BOOK REPORT: THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: THE FIGHT FOR A HUMAN FUTURE AT THE NEW FRONTIER OF POWER by SHOSHANA ZUBOFF. Part One.

 

EARLIER TODAY, I WAS EDITING SOME POETRY ONLINE that I'd previously posted, changing fonts, re-sizing illustrations and what-not, then clicking “Publish” to re-install the refurbished poems on my blog. All well and good. I did this for several posts until my bor-ring alarm rang. Then, I read for a while and caught a few zzz’s (I sometimes don’t sleep well at night, so I nap during the day.) Later, when I fired up my hard drive again and checked my email, I found there an advertisement from Amazon.ca recommending the book, “Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. $24.33. Learn More.” 

Oh, Mother Amazon! Thank you! I know what many of you are thinking—that a how-to book on writing poetry might a helpful purchase for me (Thanks for that.) But, here’s the deal, fats: I’d been working on my poems only two hours earlier. I woke from my nap like Sleeping Beauty but discovered I'd been kissed by a Tech Giant! 

    Only $24.33!

QUESTION: How the heck did Amazon know I was fiddling with my poems?! And so quickly. What kind of web are these folks weaving? This blog is on Google’s platform not Amazon’s. So, Google hoovers-up my data--that I'm diligently striving to brush up some poems. It sells that info to Amazon which, in turn, crafts an advert and uses the info it has on file to email me a quickie book suggestion. WOW! 

Of course, this is the same as those pop-ups everyone gets when surfing the web, or reading a news blog, checking social media, etc., “click baits” that advertise products based on what you’ve been reading or searching, like adverts for hemorrhoid cream that pop-up when googling “Brazilian Fart Porn”. (Not that I would, of course.) So, I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised. Maybe I should be feeling warm fuzzies because Google and Amazon care so much about me and all the fun stuff I’m doing online? I dunno. But somehow, I’m left with cold chills, instead. 

 

IN A 1974 INTERVIEW, American science fiction-writer Phillip K. Dick¹ had this exchange with rock journalist Paul Williams:

Dick: “I want to lay an idea on you, man. There are no privacies versus publixes anymore.”

 

Williams: “There are no secrets.”

 

Dick: “There are no private lives. This is what Nixon found out. [The disgraced American president during the Watergate scandal who was forced to resign. Ed.] ‘Course he engineered it himself with the tapes. This is the most important aspect of modern life. As a science-fiction writer, dealing with the future, I want to speak to this. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets, and nothing is private. Everything is public.” (Last Interview. 38-9.)

 

TODAY, the speculations Dick made some fifty years ago are becoming commonplace, even acceptable—where our private lives are something of a luxury, something we “trade away” to gain access to the public spaces of our digital world via social media, or to conduct business, communicate, or receive news and information, "special" digital services and perks,  or to be entertained. And, in addition to our on-line activity, we are also surveilled at work, on the street, in stores and in our homes, and again, this seems a necessary and acceptable compromise we must make to benefit from powerful, new technologies of what’s been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. To understand what is meant by this term, we turn to the ever-helpful World Economic Forum to advise us—the organization dedicated to furthering the power and wealth-accumulation objectives of global elites. It provides us with a rationale for the revolution few of us anticipated or wanted:

“The Fourth Industrial Revolution may look and feel like an exogenous force with the power of a tsunami, but in reality, it is a reflection of our desires and choices. At the heart of discussions around emerging technologies there is a critical and central question: what do we want these technologies to deliver for us?” (WEF. "What Is", 2016)

 

Yet, for a growing number of people, this new, digital metropolis being built around us seems increasingly like a cul de sac. But the WEF tells us it's an edifice of our own making; in fact, it is the “shining city on the hill” we have always desired. Rainbows and Unicorns! If you believe that, man, then I've got some swamp land in Florida to sell to you!

 

THAT’S WHY Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is so timely and important. In it, she calculates the “debits and credits” of such a revolutionary system, and what we can expect (namely, to be short-changed by it), if surveillance capitalism is allowed to grow and establish itself as the dominant economic model for our world.

“Surveillance capitalism”, a term coined by Zuboff, is “a new logic of accumulation.” It is a new form of capitalism² whose aim is “to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to produce revenue and market [italics mine] control.” (“Big Other”, 75). In rapid succession (less than two decades), the architecture for a new economic order is well on its way to being assembled. The collection of corporations that operate under this new economic model Zuboff, not entirely  tongue-in-cheek, calls "Big Other"  (referencing Orwell’s “Big Brother"). Through the exponential growth of private tech companies, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, Big Other wields enormous resources geared towards harvesting and analyzing vast troves of digital data, using the information it acquires from its multitude of sources, to make predictions about the behaviour of individuals and groups, and ultimately, to manipulate their actions with “total certainty.”³

The tools of Big Other are its powerful proprietary algorithms, its vast server farms, wearable body sensors, cameras, phones, AI, "personal assistants", vehicles and robotic devices, and devices created for the “Internet of Things”, etc., as well as a business model whose revenue streams demand an ever-increasing volume of raw data about the world and about us. These new digital and "real world" machine ecologies give Big Other its power, one that Zuboff calls "instrumentarian” power.

 

THIS NEW ECONOMIC MODEL OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM wants nothing less than a world it can digitally map and monetize, and a human population it can predict and control. And, I know! It’s the stuff of science fiction. Right? But as Zuboff points out, Big Other, with its ability to digitally extract, categorize, analyze, and increasingly utilize all available data has, like the previous era’s capitalism, an imperative of infinite growth. Big Other simply can’t stop. If it stops collecting new data, then its predictive models—the keys to its success—become less accurate and therefore less attractive to advertisers who are, after all, the main source of its wealth. (Poor Jeff Bezos might not be able to afford another spaceflight if that happens!) Zuboff suggests Big Other’s goal of total control is like another system that aimed at total control of society: totalitarianism.

“To command populations right down to their souls requires unimaginable effort, which was one reason why totalitarianism was unimaginable.⁴ It requires henchmen, and their henchmen, and their henchmen, all willing to roll up both sleeves and thrust both hands into the blood and shit of actual living persons whose bodies stink and sweat and cry out in terror, grief, and pain. It measures success at the cellular level, penetrating to the quick, where it subverts and commands each unspoken yearning in pursuit of the genocidal vision that historian Richard Shorten calls ‘the experiment in reshaping humanity.’” (259)

 

SHE CONTRASTS totalitarian power with instrumentarian power, which “moves differently and toward an opposite horizon.” (360) Totalitarian power uses violence as a means of social control. It uses terror, indoctrination, and subjugation to root out all deviations from the reigning ideology, the central authority’s mantra. It works to change people’s inner selves, their psyches, to tear away any vestige of resistance to dogma, to break their bodies, minds, and spirits, to change their humanity.

 

ON THE OTHER HAND, “instrumentarianism” has no interest in instructing or possessing, indoctrinating, or capturing or controlling peoples’ souls. Instead, “[i]t welcomes data on the behaviour [italics mine] of our blood and shit, but it has no interest in soiling itself with our excretions. It has no appetite for our grief, our pain…although it eagerly welcomes the “behavioural surplus”⁵ that leaches from our anguish.” (360) Big Other’s instrumentarian power seeks “market” domination of society whereby everything becomes a “transaction”—from our bodies outward to the natural world—everything is a vector for monetization. Traditional authoritarian power seeks political domination over its populace, such as in the former USSR under Stalin. Zuboff notes that the effects of surveillance capitalism  on individuals, their actions and on the wider society are just as far reaching an “experiment in reshaping humanity” (Shorten) as was the machinery of totalitarianism during the middle twentieth century, except instead of bullets and blood, today it’s “clicks” and “likes”.

 

I THINK I'LL STOP HERE before I’m up to my eyeballs in the weeds. Zuboff has much more to say about  Surveillance Capitalism, and I'll try to do her book justice in a follow up post. I know it’s hard to appreciate the reality of it all; we just don’t see the true nature and potential of Big Other. It’s not apparent to us.

And I think it would have been equally hard for someone living in a village or on a small croft somewhere in the rolling hills of England’s green and pleasant West Country to appreciate the reality of that smelly, new mill being built along the banks of the nearby stream and its true nature and potential, and how it would affect their lives and livelihoods, in the dawning years of the nineteenth century.

 

 

Cheers, Jake.  

__________________________________________ 

 

1. Dick wrote prolifically in his far too short lifetime (he died at age 53), with several of his novels and short stories being made into major Hollywood movies like “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (Blade Runner), “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (Total Recall) and The Man in the High Castle (TV series). The short story, “Minority Report” (also made into a major motion picture), with its theme of “pre-crime” policing, is arguably his most focused examination of “the diminution of the sphere of the private” where individual intentions, not actions—in this case the intent to commit murder—are recorded by “mutant telepaths” in service to a state surveillance system.

—Interesting side-note: I used DuckDuckGo’s search engine to download the Minority Report trailer for this footnote. As I did, a pop-up announced that I was not allowed to view this video “anonymously”. I could view it through Duck’s search result or click onto YouTube button to watch it there. Either way, the pre-crime announcement stated, Google, which owns YouTube where the vid is located, would be “tracking” me. [Thanks for letting me know, Goog! I think I’ll download the movie Dystopia unless that’s a pre-crime, too. “Keep watching the skies!” Ed.]

 

^2. Shoshana contends that advances in computer design, the growth of the internet and computational resources, and the rapid rise of technology firms, particularly since 2000, created a new type of capitalism with a corporate sector whose discovery, and then command, of new digital resources—meta-data, previously deemed as a by-product of their systems, a digital “waste”—became both the template for future digital companies, as well as forcing traditional “information” and industrial businesses to adopt similar data acquisition and manipulation practices.

 

^3.  The goal of these new digital giants is “predictability”, to be able to calculate with complete confidence how people will respond to the digital “tuning”, “herding” and “conditioning” stimulus they apply. (The last term is taken directly from Behavioral Psychology, and in particular, the work of B. F. Skinner that Zuboff discusses in some detail.) The goal of Big Other is accomplished through massive intakes of constantly updating data on people’s work, home and community lives. The more that is known, digitally, about someone, the more robust predictive models will be to determine how they will react to certain news items or advertisements, for example, or how and where they will shop, or vote, their health status, relationships, what media they will watch, their travel routes and the destinations they visit during their day, etc. etc. Anything and everything are grist for the data mills of big tech.     

^4. “Unimaginableness” is an important piece of the puzzle to help us understand how surveillance capitalism has been able to overwhelm existing social and economic structures so suddenly and decisively, including laws, standards of conduct and legal norms. One reason, Zuboff suggests, is because people in general, including legislators, jurists, journalists, and academics simply couldn’t imagine it; it was “unprecedented”, a word she frequently uses to describe this unique economic order so foreign (and opaque) to most people’s experience.

This incomprehension on the part of traditional, "old school" industrial capitalists, politicians and populations as to the true nature, function, and power of surveillance capitalists and their new organs of economic activity is, in many  respects, disturbingly similar to the totalitarian systems of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the 1930s, whose state machineries were geared to controlling every aspect of their citizens’ lives—the hugeness of such projects, their unprecedented scope and scale, their hidden venues for domination, created during the decades between the two world wars, were simply beyond most people’s comprehension. And it wasn’t until the end of WWII that scholars began to theorize and address how such enormous and despotic machineries of social control and repression could have come into existence.

The economic system of surveillance capitalism is like a totalitarian political regime in its unprecedented scale and scope, its furious pace of development (barely two decades in the making), its hidden agendas and processes, and in its ability to upend previous command and supply structures. Still, it remains for the most part hidden, its operations opaque and its true nature couched behind legal frameworks, contractual laws, and successful public relations campaigns. And most of all—through public acquiescence.

 

^{5. “}Behavioural Surplus”: digital data about user behaviour left over after technical data requirements necessary to maintain, operate and improve networked services, which can then be used for commercial benefit. Transactional data produced as a by-product of activity mediated through digital systems and initially seen as waste, sometimes called “digital exhaust”. In the early 2000s, Google was one of the first tech firms to realise the commercial significance of transactional data and began harvesting it. One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.

 

 

 

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future At the New Frontier of Power. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2019. Print.

 

--“Big other: “Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization”: 75-89. Journal of Information Technology: Research, (2015) 30. Web. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754         

 

Streitfeld, David Ed. The Last Interview and Other Conversations: Phillip K. Dick. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2015. Print.

 

Davis, Nicholas. "What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?": World Economic Forum, 2016. Web.

 

 

 

 

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