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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power<\/strong> Shoshana Zuboff\u00a0Profile Books, 704 pp, 2019<\/em><\/p>\n One night, amid a heavy storm, lightning strikes Shoshana Zuboff\u2019s home. There is smoke. She knows she must leave the house. But first Zuboff runs around closing the bedroom doors. She doesn\u2019t want the bed linen to smell of smoke. Finally, she runs downstairs. As she makes her way out the front door, a fireman grabs her and pulls her out into the rain. Almost immediately, the house explodes into flames and burns to the ground.<\/p>\n Just a few seconds earlier, Zuboff\u2019s biggest concern was preventing the bedrooms (where she assumed her family would sleep later that same night) from smelling of smoke. She had risked her life solving a problem that didn\u2019t need solving. The odour in a bedroom does not matter once the bedroom ceases to exist. As Zuboff admits in her brilliant, important new book, \u201cThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism,\u201d she had been incapable of perceiving the situation properly because she had never seen it before. It was unprecedented, and she equates quite a lot of our contemporary economic and political debate to closing bedroom doors in a fire.<\/p>\n Only free societies were deemed capable of producing sustained economic growth. In more recent years, however, rapid growth in countries with authoritarian political systems debunked this argument.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Society, she says, has transitioned to \u201ca new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sales\u201d. It is both a result and a profound distortion of the neoliberal paradigm that gained traction starting in the late 1970s. \u201cSurveillance capitalism\u201d extracts data and feeds it to machine intelligence. Those machines make predictions about what people will do later, and then trade those predictions on behavioral futures markets. Customers buy those predictions and use them to sell stuff back to us. Increasingly, that data is instrumentalized to actually shape our behavior in advance.<\/p>\n Any half-conscious person sees signs of these changes everywhere. Even seemingly benign, silly applications provide a window into the fundamental dishonesty of the surveillance capitalist model. Think about Poke\u0301mon Go, that foolish cell phone craze of a few years back that had people running around chasing virtual characters. Harmless, right?<\/p>\n Except those restaurants, bars and shops paid to place characters into their stores in hopes of boosting foot traffic and sales. You didn\u2019t go into the coffee shop to find a Poke\u0301mon character, you went there because the coffee shop invited you in. Tired from chasing around imaginary cartoons? Perhaps you need a tall mocha non-fat latte to go?<\/p>\n Late twentieth-century neo-liberalism\u2014economics predicated on privatization, deregulation and liberalization \u2014liked to equate free markets with free societies. Starting from 1980 or so, prevailing wisdom had it that regulating commerce amounted to an affront to political freedom. Only free societies were deemed capable of producing sustained economic growth. In more recent years, however, rapid growth in countries with authoritarian political systems debunked this argument, and a growing body of evidence indicates that democratic politics elsewhere have become much less free (not to mention more dysfunctional) over the same period.<\/p>\n In a 2017 study, the scholars Markus Wagner and Thomas Meyer charted 68 mainstream European political parties from 17 countries on a \u201cliberal-authoritarian axis\u201d and measured changes in positioning on issues like immigration, law and order, and nationalism between 1980 and 2014. Their conclusion? \u201cThe average center-left party today is about as authoritarian as the average radical-right party was in the early 1980s.\u201d<\/p>\n While neoliberalism\u2019s inurement to regulation, and preference for a weak state, created fertile ground for surveillance capitalism to take root, it has since grown in its own unique way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Zuboff channels the French economist Thomas Piketty in demonstrating how a stripped-down state and raw capitalism have spurred an unjust social order. \u201cWhat is unbearable is that economic and social inequalities have reverted to the preindustrial \u2018feudal\u2019; pattern but that we, the people, have not,\u201d she writes. \u201cWe are not illiterate peasants, serfs, or slaves.\u201d Surveillance capitalists\u2014Zuboff calls Google \u201cthe pioneer\u201d\u2014took advantage of neoliberal deregulation to colonize online space \u201clike an invasive species in a landscape free of natural predators.\u201d<\/p>\n They were further aided by the collective panic that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, \u201cwhen a national security apparatus galvanized by the attacks of 9\/11 was inclined to nurture, mimic, shelter and appropriate surveillance capitalism\u2019s emergent capabilities for the sake of total knowledge and its promise of certainty\u201d.<\/p>\n While neoliberalism\u2019s inurement to regulation, and preference for a weak state, created fertile ground for surveillance capitalism to take root, it has since grown in its own unique way. Purveyors of surveillance capitalism do not trade in traditional products and services. \u201cThey do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities,\u201d Zuboff writes. Rather, they use their products as \u201chooks\u201d in order to \u201clure users into their extractive operations\u201d. More data leads to more power. At some point, a huge firm amasses sufficient data as to make competition impossible. \u201c<\/p>\n A handful of large global firms have reaped the lion\u2019s share of the prof- its that [surveillance capitalism] has yielded,\u201d Zuboff\u2019s Harvard colleague Roberto Mangabeira Unger has written elsewhere. \u201cI conjecture that a major cause of economic stagnation in the period from the early 1970s to today has been the confinement of the knowledge economy to relatively insular vanguards rather than its economy-wide dissemination.\u201d<\/p>\n Surveillance capitalism combines the worst elements of authoritarianism (spying and centralization of power, albeit in the private sector) and laissez-faire economics (increased concentration of wealth, and a neutered state). This is a truly significant change from the earlier economic systems, that even reasonable arguments for deregulation no longer make sense, predicated\u2014as they are\u2014on the assumption that markets are so multifaceted and complex that any attempt to regulate them will fail to account for certain details and cause more harm than good. In contrast, surveillance capitalism, by definition, eliminates uncertainty, meaning that\u2014staying true to principles\u2014even the purest Hayekian would find the current economy ripe for regulation.<\/p>\n Surveillance capitalism combines the worst elements of authoritarianism (spying and centralization of power, albeit in the private sector) and laissez-faire economics (increased concentration of wealth, and a neutered state).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Zuboff\u2019s book divides into four sections. The first outlines the history of surveillance capitalism\u2019s development. In part two, Zuboff tracks how surveillance capitalism has moved from the online realm into the real world (your phone means you are surveilled when physically walking around town). Next, these same systems begin to move into the social world, altering how we interact with one another and increasingly modifying behaviors in advance.<\/p>\n In the final section, Zuboff describes how surveillance capitalism departs from traditional capitalist doctrine even as it traffics in similar rhetoric. The book is long and detailed but sprinkled with colorful anecdotes. Many telling stories show how far the public mindset has shifted in a very short time. It is essential reading for anybody trying to think about the political and economic mess we find ourselves in.<\/p>\n To be clear, Zuboff, a social psychologist at Harvard, is not opposed to advances in technology. She does, however, abhor the idea that the way the Internet has evolved is in any way natural. The aforementioned Unger frequently refers to a \u201cdictatorship of no alternatives\u201d and Zuboff deploys a similar idea that she terms \u201cinvevitabilism.\u201d<\/p>\n Major tech companies have managed to conflate \u201ccommercial imperatives with technical necessity,\u201d she writes. They do it on purpose, and we let them get away with it. Things need not have developed the way they have.<\/p>\n To be clear, Zuboff is not opposed to advances in technology. She does, however, abhor the idea that the way the Internet has evolved is in any way natural.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Back in 2000, Zuboff writes, a group of computer scientists at Atlanta\u2019s Georgia Institute of Technology developed a prototype of what they called an \u201cAware Home\u201d. The idea, as you might guess, was to use computers to optimize the functioning of a house.<\/p>\n Thermostats changed the heating based on the time of day, and how much a given room is utilized, saving the homeowner money, and so forth. By 2018, products emanating from a similar concept\u2014now called the \u201csmart-home\u201d\u2014comprised a $36 billion market.<\/p>\n But there had been a fundamental shift in the meantime, whereas experimenters at the beginning of the century assumed that people would want to keep the functioning of their private lives private, smart homes now collect the customer\u2019s behavioural data for the parent company.<\/p>\n In short, in less than 20 years, the idea of broadcasting details from one\u2019s home life transitioned from preposterous to a new norm. Did consumers ask for\u2014or acquiesce\u2014to this change? By 2023, revenues from the smart-home market are forecast to increase fivefold. \u201cWe now pay for our own domination,\u201d Zuboff writes.<\/p>\n Smart Cities Maybe Technocratically Efficient but They Need Not be Democratic While the Chinese are building a surveillance state, the West looks increasingly content to outsource coercion to the private sector. Though smart cities may be technocratically efficient (trains ran on time in Nazi Germany too), they need not be democratic.<\/p>\n In the late twentieth century, politicians ceded responsibility for economic policymaking, blaming all negative outcomes on the inevitable whims of \u201cthe market,\u201d and smart cities lead to even less democratic accountability. Discussion and human consultation are replaced by algorithms. Compromises that appeal to multiple stakeholders are out, certainty is in. Cuts in a transport budget, rerouting a bus line, or rezoning a certain land for commercial use are \u201csmart\u201d because the computer says they are. Anyone who disagrees is \u201cdumb\u201d.<\/p>\n While the Chinese are building a surveillance state, the West looks increasingly content to outsource coercion to the private sector.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In fact, the entire surveillance capitalist business model, including smart cities, depends on thwarting democratic will. When people are actually informed about how their personal information is circulated, they really do not like it. A poll of American adults found that 88 percent support a law\u2014 similar to one that exists in the EU\u2014that guarantees a right to be forgotten online.<\/p>\n A separate Pew poll found that 93 percent of people thought it important to control \u201cwho can get information about you\u201d. Surveillance capitalism depends on misleading people. As is the case with Poke\u0301mon Go, gaining and retaining customers is predicated on disguising the product. One 2008 study found that reading all the online privacy notices a person encounters in a year would take 76 full workdays\u2014a number that has no doubt grown in conjunction with more privacy notices over the past decade.<\/p>\n Recent history has shown how a lack of state intervention can distort and limit political freedom, and the unprecedented power amassed by major tech companies makes the situation even more acute. \u201cIf we are to regain\u00a0control of capital, we must bet everything on democracy,\u201d Thomas Piketty has written. The good news is that collective action and democratic politics have curbed the big business excess in the past.<\/p>\n The bad news is that big changes tended to occur only in the wake of profound crises, like World War I and World War II. Unger has argued that future change \u201crequires a change in our basic economic arrangements and assumptions: not simply a different way of regulating the market economy or of doing business under its present institutions,\u201d rather \u201c a different kind of market economy\u201d. This does not sound like a pain-free process.<\/p>\n Recent history has shown how a lack of state intervention can distort and limit political freedom, and the unprecedented power amassed by major tech companies makes the situation even more acute.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Thus far, the European Union has posed the most effective regulatory challenge to surveillance capital. But as an organization in a near-constant state of crisis, with a notable democratic deficit of its own, without other allies, the clash would seem to favor surveillance capitalism in the long run. For her part, Zuboff is clear: the house is on fire. \u201cAny effort to interrupt or dismantle surveillance capitalism will have to contend with this larger institutional landscape that protects and sustains its operations,\u201d she writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Shoshana Zuboff\u00a0Profile Books, 704 pp, 2019 One night, amid a heavy storm, lightning strikes Shoshana Zuboff\u2019s home. There is smoke. She knows she must leave the house. But first Zuboff runs around closing the bedroom doors. She doesn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":7818,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[106,143,401],"class_list":["post-9627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nezarazene","tag-capitalism","tag-culture","tag-surveillance"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9627"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10623,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9627\/revisions\/10623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aspeninstitutece.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Neo-liberalism Liked to Equate Free Markets with Free Societies<\/h2>\n
Economic and Social Inequalities have Reverted to the Feudal Pattern<\/h2>\n
Even Reasonable Arguments for Deregulation No Longer Make Sense<\/h2>\n
Tech Companies Conflate Commercial Imperatives with Technical Necessity<\/h2>\n
\nThis logic has now broadened in scope. Smart cities are predicated on the idea that urban problems are caused by a lack of data or the inability to analyze it. Political problems all have a right or wrong answer if only we can collect and interpret enough information.<\/p>\nThe House is on Fire<\/h2>\n