis.hun...@irmielin.org> wrote:
>
>> Indirectly related to Morozov's insightful discussion of Zuboffs
>> "surveillance capitalism" is my own short blurb on "surveillancism" at
>> http://databasecultures.irmielin.org/surveillancism (which I wrote
>> without having read Zuboff)
>>
>> This tries to provide a kind of self-critique of how often discussions of
>> that might become interesting, turn to "surveillance" instead. Comments
>> would be welcome.
>>
>> best
>>
>> Francis
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 5, 2019, 9:00 AM Felix Stalder >
>>>
>>> I found Mozorov's massive review more interesting.
>>>
>>> https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
>>
>>
>> Yes I totally agree. Morozov presents the most important Marxist analyses
>> that Zuboff doesn't bother to reference - exactly the ones that have been
>> nettime mainstays for 20 years. He also shows the narrowness of an account
>> centered only on corporate consumerism, remarking that the resistance and
>> transformation Zuboff calls for
>>
>> " will not win before both managerial capitalism and surveillance
>> capitalism are theorized as “capitalism”—a complex set of historical and
>> social relationships between capital and labor, the state and the monetary
>> system, the metropole and the periphery—and not just as an aggregate of
>> individual firms responding to imperat

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Florian Cramer]

While Zuboff popularized the term "surveillance capitalism" in 2015, she
wasn't the first person who wrote about it. The underlying issues had
already been analyzed in Wendy Chun's "Control and Freedom" from 2008.
Regarding the specific surveillance capitalism of the big social media
companies, Christian Fuchs' 2011 paper "An Alternative View of Privacy on
Facebook" strikes me as notable:

"Abstract: The predominant analysis of privacy on Facebook focuses on
personal information revelation. This paper is critical of this kind of
research and introduces an alternative analytical framework for studying
privacy on Facebook, social networking sites and web 2.0. This framework is
connecting the phenomenon of online privacy to the political economy of
capitalism—a focus that has thus far been rather neglected in research
literature about Internet and web 2.0 privacy. Liberal privacy philosophy
tends to ignore the political economy of privacy in capitalism that can
mask socio-economic inequality and protect capital and the rich from public
accountability. Facebook is in this paper analyzed with the help of an
approach, in which privacy for dominant groups, in regard to the ability of
keeping wealth and power secret from the public, is seen as problematic,
whereas privacy at the bottom of the power pyramid for consumers and normal
citizens is seen as a protection from dominant interests. Facebook's
understanding of privacy is based on an understanding that stresses
self-regulation and on an individualistic understanding of privacy. The
theoretical analysis of the political economy of privacy on Facebook in
this paper is based on the political theories of Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt
and Jürgen Habermas. Based on the political economist Dallas Smythe's
concept of audience commodification, the process of prosumer
commodification on Facebook is analyzed. The political economy of privacy
on Facebook is analyzed with the help of a theory of drives that is
grounded in Herbert Marcuse's interpretation of Sigmund Freud, which allows
to analyze Facebook based on the concept of play labor (= the convergence
of play and labor).
Keywords: Facebook; social networking sites; political economy; privacy;
surveillance; capitalism"

https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/1/140/htm


-- 
blog: *https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
*
bio:  http://floriancramer.nl


On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 1:38 PM Francis Hunger 
wrote:

> Indirectly related to Morozov's insightful discussion of Zuboffs
> "surveillance capitalism" is my own short blurb on "surveillancism" at
> http://databasecultures.irmielin.org/surveillancism (which I wrote
> without having read Zuboff)
>
> This tries to provide a kind of self-critique of how often discussions of
> that might become interesting, turn to "surveillance" instead. Comments
> would be welcome.
>
> best
>
> Francis
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 5, 2019, 9:00 AM Felix Stalder 
>>
>> I found Mozorov's massive review more interesting.
>>
>> https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
>
>
> Yes I totally agree. Morozov presents the most important Marxist analyses
> that Zuboff doesn't bother to reference - exactly the ones that have been
> nettime mainstays for 20 years. He also shows the narrowness of an account
> centered only on corporate consumerism, remarking that the resistance and
> transformation Zuboff calls for
>
> " will not win before both managerial capitalism and surveillance
> capitalism are theorized as “capitalism”—a complex set of historical and
> social relationships between capital and labor, the state and the monetary
> system, the metropole and the periphery—and not just as an aggregate of
> individual firms responding to imperatives of technological and social
> change. "
>
> That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth
> reading. It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but it's
> fascinating at points and hopefully gets better as you go. Morozov has
> written the perfect intro for a critical read of what might become a
> landmark book- if the situation it describes does not again suddenly change
> beyond recognition, as it easily could.
>
> Best, Brian
>
>>
>>
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> --
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>
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>

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Francis Hunger]

  
  
Indirectly related to Morozov's insightful discussion of Zuboffs
  "surveillance capitalism" is my own short blurb on
  "surveillancism" at
  http://databasecultures.irmielin.org/surveillancism (which I wrote
  without having read Zuboff)

This tries to provide a kind of self-critique of how often
  discussions of that might become interesting, turn to
  "surveillance" instead. Comments would be welcome.

best
Francis








  
  

  On Tue, Feb 5, 2019, 9:00 AM Felix Stalder 

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Brian Holmes]

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019, 9:00 AM Felix Stalder 
> I found Mozorov's massive review more interesting.
>
> https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov


Yes I totally agree. Morozov presents the most important Marxist analyses
that Zuboff doesn't bother to reference - exactly the ones that have been
nettime mainstays for 20 years. He also shows the narrowness of an account
centered only on corporate consumerism, remarking that the resistance and
transformation Zuboff calls for

" will not win before both managerial capitalism and surveillance
capitalism are theorized as “capitalism”—a complex set of historical and
social relationships between capital and labor, the state and the monetary
system, the metropole and the periphery—and not just as an aggregate of
individual firms responding to imperatives of technological and social
change. "

That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth reading.
It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but it's fascinating
at points and hopefully gets better as you go. Morozov has written the
perfect intro for a critical read of what might become a landmark book- if
the situation it describes does not again suddenly change beyond
recognition, as it easily could.

Best, Brian

>
>
#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Felix Stalder]

I found Mozorov's massive review more interesting.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov

Felix

On 05.02.19 13:49, Patrice Riemens wrote:
> 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
> 

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

[Patrice Riemens]

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 int