The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
By Shoshana Zuboff
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You should read this book.
What’s your view as to the most pressing issue facing humankind
today? Climate change? Nuclear war? Viral pandemic? Mine is surveillance
capitalism.
Whoa, but aren’t the other issues of an existential nature,
capable of wiping out the human race? Yes, but… in each case there are experts
and activists working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.
The problem with surveillance capitalism is that very few people
outside of Google, Facebook, and other Big Tech even know what it is, and they
aren’t working to stop it. Far from it.
You should read this book.
Shoshana Zuboff is a social psychologist who studies and writes
about the impact of technology on people. I read her 1988 book, In The Age of
the Smart Machine, where, over 30 years ago, she investigated the early impact
of smart machines on people’s lives. But that was before Google, and Facebook,
and surveillance capitalism.
Zuboff is a professor at Harvard Business School. She has spent
her career researching how the information age has morphed into something not
so positive: surveillance capitalism. What does that term even mean? Here are
her many definitions, with which she begins the book:
Surveillance Capitalism, n:
1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw
material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales;
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is
subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A
rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and
power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a
surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the
twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the
nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that
asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market
democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on
total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best
understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.
I came across surveillance capitalism in my final job, working in
cybersecurity and learning about the dark side of mobile phones with their
persistent surveillance and egregious invasions of privacy. I have therefore
been aware of how our corporate masters cynically capture many aspects of our
lived experience so they can deliver “better” ads. The overall goal, as with all
advertising, is to sell us more stuff. For this, our privacy is stealthily
violated. This I already knew.
But I now know that I was only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
Zuboff outlines how Google, Facebook and Big Tech can now take a “God’s eye
view” of the data resulting from our lived experience--our location, calls,
texts, emails, digital assistants, web surfing, online purchases, offline
purchases, connections, friends, social media posts, likes, follows, and many
other factors--and can appropriate that as their proprietary data and
inferences which can be sold to advertisers, yes, but also to other entities
including insurance companies, financial service companies, educational
institutions, law enforcement, city, state and federal governments, and any
other entity willing to pay.
We know that websites track us. We know our phone also tracks us,
to the degree we should call is surveillance. But as the so-called Internet of
Things (IoT) relentlessly comes into pervasive reality, we can (and are) being
tracked by smart speakers, TVs, appliances, cars, toys, thermostats, smart
vacuums, security systems, and soon--clothing and other wearables. Zuboff
refers to the sum of surveillance devices as Big Other (sounds like Big
Brother--get it?). And here’s a key point: It’s not big brother. It’s not the
government. Out 4th amendment rights don’t protect us. This pervasive
surveillance infrastructure--the Big Other--is controlled by our corporate
masters. Companies such as Google and Facebook gather bazillion data points
daily, and, using millions of servers deployed around the world, unseen but
powerful, and deduce characteristics about us that we can’t know, can’t appeal,
and which control our lives. Want a job? The algorithm that used to just scan
resumes now adds everything it knows about you--right or wrong--to determine
who gets the job. And who gets the loan. And who qualifies for the house. And
what the length of your sentence is.
As time goes on, surveillance capitalism shifts from a system that
can deliver you relevant ads, to one that controls your life. Without
transparency or accountability.
I won't go too far in describing what these technologies can do to
children, because it makes me too upset. Suffice it to say, something called
"persuasive technology" has been weaponized by Facebook and others to
manipulate children's emotions for commercial gain.
Zuboff is not a technologist, but she puts tech in perspective.
She compares surveillance capitalism to the industrial revolution,
totalitarianism, the cultural trend towards individualism, and how behavior
modification became accepted (which also caused me to drop out of college as a
psych major, coincident with B.F. Skinner’s publishing Beyond Freedom and
Dignity). Zuboff cites philosophers, social scientists, economists,
psychologists, and of course tech industry leaders. In this book she provides a
360-degree perspective on the many factors that influence this movement. And
she sounds a warning.
Naomi Klein says “everyone needs to read this book as an act of
digital self defense.” Robert Reich says “Her sweeping analysis demonstrates
the unprecedented challenges to human autonomy, social solidarity, and
democracy perpetrated by this rogue capitalism.”
Rogue capitalism. You don’t have to be a techie to understand it,
but you have to pay attention.
You should read this book.
