“It is possible to have surveillance capitalism, and it is possible to
have a democracy. It is not possible to have both,”
Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Privacy has been extinguished. It is now a zombie’
The professor who predicted that computers would change our lives
demands a right to sanctuary from data ‘theft’
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These are uncertain times for Silicon Valley. Tech companies are firing
staff who they hired in the pandemic. Twitter, under Elon Musk, has
repelled advertisers. Apple, a self-proclaimed privacy champion, wants
to reduce
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the reach of Google. It’s possible to imagine that the digital wild west
will become more genteel.
Yet for the critics of Big Tech, there is little relief. Shoshana
Zuboff, a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, published /The
Age of Surveillance Capitalism/ in 2019 — a blast about how tech
companies had made billions of dollars by sucking up private data. “We
thought we were searching Google, but Google was searching us,” she
summarised.
Today she’s frustrated that efforts to restrain tech companies are so
fragmented. “We have fantastic scholars, researchers, advocates who are
focused on privacy, others who are focused on disinformation, others who
are focused on the nexus with democracy,” she says, when we meet in
London. This “Balkanisation” reduces the ability to pinpoint the “actual
source of harm”: people’s data is treated as a costless resource, just
as forests and other parts of nature were in centuries past.
Zuboff cites data that, in the US, which has no federal privacy law,
people have their location exposed 747 times a day. In the EU, which she
says has the “best regulation”, it’s 376. “It’s better, but it’s not
nearly better enough.” Mark Zuckerberg once promised you that a
predictive model would tell you, on arriving in a strange city, which
bar to go to and a bartender would already have prepared your favourite
drink. That dream has faded only on the basis of practicality, not
principle.
In a paper
<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26317877221129290>
published in November, Zuboff argued that Apple and Google had
strong-armed European health officials over Covid tracing technology.
“It is possible to have surveillance capitalism, and it is possible to
have a democracy. It is not possible to have both,” she wrote. Apple had
created the illusion of acting as Robin Hood, when only democratic
oversight could protect individual rights.
She sees its move against Google as simply an “expansion” of
surveillance capitalism. Tim Cook’s promises to protect privacy can be
withdrawn any time: “Users have no say.”
Tech surveillance matters, Zuboff argues, because it robs us of
“life-sustaining inwardness”. Nor can individuals realistically opt out
by themselves. What we need is a right to sanctuary.
Last year Brussels introduced
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the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, its most comprehensive
tech legislation to date. The UK parliament is currently debating the
online safety bill
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Zuboff wants these to be stepping stones.
***
Normally in newspaper interviews, the journalist asks questions, and the
interviewee answers them. An interview with Zuboff is different. You ask
questions and, more often than not, she responds with first principles —
step-by-step explanations of how she believes that surveillance
capitalism has taken hold this century.
Zuboff is particular about how her ideas are described, about how things
are set up, about what pen she uses. She mulls each detail. “Is it
distracting for you if I stand? I’ll sit down. I usually walk and talk,”
she says, when we start.
This particular mind is, in tech terminology, a feature, not a bug. It
enables Zuboff to take the long view. In 1988, she published /In the Age
of the Smart Machine, /which argued that computers would change
companies in a way that previous technologies had not. She later ran
Odyssey, a Harvard Business School education programme to help
successful people decide how to spend the later part of their lives.
Her opus on surveillance capitalism was her own late-career flourish. It
was published when she was 67, after a lightning strike had burnt down
her family home in Maine and after the unexpected death of her husband
and sometime co-author, the businessman Jim Maxmin.
Zuboff argues that tech companies knew that the public would never
support their data collection. “Right from the start, they were
understood as things that had to be secret, had to be camouflaged from
users, lest they provoke resistance.” She quotes a recent Google
executive as saying: “Won’t it creep people out to know how much we are
paying attention?”
Today tech companies “are becoming much more reluctant to patent their
discoveries, because they don’t want the public to know exactly what
they’re doing. They’re no longer in most cases making their own data
available to researchers.”
So Zuboff sees the need for a regulatory fishing expedition. The EU’s
tech laws will create “new cadres of people with new mixes of skills
that are going to go inside the corporations. Their brief will be to
lift the hood, to understand what’s really going on. One of the huge
problems that we have is that most of the information that comes out of
the companies is intentionally designed to be misleading. Gaslighting is
a rhetorical art form that is genuinely practised by these companies.”
Zuboff rarely uses short answers or plain terminology. Nonetheless, she
is direct about content moderation — companies’ attempts to remove
harmful content — which she describes as “quicksand . . . an utterly
losing proposition, designed in fact to keep us occupied as long as
possible so that they can keep getting away with what they’re really doing.”
She is more positive about age-appropriate design, where platforms are
engineered to minimise harm to children and to collect less data from
them. The UK pioneered age-appropriate design, but after Brexit will
miss out on Brussels’ “more muscular power” against surveillance
capitalism, says Zuboff. She also sees “a move to weaken and denature
the existing data protection regime with a data protection bill that
favours the big tech companies and perpetuates the misbegotten idea that
democracy must get out of the way.”
The problem for privacy advocates is that their cause seems to offer too
few advantages and too many drawbacks. For most European citizens, the
biggest impact of privacy legislation is annoying cookies pop-ups.
Regulation seems impractical: the UK and France have both wanted
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to place age limits on porn sites, but have so far failed to find
effective ways of doing so.
Similarly, Zuboff criticises Apple and Google for taking control of
Covid tracing, but what if their system simply worked better than the
centralised ones favoured by European health officials? She laughs at
the suggestion. But she admits regulation is hindered “because we can’t
get inside [tech companies] to know what’s really going on. We’re
regulating with blinders on . . . We don’t understand our adversary well
enough.”
Zuboff insists that her attack is not against technology itself, but the
economic logic that underpins it — “theft”. She holds out the
possibility that we could use data and prediction for the common good.
The counterargument is that there are basic trade-offs. Tech services,
whether for predicting text answers or the fastest driving routes, can
only work by accumulating data and reducing our privacy.
I ask what she makes of Musk’s ownership of Twitter. “We’ve got
politicians, lawmakers, elected officials, as well as the entire
citizenry, focused on one man and asking the question, ‘what will he
do?’ Our political stability, our ability to know what’s true and what
false, our health and to some degree our sanity, is challenged on a
daily basis depending on which decisions Mr Musk decides to take. I
regard this as fundamentally intolerable . . . These spaces cannot exist
solely under corporate control . . . We’re two decades into the digital
era but we have never, as democracies, taken stock of the meaning of
these technologies.”
Musk has put Donald Trump back on Twitter. The former US president’s
suspension from Facebook will end “in the coming weeks”, its parent
company has said
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Zuboff is aghast. “It should not be a decision that belongs to
individuals such as Musk or Zuckerberg or anyone else.” The implications
for democracy are too great. “In an information civilisation, our
information spaces must exist under public law and be governed by
democratic institutions . . . With luck and determination we will look
back on the days of the information oligarchs like Musk and Zuckerberg
as the first primitive missteps of a new civilisation.”
She compares the west’s tech giants to China’s surveillance state. “This
is a world in which privacy has been extinguished. Privacy is now a
zombie category. None of us have privacy, even as we thought about it in
the year 2000.”
Her sense of dystopia is visceral. “Somebody just invented a type of
paint that you can put on your face that confounds facial recognition.
Young people on Reddit are very excited about this. This is terrible,
Henry!”
The abolition of surveillance capitalism requires new laws that allow
societies to decide “what becomes data in the first place, what we
share, with whom, and to what purpose”.
Instead, tech marches onwards, particularly in the form of artificial
intelligence
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“ChatGPT has shaken us up. It has shocked people, forcing us to
recognise how far AI has come, with virtually no law and democratic
governance to shape or constrain its development and application.” AI’s
development has relied on stealing human data, she argues. She points
hopefully to the EU’s proposed AI Act — “the first law to assert
democratic governance over the application of AI”. But it’s hard not to
feel that, even when Silicon Valley stumbles, it is still a step ahead.
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