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

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

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
> 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 intrusion and control.
> Aspects of employees’ personal experience that were implicit and private
> suddenly became explicit and public, were exposed to scrutiny and made
> the basis for evaluation, criticism and punishment. Now it is the
> interiors of all our lives that are exposed to invisible overseers, who
> do not merely profit from our actions, but increasingly control their
> every expression.
> 
>     Players think they are playing one game – collecting Pokémon – while
> they are in fact pawns in an entirely different one
> 
> Consider the apparently benign game Pokémon Go, both a ridiculous and a
> transparent example of the link between behavioural surplus and physical
> control. While its initial players lauded the game for its incitement to
> head outside into the “real world”, they in fact stumbled straight into
> an entirely fabricated reality, one based on years of conditioning human
> motivation through reward systems, and designed to herd its users
> towards commercial opportunities. Within days of the game’s launch in
> 2016, its creators revealed that attractive virtual locations were for
> sale to the highest bidder, inking profitable deals with McDonald’s,
> Starbucks and others to direct Pokémon hunters to their front doors. The
> players think they are playing one game – collecting Pokémon – while
> they are in fact playing an entirely different one, in which the board
> is invisible but they are the pawns. And Pokémon Go is but one tiny
> probe extending out from Google and others’ vast capabilities to tune
> and manipulate human action at scale: a global means of behaviour
> modification entirely owned and operated by private enterprise.
> 
> The efficacy of Pokémon Go in impelling and directing human behaviour
> recalls nothing so strongly as the psychologist BF Skinner’s development
> of operant conditioning, and Skinner is one of many figures Zuboff
> evokes, implicates and critiques in her narrative. Skinner developed and
> perfected a technology of behaviour modification in living organisms,
> and extrapolated from it a politics rooted in total social control.
> Published in 1971, his incendiary treatise Beyond Freedom and Dignity
> prescribed a future of behavioural modification and redirection which
> rejected the very idea of freedom, replacing it with guaranteed outcomes
> and individual conformity. But while the targets of operant conditioning
> in the 20th century were always construed as “them” – enemies, prisoners
> and social misfits – and its implications were the subject of revulsion
> and rejection by a public fearful of “mind control”, the targets of the
> same logic today are all of us, and its possibilities have been embraced
> at the highest level, from the boardrooms of the most powerful
> corporations to governments seeking to both “nudge” their populations
> towards “better” decisions, and to surveil their inner moods and desires
> for any signs of deviance, dissent or radical intent.
> 
> For Zuboff, this dread force is not merely a higher expression of
> capitalism, but a perversion of it, and while some might regard that as
> special pleading, she is at pains to clarify where it differs from more
> equitable and mutually beneficial forms. As a consequence of placing her
> analysis within economic theory and a wider history of both capitalism
> and totalitarianism, she introduces a number of useful terms into the
> discussion which do much to move it forward. Much of the debate around
> Google, Facebook and their ilk, for example, has been framed in terms of
> privacy – as mere control over information about the self – and while
> many of these arguments are venerable and well-articulated, they’ve also
> been mostly lost. It seems people are very willing to give up their
> private information in return for perceived benefits such as ease of
> use, navigation and access to friends and information. Zuboff recasts
> the conversation around privacy as one over “decision rights”: the
> agency we can actively assert over our own futures, which is
> fundamentally usurped by predictive, data-driven systems. Engaging with
> the systems of surveillance capitalism, and acquiescing to its demands
> for ever deeper incursions into everyday life, involves much more than
> the surrender of information: it is to place the entire track of one’s
> life, the determination of ones path, under the purview and control of
> the market, just as Pokémon Go players are walked, lit by their glowing
> screens, straight through the doors of shops they didn’t even know they
> wanted to visit.
> 
> When this logic of invisible coercion is applied to the social sphere,
> its implications become even more disturbing. The belief that human
> behaviour can be perfectly modelled, predicted and controlled entrains
> as a consequence the collapse of equitable relations between individuals
> and trust in institutions, and the substitution of algorithmic certainty
> for any semblance of participatory, democratic society. There is no
> appeal to collective, contestable decision-making or to responsible
> business practices under this purported perfection of human behaviour.
> Surveillance capitalism, run as the code for everyday life, erases both
> free will and free markets – an outcome as horrifying to confirmed
> believers in “good old” capitalism, such as Zuboff, as to those of us
> who weren’t so sure about the original in the first place.
> 
> What is hinted at throughout the text, and made explicit in Zuboff’s
> closing insistence that subsequent generations must face up to this
> epochal challenge to the future, is that such utopian schemes are
> destined to fail. As experience has shown, the world – life itself – is
> cloudy, contingent and defined by change. As horrifying as the
> surveillance capitalists’ view of a totally controlled, perfectly
> articulated and error-free future might be, the inevitable failure of
> its vision, and the resultant violence – already evident in our
> fractured worldviews, competing fundamentalisms, weakening of social
> bonds, and distrust of one another – is perhaps more so. The work begins
> in demolishing the framework of this world order, but it continues in
> the establishment and enactment of new and better futures.
> 
> • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is published by Profile (£25).
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