bwo Kiran Jonnalagadda & Frederick Noronha, with thanks
original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook
'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance
capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model
that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton
explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key
questions
John Naughton
The Observer/Guardian, Sun 20 Jan 2019
We’re living through the most profound transformation in our information
environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa
1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s
impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the
only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all
dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four
centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495
could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel
the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic
church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science;
create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of our
brains; and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet
printing did all this and more.
Why choose 1495? Because we’re about the same distance into our
revolution, the one kicked off by digital technology and networking. And
although it’s now gradually dawning on us that this really is a big deal
and that epochal social and economic changes are under way, we’re as
clueless about where it’s heading and what’s driving it as the citizens
of Mainz were in 1495.
That’s not for want of trying, mind. Library shelves groan under the
weight of books about what digital technology is doing to us and our
world. Lots of scholars are thinking, researching and writing about this
stuff. But they’re like the blind men trying to describe the elephant in
the old fable: everyone has only a partial view, and nobody has the
whole picture. So our contemporary state of awareness is – as Manuel
Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace once put it – one of “informed
bewilderment”.
Which is why the arrival of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is such a big
event. Many years ago – in 1988, to be precise – as one of the first
female professors at Harvard Business School to hold an endowed chair
she published a landmark book, The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future
of Work and Power, which changed the way we thought about the impact of
computerisation on organisations and on work. It provided the most
insightful account up to that time of how digital technology was
changing the work of both managers and workers. And then Zuboff appeared
to go quiet, though she was clearly incubating something bigger. The
first hint of what was to come was a pair of startling essays – one in
an academic journal in 2015, the other in a German newspaper in 2016.
What these revealed was that she had come up with a new lens through
which to view what Google, Facebook et al were doing – nothing less than
spawning a new variant of capitalism. Those essays promised a more
comprehensive expansion of this Big Idea.
And now it has arrived – the most ambitious attempt yet to paint the
bigger picture and to explain how the effects of digitisation that we
are now experiencing as individuals and citizens have come about.
The headline story is that it’s not so much about the nature of digital
technology as about a new mutant form of capitalism that has found a way
to use tech for its purposes. The name Zuboff has given to the new
variant is “surveillance capitalism”. It works by providing free
services that billions of people cheerfully use, enabling the providers
of those services to monitor the behaviour of those users in astonishing
detail – often without their explicit consent.
“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human
experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.
Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest
are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced
manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated
into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and
later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of
marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance
capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations,
for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”
While the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has been
known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has
been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship
to situate them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us
think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in
fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long
evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to
managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to
the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the
surveillance of users. In that sense, her vast (660-page) book is a
continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl
Polanyi and – dare I say it – Karl Marx.
Digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two
groups: the watchers and the watched
Viewed from this perspective, the behaviour of the digital giants looks
rather different from the roseate hallucinations of Wired magazine. What
one sees instead is a colonising ruthlessness of which John D
Rockefeller would have been proud. First of all there was the arrogant
appropriation of users’ behavioural data – viewed as a free resource,
there for the taking. Then the use of patented methods to extract or
infer data even when users had explicitly denied permission, followed by
the use of technologies that were opaque by design and fostered user
ignorance.
And, of course, there is also the fact that the entire project was
conducted in what was effectively lawless – or at any rate law-free –
territory. Thus Google decided that it would digitise and store every
book ever printed, regardless of copyright issues. Or that it would
photograph every street and house on the planet without asking anyone’s
permission. Facebook launched its infamous “beacons”, which reported a
user’s online activities and published them to others’ news feeds
without the knowledge of the user. And so on, in accordance with the
disrupter’s mantra that “it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for
permission”.
When the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “surveillance is the
business model of the internet” he was really only hinting at the
reality that Zuboff has now illuminated. The combination of state
surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital
technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups:
the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched.
This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of
knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most
democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state
surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its
privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.
And it won’t be easy to fix because it requires us to tackle the essence
of the problem – the logic of accumulation implicit in surveillance
capitalism. That means that self-regulation is a nonstarter. “Demanding
privacy from surveillance capitalists,” says Zuboff, “or lobbying for an
end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking old Henry
Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten
its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential
threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”
The Age of Surveillance Capital is a striking and illuminating book. A
fellow reader remarked to me that it reminded him of Thomas Piketty’s
magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in that it opens one’s
eyes to things we ought to have noticed, but hadn’t. And if we fail to
tame the new capitalist mutant rampaging through our societies then we
will only have ourselves to blame, for we can no longer plead ignorance.
...................
Ten questions for Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Larry Page saw that human experience
could be Google’s virgin wood’
Continuing a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl
Polanyi, Marx… Shoshana Zuboff.
John Naughton: At the moment, the world is obsessed with Facebook. But
as you tell it, Google was the prime mover.
Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism is a human creation. It lives
in history, not in technological inevitability. It was pioneered and
elaborated through trial and error at Google in much the same way that
the Ford Motor Company discovered the new economics of mass production
or General Motors discovered the logic of managerial capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to
financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling
company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure
mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward
advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their
exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in
combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and
computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through
rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.
Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing
cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data
surplus, and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this
surplus.
The company developed new methods of secret surplus capture that could
uncover data that users intentionally opted to keep private, as well as
to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not
provide. And this surplus would then be analysed for hidden meanings
that could predict click-through behaviour. The surplus data became the
basis for new predictions markets called targeted advertising.
Here was the origin of surveillance capitalism in an unprecedented and
lucrative brew: behavioural surplus, data science, material
infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated
platforms. As click-through rates skyrocketed, advertising quickly
became as important as search. Eventually it became the cornerstone of a
new kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale.
The success of these new mechanisms only became visible when Google went
public in 2004. That’s when it finally revealed that between 2001 and
its 2004 IPO, revenues increased by 3,590%.
JN: So surveillance capitalism started with advertising, but then became
more general?
SZ: Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to advertising than mass
production was limited to the fabrication of the Ford Model T. It
quickly became the default model for capital accumulation in Silicon
Valley, embraced by nearly every startup and app. And it was a Google
executive – Sheryl Sandberg – who played the role of Typhoid Mary,
bringing surveillance capitalism from Google to Facebook, when she
signed on as Mark Zuckerberg’s number two in 2008. By now it’s no longer
restricted to individual companies or even to the internet sector. It
has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic
sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance,
entertainment, education, transportation, and more, birthing whole new
ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market-makers, and market
players. Nearly every product or service that begins with the word
“smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled device, every “digital
assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface for the unobstructed flow
of behavioural data on its way to predicting our futures in a
surveillance economy.
JN: In this story of conquest and appropriation, the term “digital
natives” takes on a new meaning…
SZ: Yes, “digital natives” is a tragically ironic phrase. I am
fascinated by the structure of colonial conquest, especially the first
Spaniards who stumbled into the Caribbean islands. Historians call it
the “conquest pattern”, which unfolds in three phases: legalistic
measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of justification, a
declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to
legitimate the declaration. Back then Columbus simply declared the
islands as the territory of the Spanish monarchy and the pope.
The sailors could not have imagined that they were writing the first
draft of a pattern that would echo across space and time to a digital
21st century. The first surveillance capitalists also conquered by
declaration. They simply declared our private experience to be theirs
for the taking, for translation into data for their private ownership
and their proprietary knowledge. They relied on misdirection and
rhetorical camouflage, with secret declarations that we could neither
understand nor contest.
Google began by unilaterally declaring that the world wide web was its
to take for its search engine. Surveillance capitalism originated in a
second declaration that claimed our private experience for its revenues
that flow from telling and selling our fortunes to other businesses. In
both cases, it took without asking. Page [Larry, Google co-founder]
foresaw that surplus operations would move beyond the online milieu to
the real world, where data on human experience would be free for the
taking. As it turns out his vision perfectly reflected the history of
capitalism, marked by taking things that live outside the market sphere
and declaring their new life as market commodities.
We were caught off guard by surveillance capitalism because there was no
way that we could have imagined its action, any more than the early
peoples of the Caribbean could have foreseen the rivers of blood that
would flow from their hospitality toward the sailors who appeared out of
thin air waving the banner of the Spanish monarchs. Like the Caribbean
people, we faced something truly unprecedented.
Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Once we thought of
digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us
as free.
JN: Then there’s the “inevitability” narrative – technological
determinism on steroids.
SZ: In my early fieldwork in the computerising offices and factories of
the late 1970s and 80s, I discovered the duality of information
technology: its capacity to automate but also to “informate”, which I
use to mean to translate things, processes, behaviours, and so forth
into information. This duality set information technology apart from
earlier generations of technology: information technology produces new
knowledge territories by virtue of its informating capability, always
turning the world into information. The result is that these new
knowledge territories become the subject of political conflict. The
first conflict is over the distribution of knowledge: “Who knows?” The
second is about authority: “Who decides who knows?” The third is about
power: “Who decides who decides who knows?”
Now the same dilemmas of knowledge, authority and power have surged over
the walls of our offices, shops and factories to flood each one of us…
and our societies. Surveillance capitalists were the first movers in
this new world. They declared their right to know, to decide who knows,
and to decide who decides. In this way they have come to dominate what I
call “the division of learning in society”, which is now the central
organising principle of the 21st-century social order, just as the
division of labour was the key organising principle of society in the
industrial age.
JN: So the big story is not really the technology per se but the fact
that it has spawned a new variant of capitalism that is enabled by the
technology?
SZ: Larry Page grasped that human experience could be Google’s virgin
wood, that it could be extracted at no extra cost online and at very low
cost out in the real world. For today’s owners of surveillance capital
the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and feelings are as
virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers, oceans
and forests before they fell to the market dynamic. We have no formal
control over these processes because we are not essential to the new
market action. Instead we are exiles from our own behaviour, denied
access to or control over knowledge derived from its dispossession by
others for others. Knowledge, authority and power rest with surveillance
capital, for which we are merely “human natural resources”. We are the
native peoples now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from
the maps of our own experience.
While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the
digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance
capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance
capitalism is not technology. Digital technologies can take many forms
and have many effects, depending upon the social and economic logics
that bring them to life. Surveillance capitalism relies on algorithms
and sensors, machine intelligence and platforms, but it is not the same
as any of those.
JN: Where does surveillance capitalism go from here?
SZ: Surveillance capitalism moves from a focus on individual users to a
focus on populations, like cities, and eventually on society as a whole.
Think of the capital that can be attracted to futures markets in which
population predictions evolve to approximate certainty.
This has been a learning curve for surveillance capitalists, driven by
competition over prediction products. First they learned that the more
surplus the better the prediction, which led to economies of scale in
supply efforts. Then they learned that the more varied the surplus the
higher its predictive value. This new drive toward economies of scope
sent them from the desktop to mobile, out into the world: your drive,
run, shopping, search for a parking space, your blood and face, and
always… location, location, location.
The evolution did not stop there. Ultimately they understood that the
most predictive behavioural data comes from what I call “economies of
action”, as systems are designed to intervene in the state of play and
actually modify behaviour, shaping it toward desired commercial
outcomes. We saw the experimental development of this new “means of
behavioural modification” in Facebook’s contagion experiments and the
Google-incubated augmented reality game Pokémon Go.
Democracy has slept, while surveillance capitalists amassed
unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power
Shoshana Zuboff
It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal
now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to
produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus
eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist
explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular
behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the
music, and then we let the music make them dance.”
This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely
self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral
legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of
individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic
society. The message here is simple: Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.
JN: What are the implications for democracy?
SZ: During the past two decades surveillance capitalists have had a
pretty free run, with hardly any interference from laws and regulations.
Democracy has slept while surveillance capitalists amassed unprecedented
concentrations of knowledge and power. These dangerous asymmetries are
institutionalised in their monopolies of data science, their dominance
of machine intelligence, which is surveillance capitalism’s “means of
production”, their ecosystems of suppliers and customers, their
lucrative prediction markets, their ability to shape the behaviour of
individuals and populations, their ownership and control of our channels
for social participation, and their vast capital reserves. We enter the
21st century marked by this stark inequality in the division of
learning: they know more about us than we know about ourselves or than
we know about them. These new forms of social inequality are inherently
antidemocratic.
At the same time, surveillance capitalism diverges from the history of
market capitalism in key ways, and this has inhibited democracy’s normal
response mechanisms. One of these is that surveillance capitalism
abandons the organic reciprocities with people that in the past have
helped to embed capitalism in society and tether it, however
imperfectly, to society’s interests. First, surveillance capitalists no
longer rely on people as consumers. Instead, supply and demand orients
the surveillance capitalist firm to businesses intent on anticipating
the behaviour of populations, groups and individuals. Second, by
historical standards the large surveillance capitalists employ
relatively few people compared with their unprecedented computational
resources. General Motors employed more people during the height of the
Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights
of market capitalisation. Finally, surveillance capitalism depends upon
undermining individual self-determination, autonomy and decision rights
for the sake of an unobstructed flow of behavioural data to feed markets
that are about us but not for us.
This antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian juggernaut is best described as
a market-driven coup from above: an overthrow of the people concealed as
the technological Trojan horse of digital technology. On the strength of
its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive
concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence
over the division of learning in society. It is a form of tyranny that
feeds on people but is not of the people. Paradoxically, this coup is
celebrated as “personalisation”, although it defiles, ignores,
overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.
‘The power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely
self-authorising,’ says Zuboff. ‘It has no foundation in democratic or
moral legitimacy.’
JN: Our societies seem transfixed by all this: we are like rabbits
paralysed in the headlights of an oncoming car.
SZ: Despite surveillance capitalism’s domination of the digital milieu
and its illegitimate power to take private experience and to shape human
behaviour, most people find it difficult to withdraw, and many ponder if
it is even possible. This does not mean, however, that we are foolish,
lazy, or hapless. On the contrary, in my book I explore numerous reasons
that explain how surveillance capitalists got away with creating the
strategies that keep us paralysed. These include the historical,
political and economic conditions that allowed them to succeed. And
we’ve already discussed some of the other key reasons, including the
nature of the unprecedented, conquest by declaration. Other significant
reasons are the need for inclusion, identification with tech leaders and
their projects, social persuasion dynamics, and a sense of
inevitability, helplessness and resignation.
We are trapped in an involuntary merger of personal necessity and
economic extraction, as the same channels that we rely upon for daily
logistics, social interaction, work, education, healthcare, access to
products and services, and much more, now double as supply chain
operations for surveillance capitalism’s surplus flows. The result is
that the choice mechanisms we have traditionally associated with the
private realm are eroded or vitiated. There can be no exit from
processes that are intentionally designed to bypass individual awareness
and produce ignorance, especially when these are the very same processes
upon which we must depend for effective daily life. So our participation
is best explained in terms of necessity, dependency, the foreclosure of
alternatives, and enforced ignorance.
JN: Doesn’t all this mean that regulation that just focuses on the
technology is misguided and doomed to fail? What should we be doing to
get a grip on this before it’s too late?
SZ: The tech leaders desperately want us to believe that technology is
the inevitable force here, and their hands are tied. But there is a rich
history of digital applications before surveillance capitalism that
really were empowering and consistent with democratic values. Technology
is the puppet, but surveillance capitalism is the puppet master.
Surveillance capitalism is a human-made phenomenon and it is in the
realm of politics that it must be confronted. The resources of our
democratic institutions must be mobilised, including our elected
officials. GDPR [a recent EU law on data protection and privacy for all
individuals within the EU] is a good start, and time will tell if we can
build on that sufficiently to help found and enforce a new paradigm of
information capitalism. Our societies have tamed the dangerous excesses
of raw capitalism before, and we must do it again.
While there is no simple five-year action plan, much as we yearn for
that, there are some things we know. Despite existing economic, legal
and collective-action models such as antitrust, privacy laws and trade
unions, surveillance capitalism has had a relatively unimpeded two
decades to root and flourish. We need new paradigms born of a close
understanding of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives and
foundational mechanisms.”
For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a
solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in
the first place? All that does is further institutionalise and
legitimate data capture. It’s like negotiating how many hours a day a
seven-year-old should be allowed to work, rather than contesting the
fundamental legitimacy of child labour. Data ownership also fails to
reckon with the realities of behavioural surplus. Surveillance
capitalists extract predictive value from the exclamation points in your
post, not merely the content of what you write, or from how you walk and
not merely where you walk. Users might get “ownership” of the data that
they give to surveillance capitalists in the first place, but they will
not get ownership of the surplus or the predictions gleaned from it –
not without new legal concepts built on an understanding of these
operations.
Another example: there may be sound antitrust reasons to break up the
largest tech firms, but this alone will not eliminate surveillance
capitalism. Instead it will produce smaller surveillance capitalist
firms and open the field for more surveillance capitalist competitors.
So what is to be done? In any confrontation with the unprecedented, the
first work begins with naming. Speaking for myself, this is why I’ve
devoted the past seven years to this work… to move forward the project
of naming as the first necessary step toward taming. My hope is that
careful naming will give us all a better understanding of the true
nature of this rogue mutation of capitalism and contribute to a sea
change in public opinion, most of all among the young.
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff is published by
Profile (£25)
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