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BOOKEND
It’s worse than you thought:
the age of surveillance capitalism
W
e’re all part of the information age, taking for
granted the digital technology that underpins
our lives. Despite signs of a ‘techlash’
against all-powerful tech giants, our relationship with
the tech itself remains largely unchanged. We ponder
the implications of the Cambridge Analytica scandal,
yet millions of us still have Facebook and Instagram
accounts. It’s too integral to the way we live today, the
tech too complex and its march all too inexorable, right?
Wrong, says Harvard Professor, Shoshana Zuboff, who
argues in her new book that it’s incumbent on all of us to
think again about how the effects of
digitisation that we experience today
have come about, and the threat they
pose to nothing less than the future
of human nature and democracy.
Zuboff’s central challenge is to
the inevitability and unknowability
of technological advance; for her,
the information age is less about
the nature of digital technology
itself, but a new form of capitalism
that has harnessed it for its own
purposes. What she calls “surveillance
capitalism” is a human creation.
Just as the Ford Motor Company
pioneered the new economics of
mass production, so companies today
have pioneered a new economic
system based on the surreptitious
exploitation of our most intimate
data, our “behavioural surplus”. It
works by providing free services to
billions of us, all the while allowing
service providers to collect, monitor,
package and trade information about
our preferences, personalities and emotions – mostly
without our explicit consent.
So far, so familiar. But while surveillance capitalism
was the brainchild of Silicon Valley, its reach is now
ubiquitous. Think about the plethora of ‘smart’,
‘personalised’ or ‘internet-enabled’ products around
our houses and workplaces, each designed to create
a flow of ‘behavioural data’. And as competition in the
new economy has increased, surveillance capitalism has
entered its second, more intense, phase: the discovery
that the biggest returns come not just from knowing our
behaviour, but by intervening to shape it, generating a
new form of power Zuboff terms “instrumentarianism”.
Instrumentarian power “knows and shapes human
behaviour toward others’ ends”; it’s about behaviour
modification. Users of Pokemon Go might feel that they
are playing an enjoyable game chasing virtual monsters.
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Future Talent
But the monstrous thing is that players are being subtly
‘nudged’ into visiting retail locations actively bidding for
their custom. It’s a perfect example of the ability to tune
into and manipulate human action on a global scale.
Seen through the lens of instrumentarianism, the
expropriation of Facebook profiles to influence electoral
politics or the Chinese state’s ‘social-credit’ system
suggest a disturbing potential for social and political –
as well as commercial – manipulation. The quantified
self has become the managed and directed self. It feels
a long way away from Google’s promise to “do no evil”.
Zuboff argues that such an
unprecedented threat requires the
right ‘vaccines’. As surveillance capitalist
companies accumulate wealth and
power, digital technology divides us into
those with knowledge, and therefore
power, and those without. This is a
brand of capitalism that “should not be
eaten raw” but needs to be “cooked” by
democratic institutions to reintroduce
some much-needed reciprocity. In
the early 20th century, the unbridled
industrial capitalism of the US ‘robber
barons’ was tamed by a regulatory
regime that understood that practices
such as child labour were inimical to a
social contract that would ultimately
make it sustainable. We need the same
kind of bold legislative moves today.
The book offers a convincing case
that surveillance capitalism has thrived
in a regulation-light environment,
encouraged by neoliberalism and
reinforced by a renewed focus on state
surveillance in the wake of 9/11.
As digital users, we are all guilty of a collective
‘numbing’, blithely clicking on over-complex user
agreements or privacy policies. If we are to address the
threats posed by surveillance capitalism, then Zuboff’s
project to survey, analyse and name that threat is an
important precursor to action. The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism has been compared to seminal works, from
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to Thomas Piketty’s
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and with good
reason. It provides a wide-ranging analysis of how we
now live and consume, plus practical suggestions for
what needs to happen next. By naming and explaining
an unease we have struggled to articulate, Zuboff gives
us the vocabulary and tools to fight back.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future
at the New Frontier of Power is published by Profile Books.