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     mystique, closeted homosexuals, church-going atheists, and back-alley
     abortions. Eventually, though, they even produced people like you and me.
 
-
     [...]
 
     The free-market creed originated in Europe as a sweeping defense against
@@ -280,3 +279,3233 @@
     competition for scarce resources. The disciplines of competitive markets
     promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects
     too preoccupied with survival to complain.
+
+
+    [...]
+
+    In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas
+    Piketty integrated years of income data to derive a general law of
+    accumulation: the rate of return on capital tends to exceed the rate of
+    economic growth. This tendency, summarized as r > g, is a dynamic that
+    produces ever-more-extreme income divergence and with it a range of
+    antidemocratic social consequences long predicted as harbingers of an
+    eventual crisis of capitalism.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Many scholars have taken to describing these new conditions as
+    neofeudalism, marked by the consolidation of elite wealth and power far
+    beyond the control of ordinary people and the mechanisms of democratic
+    consent.55 Piketty calls it a return to “patrimonial capitalism,” a
+    reversion to a premodern society in which one’s life chances depend
+    upon inherited wealth rather than meritocratic achievement.56
+
+    [...]
+
+    We now have the tools to grasp the collision in all of its destructive
+    complexity: what is unbearable is that economic and social inequalities
+    have reverted to the preindustrial “feudal” pattern but that we, the
+    people, have not. We are not illiterate peasants, serfs, or slaves.
+    Whether “middle class” or “marginalized,” we share
+
+    [...]
+
+    Nevertheless, Occupy revealed a similar conflict between inequality’s
+    facts and inequality’s feelings, expressed in a creatively
+    individualized political culture that insisted on “direct democracy”
+    and “horizontal leadership.”60 Some analysts concluded that it was this
+    conflict that ultimately crippled the movement, with its “inner core”
+    of leaders unwilling to compromise their highly individualized approach
+    in favor of the strategies and tactics required for a durable mass
+    movement.61 However
+
+    [...]
+
+    This is the existential contradiction of the second modernity that
+    defines our conditions of existence: we want to exercise control over
+    our own lives, but everywhere that control is thwarted.
+    Individualization has sent each one of us on the prowl for the
+    resources we need to ensure effective life, but at each turn we are
+    forced to do battle with an economics and politics from whose vantage
+    point we are but ciphers. We live in the knowledge that our lives have
+    unique value, but we are treated as invisible
+
+    [...]
+
+    The deepest contradiction of our time, the social philosopher Zygmunt
+    Bauman wrote, is “the yawning gap between the right of self-assertion
+    and the capacity to control the social settings which render such
+    self-assertion feasible. It is from that abysmal gap that the most
+    poisonous effluvia contaminating the lives of contemporary individuals
+    emanate.”
+
+    [...]
+
+    When it comes to genuine economic mutation, there is always a tension
+    between the new features of the form and its mother ship. A combination
+    of old and new is reconfigured in an unprecedented pattern.
+    Occasionally, the elements of a mutation find the right environment in
+    which to be “selected” for propagation. This is when the new form
+    stands a chance of becoming fully institutionalized and establishes its
+    unique migratory path toward the future. But it’s even more likely that
+    potential mutations meet their fate in “transition failure,” drawn back
+    by the gravitational pull of established practices.63
+
+    [...]
+
+    Among the many violations of advocacy expectations, ubiquitous
+    “terms-of-service agreements” were among the most pernicious.67 Legal
+    experts call these “contracts of adhesion” because they impose
+    take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they
+    like it or not.
+
+    [...]
+
+    These “contracts” impose an unwinnable infinite regress upon the user
+    that law professor Nancy Kim describes as “sadistic.”
+
+    [...]
+
+    The digital milieu has been essential to these degradations. Kim points
+    out that paper documents once imposed natural restraints on contracting
+    behavior simply by virtue of their cost to produce, distribute, and
+    archive. Paper contracts require a physical signature, limiting the
+    burden a firm is likely to impose on a customer by requiring her to
+    read multiple pages of fine print. Digital terms, in contrast, are
+    “weightless.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Radin calls this “private eminent domain,” a unilateral seizure of
+    rights without consent. She
+
+    [...]
+
+    Once firms understood that the courts were disposed to validate their
+    click-wrap and browse-wrap agreements, there was nothing to stop them
+    from expanding the reach of these degraded contracts “to extract from
+    consumers additional benefits unrelated to the transaction.”73 This
+    coincided with the discovery of behavioral surplus that we examine in
+    Chapter 3, as
+
+    [...]
+
+    2008 two Carnegie Mellon professors calculated that a reasonable
+    reading of all the privacy policies that one encounters in a year would
+    require 76 full workdays at a national opportunity cost of $781
+    billion.75 The numbers are much higher today. Still, most
+
+    [...]
+
+    These developments reflect the simple truth that genuine economic
+    reformation takes time and that the internet world, its investors and
+    shareholders, were and are in a hurry. The credo of digital innovation
+    quickly turned to the language of disruption and an obsession with
+    speed, its campaigns conducted under the flag of “creative
+    destruction.” That famous, fateful phrase coined by evolutionary
+    economist Joseph Schumpeter was seized upon as a way to legitimate what
+    Silicon Valley euphemistically calls “permissionless innovation.”77
+    Destruction rhetoric promoted what I think of as a “boys and their
+    toys” theory of history, as if the winning hand in capitalism is about
+    blowing things up with new technologies. Schumpeter’s analysis was, in
+    fact, far more nuanced and complex than modern destruction rhetoric
+    suggests.
+
+    [...]
+
+    was as if a shark had been silently circling the depths all along, just
+    below the surface of the action, only to occasionally leap glistening
+    from the water in pursuit of a fresh bite of flesh
+
+    [...]
+
+    Over time, the shark revealed itself as a rapidly multiplying,
+    systemic, internally consistent new variant of information capitalism
+    that had set its sights on domination. An unprecedented formulation of
+    capitalism was elbowing its way into history: surveillance capitalism.
+
+    [...]
+
+    As we shall explore in detail throughout the coming chapters, thanks to
+    surveillance capitalism the resources for effective life that we seek
+    in the digital realm now come encumbered with a new breed of menace.
+    Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is
+    also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral
+    data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse
+    amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. In the
+    absence of a decisive societal response that constrains or outlaws this
+    logic of accumulation, surveillance capitalism appears poised to become
+    the dominant form of capitalism in our time.
+
+    [...]
+
+    This left us wholly unprepared to defend ourselves from new companies
+    with imaginative names run by young geniuses that seemed able to
+    provide us with exactly what we yearn for at little or no cost. This
+    new regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to
+    grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by
+    expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate
+    practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural
+    misappropriation. On this road, terms whose meanings we take to be
+    positive or at least banal—“the open internet,” “interoperability,” and
+    “connectivity”—have been quietly harnessed to a market process in which
+    individuals are definitively cast as the means to others’ market ends.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The new harms we face entail challenges to the sanctity of the
+    individual, and chief among these challenges I count the elemental
+    rights that bear on individual sovereignty, including the right to the
+    future tense and the right to sanctuary. Each of these rights invokes
+    claims to individual agency and personal autonomy as essential
+    prerequisites to freedom of will and to the very concept of democratic
+    order.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The Spanish Data Protection Agency recognized that not all information
+    is worthy of immortality
+
+    [...]
+
+    As for the Spanish people, their Data Protection Agency, and the
+    European Court of Justice, the passage of time is likely to reveal
+    their achievements as a stirring early chapter in the longer story of
+    our fight for a third modern that is first and foremost a human future,
+    rooted in an inclusive democracy and committed to the individual’s
+    right to effective life. Their message is carefully inscribed for our
+    children to ponder: technological inevitability is as light as
+    democracy is heavy, as temporary as the scent of rose petals and the
+    taste of honey are enduring.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The point for us is that every successful vaccine begins with a close
+    understanding of the enemy disease. The mental models, vocabularies,
+    and tools distilled from past catastrophes obstruct progress. We smell
+    smoke and rush to close doors to rooms that are already fated to
+    vanish. The result is like hurling snowballs at a smooth marble wall
+    only to watch them slide down its facade, leaving nothing but a wet
+    smear: a fine paid here, an operational detour there, a new encryption
+    package there.
+
+    [...]
+
+    It is the habitat for progress “at the speed of dreams,” as one Google
+    engineer vividly describes it.100 My aim here is to slow down the
+    action in order to enlarge the space for such debate and unmask the
+    tendencies of these new creations as they amplify inequality, intensify
+    social hierarchy, exacerbate exclusion
+
+    [...]
+
+    Peter Drucker’s field studies for his seminal Concept of the
+    Corporation, the 1946 book that codified the practices of the twentieth
+
+    [...]
+
+    The closest thing we have to a Buck Weaver or James Couzens codifying
+    Google’s practices and objectives is the company’s longtime chief
+    economist, Hal Varian, who aids the cause of understanding with
+    scholarly articles that explore important themes. Varian has been
+    described as “the Adam Smith of the discipline of Googlenomics” and the
+    “godfather” of its advertising model.6 It is in
+
+    [...]
+
+    Nowadays there is a computer in the middle of virtually every
+    transaction… now that they are available these computers have several
+    other uses.”8 He then identifies four such new uses: “data extraction
+    and analysis,” “new contractual forms due to better monitoring,”
+    “personalization and customization,” and “continuous
+    experiments.”Varian’s discussions of
+
+    [...]
+
+    Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is
+    talking about when they talk about big data.” “Data” are the raw
+    material necessary for surveillance capitalism’s novel manufacturing
+    processes. “Extraction” describes the social relations and material
+    infrastructure with which the firm asserts authority over those raw
+    materials to achieve economies of scale in its raw-material supply
+    operations. “Analysis” refers to the complex of highly specialized
+    computational systems that I will generally refer to in these chapters
+    as “machine intelligence.” I like this umbrella phrase because it
+    trains us on the forest rather than the trees, helping us decenter from
+    technology to its objectives. But in choosing this phrase I also follow
+    Google’s lead. The company describes itself “at the forefront of
+    innovation in machine intelligence,” a term in which it includes
+    machine learning as well as “classical” algorithmic production, along
+    with many computational operations that
+
+    [...]
+
+    Amit Patel, a young Stanford graduate student with a special interest
+    in “data mining,” is frequently credited with the groundbreaking
+    insight into the significance of Google’s accidental data caches. His
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google’s engineers soon grasped that the continuous flows of collateral
+    behavioral data could turn the search engine into a recursive learning
+    system that constantly improved search results and spurred product
+    innovations such as spell check,
+
+    [...]
+
+    was Google that recognized the gold dust in the detritus of its
+    interactions with its users and took the trouble to collect it up.…
+    Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions,
+    or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled
+
+    [...]
+
+    that early stage of Google’s development, the feedback loops involved
+    in improving its Search functions produced a balance of power: Search
+    needed people to learn from, and people needed Search
+
+    [...]
+
+    Hal Varian, who joined Google as its chief economist in 2002, would
+    note, “Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be
+    analyzed and fed back into the system.”16 The Page Rank algorithm,
+    named after its founder
+
+    [...]
+
+    The key point for us rests on a critical distinction. During this early
+    period, behavioral data were put to work entirely on the user’s behalf.
+    User data provided value at no cost, and that value was reinvested in
+    the user experience in the form of improved services: enhancements that
+    were also offered at no cost to users. Users provided the raw material
+    in the form of behavioral data, and those data were harvested to
+    improve speed, accuracy, and relevance and to help build ancillary
+    products such as translation. I call this the behavioral value
+    reinvestment cycle, in which all behavioral data are reinvested in the
+    improvement of the product or service (see Figure 1).
+
+    [...]
+
+    cycle was similarly oriented toward the individual as its subject, but
+    without a physical product to sell, it floated outside the marketplace,
+    an interaction with “users” rather than a market transaction with
+    customers.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Users are not paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of
+    production, as we’ll discuss in more depth later in this chapter.
+    Finally, people often say that the user is the “product.” This is also
+    misleading, and it is a point that we will revisit more than once. For
+    now let’s say that users are not products, but rather we are the
+    sources of raw-material supply. As we shall see, surveillance
+    capitalism
+
+    [...]
+
+    impatient money
+
+    [...]
+
+    These behavioral data available for uses beyond service improvement
+    constituted a surplus, and it was on the strength of this behavioral
+    surplus that the young company would find its way to the “sustained and
+    exponential profits” that would be necessary for survival. Thanks to a
+    perceived
+
+    [...]
+
+    the New York Times reported, “The precision of the Carol Brady data was
+    eye-opening for some.” Even Brin was stunned by the clarity of Search’s
+    predictive power, revealing events and trends before they “hit the
+    radar” of traditional media. As he told the Times, “It was like trying
+    an electron microscope for the first time. It was like a
+    moment-by-moment barometer
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google maximizes the revenue it gets from that precious real estate by
+    giving its best position to the advertiser who is likely to pay Google
+    the most in total, based on the price per click multiplied by Google’s
+    estimate of the likelihood that someone will actually click on the
+    ad.”42 That pivotal multiplier was the result of Google’s advanced
+    computational capabilities trained on its most significant and secret
+    discovery: behavioral surplus
+
+    [...]
+
+    competitors, in which ads were targeted to keywords or content, were
+    unable to identify relevant ads “for a particular user.” Now the
+    inventors offered a scientific solution that exceeded the
+    most-ambitious dreams of any advertising executive
+
+    [...]
+
+    This new Google assures its actual customers that it will do whatever
+    it takes to transform the natural obscurity of human desire into
+    scientific fact. This Google is the superpower that establishes its own
+    values and pursues its own purposes above and beyond the social
+    contracts to which others are bound.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google’s unique auction methods and capabilities earned a great deal of
+    attention, which distracted observers from reflecting on exactly what
+    was being auctioned: derivatives of behavioral surplus. Click-through
+    metrics institutionalized “customer” demand for these prediction
+    products and thus established the central importance of economies of
+    scale in surplus supply operations. Surplus capture would have to
+    become automatic and ubiquitous if the new logic was to succeed, as
+    measured by the successful trading of behavioral futures.
+
+    [...]
+
+    kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale.
+    Insiders referred to Google’s new science of behavioral
+
+    [...]
+
+    here was an unprecedented and lucrative brew: behavioral surplus, data
+    science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic
+    systems, and automated platforms. This convergence produced
+    unprecedented “relevance” and billions of auctions. Click-through rates
+    skyrocketed. Work on AdWords and AdSense became just as important as
+    work on Search
+
+    [...]
+
+    their community effectively declared a “state of exception” in which it
+    was judged necessary to suspend the values and principles that had
+    guided Google’s founding and early practices.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google’s inventions, their origins in emergency, and the 180-degree
+    turn from serving users to surveilling them. Most of all, he credited
+    the discovery of behavioral surplus as the game-changing asset that
+    turned Google into a fortune-telling giant, pinpointing Google’s
+    breakthrough transformation of the Overture model, when the young
+    company first applied its analytics of behavioral surplus to predict
+    the likelihood of a click:
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google loosed a new incarnation of capitalism upon the world, a
+    Pandora’s box whose contents we are only beginning
+
+    [...]
+
+    On the strength of Google’s inventions, discoveries, and strategies, it
+    became the mother ship and ideal type of a new economic logic based on
+    fortune-telling and selling—an ancient and eternally lucrative craft
+    that has fed on humanity’s confrontation with uncertainty from the
+    beginning of the human story.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The scientific and material complexity that supported the capture and
+    analysis of behavioral surplus also enabled the hiding strategy, an
+    invisibility cloak over the whole operation. “Managing search at our
+    scale is a very serious barrier to entry,” Schmidt warned would-be
+    competitors.79 To be sure, there are always sound business
+
+    [...]
+
+    public were told that Google’s magic derived from its exclusive
+    capabilities in unilateral surveillance of online behavior and its
+    methods specifically designed to override individual decision rights?
+    Google policies had to enforce secrecy in order to protect operations
+    that were designed to be undetectable because they took things from
+    users without asking and employed those unilaterally claimed resources
+    to work in the service of others’ purposes.
+
+    [...]
+
+    George Orwell once observed that euphemisms are used in politics, war,
+    and business as instruments that “make lies sound truthful and murder
+    respectable.”81 Google has been careful to camouflage the significance
+    of
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google discovered this necessary element of the new logic of
+    accumulation: it must assert the rights to take the information upon
+    which its success depends.
+
+    [...]
+
+    signing on with Facebook, the talented Sandberg became the “Typhoid
+    Mary” of surveillance capitalism as she led Facebook’s transformation
+    from a social networking site to an advertising behemoth. Sandberg
+    understood that Facebook’s social graph represented an awe-inspiring
+    source of behavioral surplus: the extractor’s equivalent of a
+    nineteenth-century prospector stumbling into a valley that sheltered
+    the largest diamond mine and the deepest gold mine ever to be
+    discovered. “We have better information than anyone else. We know
+    gender, age, location, and it’s real data as opposed to the stuff other
+    people infer,” Sandberg
+
+    [...]
+
+    Sandberg understood that through the artful manipulation of Facebook’s
+    culture of intimacy and sharing, it would be possible to use behavioral
+    surplus not only to satisfy demand but also to create demand. For
+    starters, that meant inserting advertisers into the fabric of
+    Facebook’s online culture, where they could
+
+    [...]
+
+    This new market form declares that serving the genuine needs of people
+    is less lucrative, and therefore less important, than selling
+    predictions of their behavior. Google discovered that we are less
+    valuable than others’ bets on our future behavior. This changed
+    everything.
+
+    [...]
+
+    VIII. Summarizing the Logic and Operations of Surveillance Capitalism
+
+    [...]
+
+    is obscene to suppose that this harm can be reduced to the obvious fact
+    that users receive no fee for the raw material they supply. That
+    critique is a feat of misdirection that would use a
+
+    [...]
+
+    remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered
+    as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of
+    this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even
+    knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to
+    this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that
+    there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness,
+    resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only
+    positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and
+    casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Social theorist David Harvey builds on Arendt’s insight with his notion
+    of “accumulation by dispossession”: “What accumulation by dispossession
+    does is to release a set of assets… at very low (and in some instances
+    zero) cost. Overaccumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and
+    immediately turn them to profitable use.” He adds that entrepreneurs
+    who are determined to “join the system” and enjoy “the benefits of
+    capital accumulation” are often the ones who drive this
+
+    [...]
+
+    Even when knowledge derived from our behavior is fed back to us as a
+    quid pro quo for participation, as in the case of so-called
+    “personalization,” parallel secret operations pursue the conversion of
+    surplus into sales that point far beyond our interests. We have no
+    formal control because we are not essential to this market action. In
+    this future we are exiles from our own behavior, denied access to or
+    control over knowledge derived from its dispossession by others for
+    others. Knowledge
+
+    [...]
+
+    When asked about government regulation, Schmidt said that technology
+    moves so fast that governments really shouldn’t try to regulate it
+    because it will change too fast, and any problem will be solved by
+    technology. ‘We’ll move much faster than any government.’”26 Both Brin
+    and Page are even more candid in their contempt
+
+    [...]
+
+    Economic historians describe the dedication to lawlessness among the
+    Gilded Age “robber barons” for whom Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism
+    played the same role that Hayek, Jensen, and even Ayn Rand play for
+    today’s digital barons. In the same way that surveillance capitalists
+    excuse their corporations’ unprecedented
+
+    [...]
+
+    There was no need for law, they argued, when one had the “law of
+    evolution,” the “laws of capital,” and the “laws of industrial
+    society.” John Rockefeller insisted that his outsized oil fortune was
+    the result of “the natural law of trade development.” Jay Gould, when
+    questioned by Congress on the need for federal regulation of railroad
+    rates, replied that rates were already regulated by “the laws of supply
+    and demand, production and consumption.”31 The millionaires mobilized
+    in 1896 to defeat the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who had
+    vowed to tether economic policy to the political realm, including
+    regulating the railroads and protecting the people from “robbery
+
+    [...]
+
+    Surveillance After September 11, surveillance scholar David Lyon
+
+    [...]
+
+    After several decades in which data-protection officials, privacy
+    watchdogs, civil rights groups, and others have tried to mitigate
+    negative social effects of surveillance, we are witnessing a sharp tilt
+    toward more exclusionary and intrusive surveillance practices.”56 This
+    abrupt refocusing of governmental power and policy after the 9/11
+    attacks in New York City and Washington, DC
+
+    [...]
+
+    With the attacks of September 11, 2001, everything changed. The new
+    focus was overwhelmingly on security rather than privacy.”61 The
+    privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the
+    conversation more or less overnight. In both the US Congress and across
+    the EU, legislation was
+
+    [...]
+
+    including Germany (a country that had been highly sensitized to
+    surveillance under the hammer of both Nazi and Stalinist
+    totalitarianism), the UK, and France.62 In the US the failure to
+    “connect the dots” on the terrorist attack was a source of shame and
+    dismay that overwhelmed other concerns. Policy guidelines shifted from
+    “need to know” to “need to share” as agencies were urged to tear down
+    walls and blend databases for comprehensive information and analysis.63
+    In a parallel development, privacy scholar Chris Jay
+
+    [...]
+
+    The elective affinity between public and private missions was evident
+    as early as 2002, when former NSA Chief Admiral John Poindexter
+    proposed his Total Information Awareness (TIA) program with a vision
+    that reads like an early guide to the foundational mechanisms of
+    behavioral surplus capture and analysis:
+
+    [...]
+
+    secret public-private intelligence collaborations that tend to be
+    “orchestrated around handshakes rather than legal formalities, such as
+    search warrants, and may be arranged this way to evade oversight and,
+    at times, to defy the law.”88 He observed that intelligence agencies
+    are irresistibly drawn to “and in some respects dependent upon” firms’
+    privately held data resources.89
+
+    [...]
+
+    former NSA Director Mike McConnell offered another glimpse into the
+    elective affinities between Google and the intelligence community.
+    Writing in the Washington Post, McConnell made clear that Google’s
+    surveillance-based operations in data capture, extraction, and analysis
+    were both taken for granted and coveted. Here the boundaries of private
+    and public melt in the intense heat of new threats and their
+    high-velocity demands that must be met in “milliseconds.” In
+    McConnell’s future there is one “seamless” surveillance empire in which
+    the requirements of self-preservation leave no opportunity for the
+    amenities of
+
+    [...]
+
+    Once again, history offers us no control groups
+
+    [...]
+
+    1) the demonstration of Google’s unique capabilities as a source of
+    competitive advantage in electoral politics; (2) a deliberate blurring
+    of public and private interests through relationships and aggressive
+    lobbying activities; (3) a revolving door of personnel who migrated
+    between Google and the Obama administration, united by elective
+    affinities during Google’s crucial growth years of 2009–2016; and (4)
+    Google’s intentional campaign of influence over academic work and the
+    larger cultural conversation so vital to policy
+
+    [...]
+
+    Obama used his proximity to Schmidt to cement his own identity as the
+    innovation candidate poised to disrupt business as usual in
+    Washington.98 Once elected, Schmidt joined the Transition Economic
+    Advisory Board and appeared next to Obama at
+
+    [...]
+
+    Political correspondent Jim Rutenberg’s New York Times account of the
+    data scientists’ seminal role in the 2012 Obama victory offers a vivid
+    picture of the capture and analysis of behavioral surplus as a
+    political methodology. The campaign knew “every single wavering voter
+    in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name,
+    address, race, sex, and income,” and it had figured out how to target
+    its television ads to these individuals. One breakthrough was the
+    “persuasion score” that identified
+
+    [...]
+
+    According to the Center for Media and Democracy’s investigatory
+    research report, “The Googlization of the Far Right,” the corporation’s
+    2012 list of grantees featured a new
+
+    [...]
+
+    Meanwhile, a list of Google Policy Fellows for 2014 included
+    individuals from a range of nonprofit organizations whom one would
+    expect to be leading the fight against that corporation’s
+    concentrations of information and power, including the Center for
+    Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the
+    Future of Privacy Forum, the National Consumers League, the Citizen
+    Lab, and the Asociación por los Derechos Civiles.116 In July 2017 the
+    Wall Street Journal reported that
+
+    [...]
+
+    That summer, one of the New America Foundation’s most highly regarded
+    scholars and a specialist in digital monopolies, Barry Lynn, posted a
+    statement praising the EU’s historic decision to levy a $2.7 billion
+    fine on Google as the result of a multiyear antitrust investigation.
+    According to the New York Times and Lynn’s own account, New America’s
+    director bent to pressure from Schmidt, firing Lynn and his Open
+    Markets team of ten researchers. “Google is very aggressive in throwing
+    its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling strings,”
+    Lynn told the New York Times. “People are so afraid of Google now.” The
+    reporters cite Google
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google in the lead, surveillance capitalism vastly expanded the market
+    dynamic as it learned to expropriate human experience and translate it
+    into coveted behavioral predictions. Google and this larger
+    surveillance project have been birthed, sheltered, and nurtured to
+    success by the historical conditions of their era—second-modernity
+    needs, the neoliberal inheritance, and the realpolitik of surveillance
+    exceptionalism—as well as by their own purpose-built fortifications
+    designed to protect supply chain operations from scrutiny through
+    political and cultural capture.
+
+    [...]
+
+    the capture of behavioral surplus and the acquisition of decision
+    rights. Like a river running to the sea, if one route is blocked
+
+    [...]
+
+    increasingly ruthless cycle of kidnapping human experience, cornering
+    surplus supplies, and competing in new behavioral futures markets
+
+    [...]
+
+    The extraction imperative demands that everything be possessed. In this
+    new context, goods and services are merely surveillance-bound supply
+    routes. It’s not the car; it’s the behavioral data from driving the
+    car. It’s not the map; it’s the behavioral data from interacting with
+    the map. The ideal here is continuously expanding borders that
+    eventually describe the world and everything in it, all the time.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Traditionally, monopolies on goods and services disfigure markets by
+    unfairly eliminating competition in order to raise prices at will.
+    Under surveillance capitalism, however, many of the practices defined
+    as monopolistic actually function as means of cornering user-derived
+    raw-material supplies. There is no monetary price for the user to pay,
+    only an opportunity
+
+    [...]
+
+    The corporation unfairly impedes competitors in Search in order to
+    protect the dominance of its most important supply route, not primarily
+    to fix prices. These cornering operations are not abstractions,
+
+    [...]
+
+    products such as Android are valued more for supply than for sales.
+    Disconnect, Inc., founded in 2011 by two former Google engineers and a
+    privacy-rights attorney, developed
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google executive, noting that if other manufacturers switched to
+    Skyhook, it “would be awful for Google, because it will cut off our
+    ability to continue collecting data” for the company’s Wi-Fi location
+    database. Court documents from Skyhook’s eventual lawsuit against
+    Motorola (and Samsung) include an e-mail from Google’s senior vice
+    president of Mobile
+
+    [...]
+
+    Finally, extraordinary research from the French nonprofit Exodus
+    Privacy and the Yale Privacy Lab in 2017 documented the exponential
+    proliferation of tracking software. Exodus identified 44 trackers in
+    more than 300 apps for Google’s Android platform, some
+
+    [...]
+
+    For example, the ad tracker FidZup developed “communication between a
+    sonic emitter and a mobile phone.…” It can detect the presence of
+    mobile phones and therefore their owners by diffusing a tone, inaudible
+    to the human ear, inside a building: “Users installing
+
+    [...]
+
+    a pattern foreshadowed by the Google patent that we examined in Chapter
+    3 and that we shall see repeatedly in the coming chapters, the research
+    findings emphasize that the always-on tracking is impervious to the
+    Android “permissions system,” despite its promises of user control.17
+
+    [...]
+
+    Disconnect software was banned from Google Play’s vast catalog of
+    mobile apps, leading to Disconnect’s lawsuit against Google in 2015.
+    The startup’s complaint explains that “advertising companies including
+    Google use these invisible
+
+    [...]
+
+    dispossession operations reveal a predictable sequence of stages that
+    must be crafted and orchestrated in great detail in order to achieve
+    their ultimate destination as a system of facts through which surplus
+    extraction is normalized.The four stages of the cycle are incursion,
+    habituation, adaptation, and redirection. Taken together, these stages
+    constitute a “theory of change” that describes and predicts
+    dispossession as a political and cultural
+
+    [...]
+
+    with Google’s wider practice: it’s great to empower people, but not too
+    much, lest they notice the pilfering of their decision rights and try
+    to reclaim them. The firm wants to enable people to make
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google’s ideal society is a population of distant users, not a
+    citizenry. It idealizes people who are informed, but only in the ways
+    that the corporation chooses. It means for us to be docile, harmonious,
+    and, above all, grateful.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Within days, an independent analysis by German security experts proved
+    decisively that Street View’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal
+    information from homes. Google was forced to concede that it had
+    intercepted and stored “payload data,” personal information grabbed
+    from unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions. As its apologetic blog post
+    noted,
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google’s “Spy-Fi” scandal filled headlines around the world. Many
+    believed that the Street View revelations would inflict irreparable
+
+    [...]
+
+    April 2012 FCC report is heart wrenching in its way, a melancholic
+    depiction of democracy’s vulnerability in the face-off with a wealthy,
+    determined, and audacious surveillance capitalist opponent. In November
+    2010 the FCC sent Google a letter of inquiry
+
+    [...]
+
+    The second point is that in retrospect, one sees that the very idea of
+    a single rogue engineer was designed and elaborated as a brilliant
+    piece of misdirection, a classic scapegoating ploy. It directed
+    attention away from the ambitious and controversial agenda of the
+    extraction imperative toward a different narrative of a single infected
+    cell excised from the flesh of an enormous but innocent organism. All
+    that was left was to excise the infected flesh and let the organism
+    declare itself cured of its privacy kleptomania. Then—a return to the
+    streets
+
+    [...]
+
+    This is to say that her job was a logical impossibility. That she may
+    have nevertheless taken it seriously is suggested by
+
+    [...]
+
+    Street View’s redirection and elaboration announced a critical shift in
+    the orientation and ambition of the surveillance program: it would no
+    longer be only about routes, but about routing
+
+    [...]
+
+    For now, suffice to say that Street View and the larger project of
+    Google Maps illustrate the new and even more ambitious goals toward
+    which this cycle of dispossession would soon point: the migration from
+    an online data source to a real-world monitor to an advisor to an
+    active shepherd—from knowledge to influence to control. Ultimately,
+    Street View’s elaborate data would become the basis for another complex
+    of spectacular Google incursions: the self-driving car and “Google
+    City,” which we learn more about in Chapter 7. Those programs aim to
+    take surplus capture to new levels while opening up substantial new
+    frontiers for the establishment of behavioral futures markets in the
+    real world of goods and services. It is important to understand that
+    each level of innovation builds on the one before and that all are
+    united in one aim, the extraction of behavioral surplus at scale.In
+    this progression, Google perceives an opportunity
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google discovered by chance or intention the source of every mapmaker’s
+    power
+
+    [...]
+
+    The first US rectangular land survey captured this language perfectly
+    in its slogan: “Order upon the Land.”72 The cartographer is the
+    instrument of power as the author of that order, reducing reality to
+    only two conditions: the map and oblivion. The cartographer’s truth
+    crystallizes the message that Google and all surveillance capitalists
+    must impress upon all humans: if you are not on our map, you do not
+    exist
+
+    [...]
+
+    Google has done incrementally and furtively what would plainly be
+    illegal
+
+    [...]
+
+    done all at once.”98
+
+    [...]
+
+    Nevertheless, the company made a canny decision not to disclose the
+    true extent of Cortana’s knowledge to its users. It wants to know
+    everything about you, but it does not want you to know how much it
+    knows or that its operations are entirely geared to continuously
+    learning more. Instead, the “bot” is programmed to ask for permission
+    and confirmation. The idea is to avoid spooking the public by
+    presenting Cortana’s intelligence as “progressive” rather than
+    “autonomous,” according to the project’s group program manager, who
+    noted that people do not want to be surprised by how much their phones
+    are starting to take over: “We made an explicit decision to be a little
+    less ‘magical’ and little
+
+    [...]
+
+    The Siren Song of Surveillance Revenues
+
+    [...]
+
+    PrecisionID
+
+    [...]
+
+    ID is then broadcast to every “unencrypted website a Verizon customer
+    visits from a mobile device. It allows third-party advertisers and
+    websites to assemble a deep, permanent profile of visitors’ web
+    browsing habits without their consent.”126 Alarmed by the threat of
+    fresh competition, Google, posing as a privacy advocate, launched a
+    campaign for a new internet protocol that would prevent “header
+    injections” such as Verizon’s PrecisionID.127 Privacy expert and
+    journalist Julia Angwin and
+
+    [...]
+
+    UIDH [unique identifier header], and expect that to be available soon.”
+    The New
+
+    [...]
+
+    capitalism gene therapy. As Verizon’s president of Operations told
+    investors, “For
+
+    [...]
+
+    The companies understood, and they persuaded Republican senators, that
+    the principle of consent would strike a serious blow to the
+    foundational mechanisms of the new capitalism: the legitimacy of
+    unilateral surplus dispossession, ownership rights to surplus, decision
+    rights over surplus, and the right to lawless space for the prosecution
+    of these activities.146 To this end the resolution also prevented
+
+    [...]
+
+    another trend, surveillance in the interest of behavioral surplus
+    capture and sale has become a service in its own right. Such companies
+    are often referred to as “software-as-a-service” or SaaS, but they are
+    more accurately termed “surveillance as a service,” or “SVaaS.” For
+    example, a new app-based approach to lending instantly establishes
+    creditworthiness based on detailed
+
+    [...]
+
+    You’re able to get in and really understand the daily life of these
+    customers,” explained the CEO of one lending company that analyzes
+    10,000 signals per customer.151 Such methods were originally
+
+    [...]
+
+    Surveillance capitalism was born digital, but as we shall see in
+    following chapters, it is no longer confined to born-digital companies.
+    This logic for translating investment into revenue is highly adaptive
+    and exceptionally lucrative as long as raw-material supplies are free
+    and law is kept at bay. The rapid migration to surveillance revenues
+    that is now underway recalls the late-twentieth-century shift from
+    revenues derived from goods and services to revenues derived from
+    mastering the speculative and shareholder-value-maximizing
+
+    [...]
+
+    Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides
+
+    [...]
+
+    According to the philosopher of language John Searle, a declaration is
+    a particular way of speaking and acting that establishes facts out of
+    thin air, creating a new reality where there was nothing. Here is how
+    it works: sometimes we speak to simply describe the world—“you have
+    brown eyes”—or to change it—“Shut the door.” A declaration combines
+    both, asserting a new reality by describing the world as if a desired
+    change were already true: “All humans are created equal.” “They are
+    yours to command.” As Searle writes, “We
+
+    [...]
+
+    Searle concludes, “All of institutional reality, and therefore… all of
+    human civilization is created by… declarations
+
+    [...]
+
+    Instead, Durkheim trained his sights on the social transformation
+    already gathering around him, observing that “specialization” was
+    gaining “influence” in politics, administration, the judiciary,
+    science, and the arts. He concluded that the division of labor was no
+    longer quarantined in the industrial workplace. Instead, it had burst
+    through those factory walls to becoming the critical organizing
+    principle of industrial society. This is also an example of Edison’s
+    insight: that the principles of capitalism initially aimed at
+    production eventually shape the wider social and moral milieu.
+    “Whatever opinion one has about the division of labor,” Durkheim wrote,
+    “everyone knows that it exists, and is more and more becoming one of
+    the fundamental bases of the social order.”17 Economic imperatives
+    predictably mandated the division of labor in production, but what was
+    the purpose of the division of labor in society? This was the question
+    that motivated Durkheim’s analysis, and his century
+
+    [...]
+
+    What would hold society together in the absence of the rules and
+    rituals of clan and kin? Durkheim’s answer was the division of labor.
+    People’s needs for a coherent new source of meaning and structure were
+    the cause, and the effect was an ordering
+
+    [...]
+
+    conclusions are still relevant for us now. He argued that the division
+    of labor accounts for the interdependencies and reciprocities that link
+    the many diverse members of a modern industrial society in a larger
+    prospect of solidarity. Reciprocities breed mutual need, engagement,
+    and respect, all of which imbue this new ordering principle with moral
+    force
+
+    [...]
+
+    Britain, university administrators are already talking about a “missing
+    generation” of data scientists. The huge salaries of the tech firms
+    have lured so many professionals that there is no one left to teach the
+    next generation of students. As one scholar described it, “The real
+    problem is these people are not dispersed through society. The
+    intellect and expertise is concentrated in a small number of
+    companies.”32
+
+    [...]
+
+    Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, the corporation’s
+    scientists are not recruited to solve world hunger or eliminate
+    carbon-based fuels. Instead, their genius is meant to storm the gates
+    of human experience, transforming it into data and translating it into
+    a new market colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing
+
+    [...]
+
+    under scrutiny, those long-awaited delivery trucks look more like
+    automated vehicles of invasion and conquest: more Mad Max than Red
+    Cross, more Black Sails than Carnival Cruise. The wizards behind their
+    steering wheels careen across every hill and hollow, learning how to
+    scrape and stockpile our behavior
+
+    [...]
+
+    Schmidt was, in fact, merely paraphrasing computer scientist Mark
+    Weiser’s seminal 1991 article, “The Computer for the 21st Century,”
+    which has framed Silicon Valley’s technology objectives for nearly
+    three decades. Weiser introduced what he called “ubiquitous computing”
+    with two legendary sentences: “The most profound technologies are those
+    that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life
+    until they are indistinguishable from it.” He described a new way of
+    thinking “that allows the computers themselves to vanish into the
+    background.… Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing
+    humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as
+    taking a walk in the woods.”2
+
+    [...]
+
+    new phase, supply operations were enlarged and intensified to
+    accommodate economies of scope and economies of action. What does this
+    entail? The shift toward economies of scope defines a new set of aims:
+    behavioral surplus must be vast, but it must also be varied. These
+    variations are developed along two dimensions. The first is the
+    extension of extraction operations from the virtual world into the
+    “real
+
+    [...]
+
+    call economies of action. In order to achieve these economies, machine
+    processes are configured to intervene in the state of play in the real
+    world among real people and things. These interventions are designed to
+    enhance certainty by doing things: they nudge, tune, herd, manipulate,
+    and modify behavior in specific directions by executing actions as
+    subtle as inserting a specific phrase into your Facebook news feed,
+    timing the appearance of a BUY button on your phone, or shutting down
+    your car engine when an insurance payment is late.
+
+    [...]
+
+    means of behavioral modification.” The aim of this undertaking is not
+    to impose behavioral norms, such as conformity or obedience, but rather
+    to produce behavior that reliably, definitively, and certainly leads to
+    desired commercial results. The research director of Gartner, the
+    well-respected business advisory and research firm, makes the point
+    unambiguously when he observes
+
+    [...]
+
+    shadow text.4As the prediction imperative gathers force, it gradually
+    becomes clear that extraction was the first phase of a
+    far-more-ambitious project. Economies of action mean that real-world
+    machine architectures must be able to know as well as to do. Extraction
+    is not enough; now it must be twinned with execution. The extraction
+    architecture is combined with a new execution architecture, through
+    which hidden economic objectives are imposed upon the vast and varied
+    field of behavior.5 Gradually, as surveillance capitalism’s imperatives
+
+    [...]
+
+    is an extraordinary statement because there can be no such guarantees
+    in the absence of the power to make it so. This wider complex that we
+    refer to as the “means of behavioral modification” is the expression of
+    this gathering power. The prospect of guaranteed outcomes alerts us to
+    the force of the prediction imperative, which demands that surveillance
+    capitalists make the future for the sake of predicting it. Under this
+    regime, ubiquitous computing is not just a knowing machine; it is an
+    actuating machine designed to produce more certainty about us and for
+    them.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Finally, I want to underscore that although it may be possible to
+    imagine something like the “internet of things” without surveillance
+    capitalism, it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without
+    something like the “internet of things.” Every command arising from the
+    prediction imperative requires this pervasive real-world material
+    “knowing and doing” presence. The new apparatus is the material
+    expression of the prediction imperative, and it represents a new kind
+    of power animated by the economic compulsion toward certainty. Two
+    vectors converge in this fact: the early ideals of ubiquitous computing
+    and the economic imperatives of surveillance capitalism. This
+    convergence signals the metamorphosis of the digital infrastructure
+    from a thing that we have to a thing that has us.
+
+    [...]
+
+    was coaxed to life nearly sixty years ago under the warm equatorial sun
+    of the Galapagos Islands, when a giant tortoise stirred from her torpor
+    to swallow a succulent chunk of cactus into which a dedicated scientist
+    had wedged a small machine. It was a time when scientists reckoned with
+    the obstinacy of free-roaming animals and concluded that surveillance
+    was the necessary price of knowledge. Locking these creatures in a zoo
+    would only eliminate the very behavior that scientists wanted to study,
+    but how were they to be surveilled? The solutions once concocted by
+    scholars of elk herds, sea turtles, and geese have been refurbished by
+    surveillance capitalists and presented as an inevitable feature of
+    twenty-first-century life on Earth. All that has changed is that now we
+    are the animals
+
+    [...]
+
+    If you’re not in the system, you don’t exist
+
+    [...]
+
+    dark data
+
+    [...]
+
+    This means that surplus must be both plentiful (economies of scale) and
+    varied (economies of scope) in both range and depth.
+
+    [...]
+
+    gamification
+
+    [...]
+
+    all else fails, insurers are advised to induce a sense of inevitability
+    and helplessness in their customers. Deloitte counsels companies to
+    emphasize “the multitude of other technologies already in play to
+    monitor driving” and that “enhanced surveillance and/or geo-location
+    capabilities are part of the world we live in now, for better or
+    worse.”46
+
+    [...]
+
+    Behavioral data drawn from their experience are processed, and the
+    results flow in two directions. First, they return to the drivers,
+    executing procedures to interrupt and shape behavior in order to
+    enhance the certainty, and therefore profitability, of predictions
+    (economies of action). Second, prediction products that rank and sort
+    driver behavior flow into newly convened behavioral futures markets in
+    which third parties lay bets on what drivers will do now, soon, and
+    later: Will
+
+    [...]
+
+    uncontract
+
+    [...]
+
+    This is not the automation of society, as some might think, but rather
+    the replacement of society with machine action dictated by economic
+    imperatives. The uncontract is not
+
+    [...]
+
+    Despite its pervasiveness both in Silicon Valley and in the wider
+    culture of data scientists and technology developers, inevitabilism is
+    rarely discussed or critically evaluated. Paradiso
+
+    [...]
+
+    Paradiso imagines a society in which it falls to each individual to
+    protect herself from the omniscient ubiquitous sensate computational
+    systems of the new apparatus. Rather than paradise, it seems a recipe
+    for a new breed of madness. Yet this is precisely the world that is now
+    under construction around us, and this madness appears to be a happy
+    feature of the plan.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Cisco Kinetic gets the right data to the right applications at the
+    right time… while executing policies to enforce data ownership,
+    privacy, security and even data sovereignty laws.”73 But, as is so
+    often the case, the most audacious effort to transform the urban
+    commons into the surveillance capitalist’s equivalent of Paradiso’s
+    250-acre marsh comes from Google, which has introduced and legitimated
+    the concept of the “for-profit city.” Just as MacKay had counseled and
+    Weiser proselytized, the computer would be operational everywhere and
+    detectable nowhere, always beyond the edge of individual awareness. In
+    2015, shortly after Google reorganized
+
+    [...]
+
+    We fund it all… through a very novel advertising model.… We can
+    actually then target ads to people in proximity, and then obviously
+    over time track them through things like beacons and location services
+    as well as their browsing activity
+
+    [...]
+
+    As we are shorn of alternatives, we are forced to purchase products
+    that we can never own while our payments fund our own surveillance and
+    coercion. Adding insult to injury, data rendered by this wave of things
+
+    [...]
+
+    life pattern marketing” based on techniques derived from military
+    intelligence known as “patterns of life analysis
+
+    [...]
+
+    It allows you to tap into people’s compulsive nature by encouraging
+    impulse buys with the notifications you send out.… It also allows you
+    to gain insight on your current customers by reading what they’re
+    saying on Yelp and Facebook.…”24 Another mobile marketing firm
+    recommends
+
+    [...]
+
+    November 2017 Quartz investigative reporters discovered that since
+    early 2017, Android phones had been collecting location information by
+    triangulating the nearest cell towers, even when location services were
+    disabled, no apps were running, and no carrier SIM card was installed
+    in the phone. The information was used to manage Google’s “push”
+    notifications and messages sent to users on their Android phones,
+    enabling the company to track “whether an individual with
+
+    [...]
+
+    databases of ruin.”34
+
+    [...]
+
+    The company built an “employment index” for the national economy as
+    well as a “consumption index.” It also touted its ability to generate
+    quite-specific predictions such
+
+    [...]
+
+    The agencies’ well-meaning guidelines overlook the inconvenient truth
+    that transparency and privacy represent friction for surveillance
+    capitalists in much the same way that improving working conditions,
+    rejecting child labor, or shortening the working day represented
+    friction for the early industrial capitalists. It took targeted laws to
+    change working conditions back
+
+    [...]
+
+    The only real protection is when an app randomly but regularly
+    generates a new MAC address for your phone, but of the nine trackers,
+    only Apple’s performed this operation. The report also identifies a
+    general pattern of careless
+
+    [...]
+
+    other words, privacy policies are more aptly referred to as
+    surveillance policies, and that is what I suggest we call them. There
+    are many new territories of body rendition
+
+    [...]
+
+    Nobody reckoned with the fact that the prediction imperative makes
+    individual ignorance the preferred condition for rendition operations,
+    just as Arendt had observed and Mackay had prescribed for animals in
+    the wild. Original sin prefers the dark. The talks continued without
+    the advocates, and
+
+    [...]
+
+    1767 the political economist Nathaniel Forster worried that
+    “fashionable luxury” was spreading “like a contagion,” and he
+    complained of the “perpetual restless ambition in each of the inferior
+    ranks to raise themselves to the level of those immediately above
+    them.”4 Adam Smith wrote insightfully on this social process, noting
+    that upper-class luxuries can in time be recast as “necessaries.” This
+    occurs as “the established rules of decency” change to reflect new
+    customs introduced by elites, triggering lower-cost production methods
+    that transform what was once unattainable into newly affordable goods
+    and services.5 Ford’s Model T
+
+    [...]
+
+    Conversation” stands alone in its promise to dominate raw-material
+    supply, and the rewards to the One Voice would be astronomical. Casual
+    talk helps to blur the boundaries between “it”—the apparatus saturated
+    with commercial agents—and us. In conversation we imagine friendship.
+    The more we fancy the apparatus as our confidante, nanny, governess,
+    and support system—a disembodied, pervasive “Mrs. Doubtfire” for each
+    person—the more experience we allow it to render, and the richer its
+    supply operations grow. Communication is the first human joy, and a
+    conversational interface is prized for the frictionless ease in which a
+    mere utterance can trigger action
+
+    [...]
+
+    2018, Amazon had inked deals with home builders, installing its Dot
+    speakers directly into ceilings throughout the house as well as Echo
+    devices and
+
+    [...]
+
+    Mark Zuckerberg’s unilateral upending of established privacy norms in
+    2010, when he famously announced that Facebook users no longer have an
+    expectation of privacy. Zuckerberg had described the corporation’s
+    decision to unilaterally release users’ personal information,
+    declaring, “We decided that these would be the social norms now, and we
+    just went for it.”55 Despite
+
+    [...]
+
+    The personalization project descends deeper toward the ocean floor with
+    these new tools, where they lay claim to yet a new frontier of
+    rendition trained not only on your personality but also on your
+    emotional life. If this project of surplus from the depths is to
+    succeed, then your unconscious—where feelings form before there are
+    words to express them—must be recast as simply one more source of
+    raw-material supply for machine rendition and analysis, all of it for
+    the sake of more-perfect prediction. As a market research report on
+    affective computing explains, “Knowing the real-time emotional state
+    can help businesses to sell their product and thereby increase
+    revenue.”88 Emotion analytics products such as SEWA use
+
+    [...]
+
+    Conditioning” is a well-known approach to inducing behavior change,
+    primarily associated with the famous Harvard behaviorist B. F. Skinner.
+    He argued that behavior modification should mimic the evolutionary
+    process, in which naturally occurring behaviors are “selected” for
+    success by environmental conditions. Instead of the earlier, more
+    simplistic model of stimulus/response, associated with behaviorists
+    such as Watson and Pavlov, Skinner interpolated a third variable:
+    “reinforcement.” In his laboratory work with mice and pigeons, Skinner
+    learned how to observe a range of naturally occurring behaviors in the
+    experimental animal and then reinforce the specific action, or
+    “operant,” that he wanted the animal to reproduce. Ultimately, he
+    mastered intricate designs or “schedules” of reinforcement that could
+    reliably shape precise behavioral routines. Skinner called the
+    application
+
+    [...]
+
+    Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively
+    engineered human behavior.” He believes that smartphones, wearable
+    devices, and the larger
+
+    [...]
+
+    Varian endorsed and celebrated this self-authorizing experimental role,
+    warning that all the data in the world “can only measure correlation,
+    not causality.”3 Data tell what happened but not why it happened
+
+    [...]
+
+    element in the construction of high-quality prediction products—i.e.,
+    those that approximate guaranteed outcomes—depends upon causal
+    knowledge. As Varian says, “If you really want to understand causality,
+    you have to run experiments. And if you run experiments continuously,
+    you can continuously improve your system.”4
+
+    [...]
+
+    Psychologists have found that the more a person can project himself or
+    herself into the feelings of another and take the other’s perspective,
+    the more likely he or she is to be influenced by subliminal cues,
+    including hypnosis. Empathy orients people toward other people. It
+    allows one to get absorbed in emotional experience and to resonate with
+    others’ experiences
+
+    [...]
+
+    Facebook’s persistence warns us again of the dispossession cycle’s
+    stubborn march. Facebook had publicly acknowledged and apologized for
+    its overt experimental incursions into behavior modification and
+    emotional manipulation, and it promised adaptations to curb or mitigate
+    these practices. Meanwhile, a new threshold of intimate life had been
+    breached. Facebook’s potential mastery of emotional manipulation became
+    discussable and even taken for granted as habituation set in. From
+    Princeton’s Fiske to critic Grimmelmann and supporter Meyer, the
+    experts believed that if Facebook’s activities were to be forced into a
+    new regulatory regime, the corporation would merely continue in secret
+
+    [...]
+
+    Individual awareness is the
+
+    [...]
+
+    The evasion of individual and group awareness was critical to
+    Facebook’s behavior-modification success, just as MacKay had
+    stipulated. The first paragraph of the research article on emotional
+    contagion celebrates this evasion: “Emotional states can be transferred
+    to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the
+    same emotions without their awareness.” Nor do the young adults of
+    Australia’s great cities suspect that the precise measure of their
+    fears and fantasies is exploited for commercial result at the hour and
+    moment of their greatest vulnerability.
+
+    [...]
+
+    enemy of telestimulation because it is the necessary condition for the
+    mobilization of cognitive and existential resources. There is no
+    autonomous judgment without awareness. Agreement and disagreement,
+    participation and withdrawal, resistance or collaboration: none of
+    these self-regulating choices can exist without awareness.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Indeed, some theorists have suggested that the primary purpose of self
+    awareness is to enable self-regulation.” Every threat to human autonomy
+    begins with an assault on awareness, “tearing down our capacity to
+    regulate our thoughts, emotions, and desires.”22
+
+    [...]
+
+    salience of self-awareness as a bulwark against self-regulatory failure
+    is also underscored in the work of two Cambridge University researchers
+    who developed a scale to measure a person’s “susceptibility to
+    persuasion.” They found that the single most important determinant of
+    one’s ability to resist persuasion is what they call “the ability to
+    premeditate.”23 This means that people who harness self-awareness to
+    think through the consequences of their actions are more disposed to
+    chart their own course and are significantly less vulnerable to
+    persuasion techniques. Self-awareness also figures in the
+    second-highest-ranking factor on their scale: commitment. People who
+    are consciously committed to a course of action or set of principles
+
+    [...]
+
+    We have seen already that democracy threatens surveillance revenues.
+    Facebook’s practices suggest an equally disturbing conclusion: human
+    consciousness itself is a threat to surveillance revenues, as awareness
+    endangers the larger project of behavior modification. Philosophers
+    recognize “self-regulation,” “self-determination,” and “autonomy” as
+    “freedom of will.” The word autonomy derives from the Greek and
+    literally means “regulation by the self.” It stands in contrast to
+    heteronomy, which means “regulation by others.” The competitive
+    necessity of economies of action means that surveillance capitalists
+    must use all means available to supplant autonomous action with
+    heteronomous action.
+
+    [...]
+
+    However, it would be dangerous to nurse the notion that today’s
+    surveillance capitalists simply represent more of the same. This
+    structural requirement of economies of action turns the means of
+    behavioral modification into an engine of growth. At no other time in
+    history have private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power
+    enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a
+    pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and
+    control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific
+    know-how that money can buy.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Most research on games concludes that these structures can be effective
+    at motivating action, and researchers generally predict that games will
+    increasingly be used as the methodology of choice to change individual
+    behavior.34 In practice, this has meant that the power of games to
+    change behavior is shamelessly instrumentalized as gamification spreads
+    to thousands of situations in which a company merely wants to tune,
+    herd, and condition the behavior of its customers or employees toward
+    its own objectives
+
+    [...]
+
+    One analyst compiled a survey of more than ninety such “gamification
+    cases,” complete with return-on-investment statistics.35 Ian Bogost, a
+    professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech and a digital
+    culture observer, insists that these systems should be called
+    “exploitationware” rather than games because their sole aim is behavior
+    manipulation and modification.36
+
+    [...]
+
+    The zeal for Pokémon Go gradually diminished, but the impact of Hanke’s
+    accomplishments is indelible. “We’ve only just scratched the surface,”
+    Hanke told a crowd of fans.46 The game had demonstrated that it was
+    possible to achieve economies of action on a global scale while
+    simultaneously directing specific individual actions toward precise
+    local market opportunities where high bidders enjoy an ever-closer
+    approximation of guaranteed outcomes. Niantic’s distinctive
+    accomplishment
+
+    [...]
+
+    TechCrunch noted the game’s “precise location tracking” and “ability to
+    perform audio fingerprinting” through its access to your camera and
+    microphone, concluding, “So it’s prudent to expect some of your
+    location data to end up in Google’s hands.”48 The Electronic Privacy
+    Information Center noted in a letter of complaint to the Federal
+
+    [...]
+
+    However, it does not acknowledge that its services operate on two
+    levels: game services for players and prediction services for Niantic’s
+    customers. The company concedes that it uses third-party services,
+    including Google’s, to “collect and interpret data,” but it is careful
+    to sidestep the aims of those analyses.51 The seven-page letter
+    mentions “sponsored
+
+    [...]
+
+    The genius of Pokémon Go was to transform the game you see into a
+    higher-order game of surveillance capitalism, a game about a game
+
+    [...]
+
+    the end we recognize that the probe was designed to explore the next
+    frontier: the means of behavioral modification. The game about the game
+    is, in fact, an experimental facsimile of surveillance capitalism’s
+    design for our future
+
+    [...]
+
+    Thus began a morbidly fascinating and often bizarre chapter in the
+    history of American spy craft.55 Much of the new work was conducted in
+    the context of the CIA’s highly classified MKUltra project, which was
+    tasked with “research and development of chemical, biological, and
+    radiological materials capable for employment in clandestine operations
+    to control human behavior
+
+    [...]
+
+    Another factor was the 1971 publication of B. F. Skinner’s incendiary
+    social meditation Beyond Freedom & Dignity. Skinner prescribed a future
+    based on behavioral control, rejecting the very idea of freedom (as
+    well as every tenet of a liberal society) and cast the notion of human
+    dignity as an accident of self-serving narcissism
+
+    [...]
+
+    First Amendment, the subcommittee argued, “must equally protect the
+    individual’s right to generate ideas,” and the right to privacy should
+    protect citizens from intrusions into their thoughts, behavior,
+    personality, and identity lest these concepts “become meaningless.” It
+    was in this context that Skinnerian behavioral engineering was singled
+    out for critical examination
+
+    [...]
+
+    Where is the hammer of democracy now, when the threat comes from your
+    phone, your digital assistant, your Facebook login? Who will stand for
+    freedom now, when Facebook threatens to retreat into the shadows if we
+    dare to be the friction that disrupts economies of action that have
+    been carefully, elaborately, and expensively constructed to exploit our
+    natural empathy, elude our awareness, and circumvent our prospects for
+    self-determination? If we fail to take notice now, how long before we
+    are numb to this incursion and to all the incursions? How long until we
+    notice nothing at all? How long before we forget who we were before
+    they owned us, bent over the old texts of self-determination in the dim
+
+    [...]
+
+    Now we know that surveillance capitalists’ ability to evade our
+    awareness is an essential condition for knowledge production. We are
+    excluded because we are friction that impedes
+
+    [...]
+
+    The commodification of behavior under the conditions of surveillance
+    capitalism pivots us toward a societal future in which an exclusive
+    division of learning is protected by secrecy, indecipherability, and
+    expertise. Even when knowledge derived from your behavior is fed back
+    to you in the first text as a quid pro quo for participation, the
+    parallel secret operations of the shadow text capture surplus for
+    crafting into prediction products destined for other marketplaces that
+    are about you rather than for you. These markets do not depend upon you
+    except first as a source of raw material from which surplus is derived,
+    and then as a target for guaranteed outcomes
+
+    [...]
+
+    this future we are exiles from our own behavior, denied access to or
+    control over knowledge derived from our experience. Knowledge,
+    authority, and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are
+    merely “human natural resources
+
+    [...]
+
+    Centuries of debate have been levied on the notion of free will, but
+    too often their effect has been to silence our own declarations of
+    will, as if we are embarrassed to assert this most fundamental human
+    fact. I recognize my direct experience of freedom as an inviolate truth
+    that cannot be reduced to the behaviorists’ formulations of life as
+    necessarily accidental and random, shaped by external stimuli beyond my
+    knowledge or
+
+    [...]
+
+    influence and haunted by irrational and untrustworthy mental processes
+    that I can neither discern nor avoid
+
+    [...]
+
+    American philosopher John Searle, whose work on the “declaration” we
+    discussed in Chapter 6, comes to a similar conclusion in his
+    examination of “free will.” He points to the “causal gap” between the
+    reasons for our actions and their enactment. We may have good reasons
+    to do something, he observes, but that does not necessarily mean it
+    will be done. “The traditional name of this gap in philosophy is ‘the
+    freedom of the will.’” In response to the “sordid history” of this
+    concept, he reasons, “even if the gap is an illusion it is one we
+    cannot shake off.… The notion of making and keeping promises
+    presupposes the gap.… [It] requires consciousness and a sense of
+    freedom on the part of the promise-making and promise-keeping agent
+
+    [...]
+
+    Our freedom flourishes only as we steadily will ourselves to close the
+    gap between making promises and keeping them. Implicit in this action
+    is an assertion that through my will I can influence the future. It
+    does not imply total authority over the future, of course, only over my
+    piece
+
+    [...]
+
+    should an experience as elemental as this claim on the future tense be
+    cast as a human right? The short answer is that it is only necessary
+    now because it is imperiled. Searle argues that such elemental
+    “features of human life” rights are crystallized as formal human rights
+    only at that moment in history when they come under systematic threat.
+    So, for example, the ability to speak is elemental. The concept of
+    “freedom of speech” as a formal right emerged only when society evolved
+    to a degree of political complexity that the freedom to speak came
+    under threat. The philosopher observes that speech is not more
+    elemental to human life than breathing or being able to move one’s
+    body. No one has declared a “right to breathe” or a “right to bodily
+    movement” because these elemental rights have not come under attack and
+    therefore do not require formal protection. What counts as a basic
+    right, Searle argues, is both “historically contingent” and “pragmatic
+
+    [...]
+
+    Most simply put, there is no freedom without uncertainty; it is the
+    medium in which human will is expressed in promises. Of course, we do
+    not only make promises to ourselves; we also make promises to one
+    another. When we join our wills and our promises, we create the
+    possibility of collective action toward a shared future, linked in
+    determination to make our vision real in the world. This is the origin
+    of the institution we call “contract,” beginning with the ancient
+    Romans.6 Contracts originated as shared “islands of predictability”
+    intended to mitigate uncertainty for the human community, and they
+    still retain this meaning. “The simplest way
+
+    [...]
+
+    The uncontract aims instead for a condition that the economist Oliver
+    Williamson describes as “contract utopia”: a state of perfect
+    information known to perfectly rational people who always perform
+    exactly as promised.12 The problem is, as Williamson writes, “All
+    complex contracts are unavoidably incomplete
+
+    [...]
+
+    you have ever seen a house built according to architectural plans, then
+    you have a good idea of what Williamson means. There is no blueprint
+    that sufficiently details everything needed to convert drawings and
+    specifications into an actual house. No plan anticipates every problem
+    that might arise, and most do not come close. The builders’ skills are
+    a function of how they collaborate to invent the actions that fulfill
+    the intention of the drawings as they solve the unexpected but
+    inevitable complications that arise along the way. They work together
+    to construct a reality from the uncertainty of the plan
+
+    [...]
+
+    Were “contract utopia” to exist, Williamson says, it would best be
+    described as a “plan” that, like other “utopian modes,” requires “deep
+    commitment to collective purposes” and “personal subordination.”
+    Subordination to what? To the plan. Contract in this context of perfect
+    rationality is what Williamson describes as “a world of planning.” Such
+    planning was the basic institution of socialist economics, where the
+    “new man” was idealized as possessing “a high level of cognitive
+    competence” and therefore, it was espoused, could design highly
+    effective plans.14 Varian deftly swaps out socialism’s “new man” and
+    installs instead a market defined by surveillance capitalism’s economic
+    imperatives, expressed through a ubiquitous computational architecture,
+    the machine intelligence capabilities to which data are continuously
+    supplied, the analytics that discern patterns, and the algorithms that
+    convert them into rules. This is the essence of the uncontract, which
+
+    [...]
+
+    Uncertainty is not
+
+    [...]
+
+    chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense. We choose
+    the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain
+    tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price
+    we pay for the freedom to will, which founds our right to the future
+    tense. In the absence of this freedom, the future collapses into an
+    infinite present of mere behavior, in which there can be no subjects
+    and no projects: only objects. In the future
+
+    [...]
+
+    Life inclines us to take action and to make commitments even when the
+    future is unknown. Anyone who has brought a child into the world or
+
+    [...]
+
+    the real world of human endeavor, there is no perfect information and
+    no perfect rationality
+
+    [...]
+
+    improve their approximation to guaranteed outcomes. Just as industrial
+    capitalism was driven to the continuous intensification of the means of
+    production, so surveillance capitalists are now locked in a cycle of
+    continuous intensification of the means of behavioral modification
+
+    [...]
+
+    Surveillance capitalists’ interests have shifted from using automated
+    machine processes to know about your behavior to using machine
+    processes to shape your behavior according to their interests. In other
+    words, this decade-and-a-half trajectory has taken us from automating
+    information flows about you to automating you. Given the conditions of
+    increasing ubiquity, it has become difficult if not impossible to
+    escape this audacious, implacable web
+
+    [...]
+
+    In order to reestablish our bearings, I have asked for a rebirth of
+    astonishment and outrage. Most of all, I have asked that we reject the
+    Faustian pact of participation for dispossession that requires our
+    submission to the means of behavioral modification built on the
+    foundation of the Google declarations. I am also mindful, though, that
+    when we ask How did they get away with it? there are many compelling
+    reasons to consider, no one of which stands alone
+
+    [...]
+
+    need laws that reject the fundamental legitimacy of surveillance
+    capitalism’s declarations and interrupt its most basic operations,
+    including the illegitimate rendition of human experience as behavioral
+    data; the use of behavioral surplus as free raw material; extreme
+    concentrations of the new means of production
+
+    [...]
+
+    shock and awe
+
+    [...]
+
+    withdrawal of agreement takes two broad forms, a distinction that will
+    be useful as we move into Part III. The first is what I call the
+    counter-declaration. These are defensive measures such as encryption
+    and other privacy tools, or arguments for “data ownership.” Such
+    measures may be effective in discrete situations
+
+    [...]
+
+    turn to the history of the Berlin Wall as an illustration of these two
+    forms of disagreement
+
+    [...]
+
+    industrial capitalism dangerously disrupted nature, what havoc might
+    surveillance capitalism wreak on human nature? The answer to this
+    question requires a return to imperatives
+
+    [...]
+
+    Industrial capitalism brought us to the brink of epic peril, but not as
+    a consequence of an evil lust for destruction or runaway technology.
+    Rather, this result was ineluctably driven by its own inner logic of
+    accumulation, with its imperatives of profit maximization, competition,
+    the relentless drive for labor productivity through the technological
+    elaboration of production, and growth funded by the continuous
+    reinvestment of
+
+    [...]
+
+    Similarly, the meaning of Polanyi’s prophecy for us now can be grasped
+    only through the lens of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives
+    as they frame its claim to human experience. If we are to rediscover
+    our sense of astonishment, then let it be here: if industrial
+    civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to
+    cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance
+    capitalism will thrive at the expense of human nature and threatens to
+    cost us our humanity
+
+    [...]
+
+    The idea from the start was that naming and taming are inextricable,
+    that fresh and careful naming can better equip us to intercept these
+    mechanisms of dispossession, reverse their action, produce urgently
+    needed friction, challenge the pathological division of learning, and
+    ultimately synthesize new forms of information capitalism that
+    genuinely meet our needs for effective life
+
+    [...]
+
+    the heart of Gentile’s political philosophy is the concept of the
+    “total.”3 The state was to be understood as an inclusive organic unity
+    that transcends individual
+
+    [...]
+
+    secret plans executed by secret police, the silent complicities and
+    hidden atrocities, the ceaseless transformation of who or what was up
+    or down, the intentional torsion of facts into anti-facts accompanied
+    by a perpetual deluge of propaganda, misinformation, euphemism, and
+    mendacity. The authoritative leader, or “egocrat,” to use the French
+    philosopher Claude Lefort’s term, displaces the rule of law and
+    “common” sense to become the quixotic judge of what is just or unjust,
+    truth or lie, at each moment.9
+
+    [...]
+
+    Great Terror
+
+    [...]
+
+    murders of whole sectors of the Soviet population, from poets to
+    diplomats, generals to political loyalists. According to Soviet
+    historian Robert Conquest, that two-year period saw seven million
+    arrests, one million executions, two million deaths in labor camps, one
+    million people imprisoned, and another seven million people still in
+    camps by the end of 1938.11 Despite the immediacy of catastrophic
+
+    [...]
+
+    Until the rise of surveillance capitalism, the prospect of
+    instrumentarian power was relegated to a gauzy world of dream and
+    delusion. This new species of power follows the logic of Planck, Meyer,
+    and Skinner in the forfeit of freedom for knowledge, but those
+    scientists each failed to anticipate the actual terms of this
+    surrender. The knowledge that now displaces our freedom is proprietary.
+    The knowledge is theirs, but the lost freedom belongs solely to us.
+    With this origin story in
+
+    [...]
+
+    Instrumentarian power cultivates an unusual “way of knowing” that
+    combines the “formal indifference” of the neoliberal worldview with the
+    observational perspective of radical behaviorism
+
+    [...]
+
+    Forget the cliché that if it’s free, “You are the product.” You are not
+    the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The “product” derives from
+    the surplus that is ripped from your life.Big Other finally enables the
+    universal technology of behavior that, as Skinner, Stuart MacKay, Mark
+    Weiser, and Joe Paradiso each insisted, accomplishes its aims quietly
+    and persistently, using methods that intentionally bypass our
+    awareness, disappearing into the background of all things. Recall that
+    Alphabet/Google’s Eric Schmidt provoked uproar in 2015 when in response
+    to a question on the future of the web, he said, “The internet will
+    disappear.” What he really meant was that “The internet will disappear
+    into Big Other.”
+
+    [...]
+
+    We may confuse Big Other with the behaviorist god of the vortex, but
+    only because it effectively conceals the machinations of surveillance
+    capital that are the wizard behind the digital curtain
+
+    [...]
+
+    Under the regime of instrumentarian power, the mental agency and
+    self-possession of the right to the future tense are gradually
+    submerged beneath a new kind of automaticity: a lived experience of
+    stimulus-response-reinforcement aggregated as the comings and goings of
+    mere organisms. Our conformity is irrelevant to instrumentarianism’s
+    success. There is no need for mass submission to social norms, no loss
+    of self to the collective induced by terror and compulsion, no offers
+    of acceptance
+
+    [...]
+
+    Take one wrong step, one deviation from the path of seamless
+    frictionless predictability, and that same voice turns acid in an
+    instant as it instructs “the vehicular monitoring system not to allow
+    the car to be started.”
+
+    [...]
+
+    belonging as a reward for bending to the group. All of that is
+    superseded by a digital order that thrives within things and bodies,
+    transforming volition into reinforcement and action into conditioned
+    response. In this way instrumentarian power produces endlessly accruing
+    knowledge for surveillance capitalists and endlessly diminishing
+    freedom for us as it continuously renews surveillance capitalism’s
+    domination of the division of learning in society. False consciousness
+    is no longer produced by the hidden facts of class and their relation
+    to production but rather by the hidden facts of instrumentarian power’s
+    command over the division of learning in society as it usurps the
+    rights to answer the essential questions: Who knows? Who decides? Who
+    decides who decides? Power was once identified with the ownership of
+    the means of production, but it is now identified with ownership of the
+    means of behavioral modification that is Big Other.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The last stage of the laboring society, the society of jobholders,
+    demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though
+    individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life
+    process of the species and the only active decision still required of
+    the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his
+    individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of
+    living, and acquiesce in a dazed
+
+    [...]
+
+    tranquilized,” functional type of behavior. The trouble with modern
+    theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could
+    become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization
+    of certain obvious trends in modern society. It is quite conceivable
+    that the modern age—which began with such an unprecedented and
+    promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most
+    sterile passivity history has ever known.5 Is this to be our home
+
+    [...]
+
+    Now imagine, decades hence, another thinker meditating on the
+    “disturbing relevance” of instrumentarian power, observing that “the
+    true problems of our time cannot be understood, let alone solved,
+    without acknowledgement that instrumentarianism became this century’s
+    curse only because it so terrifyingly took care of its problems.” What
+    problems? I have
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the age of surveillance capitalism it is instrumentarian power that
+    fills the void, substituting machines for social relations, which
+    amounts to the substitution of certainty for society. In this imagined
+    collective life, freedom is forfeit to others’ knowledge, an
+    achievement that is only possible with the resources of the shadow text
+
+    [...]
+
+    private institutions of capital led the way in this ambitious
+    reformation of collective life and individual experience, but they
+    found necessary support from public institutions, especially as the
+    declaration of a “war on terror” legitimated every inclination to
+    enshrine machine-produced certainty as the ultimate solution to
+    societal uncertainty. These mutual affinities assured that
+    instrumentarian power would not be a stepchild but rather an equal
+    partner or even, with increasing regularity, the lord and master upon
+    whom the state depends in its quest for “total awareness.” That
+    instrumentarian power is regarded as the certain
+
+    [...]
+
+    White House briefing memo encouraged the companies to develop a
+    “radicalism algorithm” that would digest social media and other sources
+    of surplus to produce something comparable to a credit score, but aimed
+    at evaluating the “radicalness” of online content.14 The turn to
+    instrumentarian
+
+    [...]
+
+    Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. The objective was to
+    tighten the net of instrumentarian power through
+
+    [...]
+
+    One startup, Geofeedia, specializes in detailed location tracking of
+    activists and protesters, such as Greenpeace members or union
+    organizers, and the computation of individualized
+
+    [...]
+
+    ACLU attorney countered that the government is using tech companies “to
+    build massive dossiers on people” based on nothing more than their
+    constitutionally protected speech.26 Another, more prominent
+    surveillance-as-a-service company, Palantir, once touted by Bloomberg
+    Businessweek as “the war on terror’s secret weapon,” was found to be in
+    a secret collaboration with the New Orleans Police Department to test
+    its “predictive policing” technology. Palantir’s software not only
+    identified gang members but also “traced people’s ties to other gang
+    members, outlined
+
+    [...]
+
+    thrust their scores into an inexorable downward spiral: “First your
+    score drops. Then your friends hear you are on the blacklist and,
+    fearful that their scores might be affected, quietly drop you as a
+    contact. The algorithm notices, and your
+
+    [...]
+
+    places less value on privacy than does Western culture and that most
+    Chinese have accommodated to the certain knowledge of online government
+    surveillance and censorship. The most common word for privacy, yinsi,
+    didn’t even appear in popular Chinese dictionaries until the
+    mid-1990s.42 Chinese citizens have accepted national ID cards with
+    biometric chips, “birth permits,” and now social credit rankings
+    because their society has been saturated with surveillance and
+    profiling for decades. For example, the “dang’an” is a wide-ranging
+    personal dossier compiled on hundreds of millions of urban residents
+    from childhood and maintained throughout life. This “Mao-era system for
+    recording the most intimate details of life” is updated by teachers,
+    Communist Party officials, and employers. Citizens have no rights to
+    see its contents, let alone contest them. The dossier is only one
+    feature of long-institutionalized
+
+    [...]
+
+    government urges the tech companies to train their algorithms for a
+    “radicalism” score. Indeed, the work of the shadow text is to evaluate,
+    categorize, and predict our behavior in millions of ways that we can
+    neither know nor combat—these are our digital dossiers. When it comes
+    to credit scoring, US and UK banks and
+
+    [...]
+
+    the Chinese context, the state will run the show and own it, not as a
+    market project but as a political one, a machine solution that shapes a
+    new society of automated behavior for guaranteed political and social
+    outcomes: certainty without terror. All the pipes from all the supply
+    chains will carry behavioral surplus to this new, complex means of
+    behavioral modification. The state will assume the role of the
+    behaviorist god, owning the shadow text and determining the schedule of
+    reinforcements and the behavioral routines that it will shape. Freedom
+    will be forfeit to knowledge, but it will be the state’s knowledge that
+    it exercises, not for the sake of revenue but for the sake of its own
+    perpetuation.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Joe” Stalin
+
+    [...]
+
+    The road from Shenzhen to an American or European airport also leads to
+    the Roomba vacuum cleaner mapping your living room and your breakfast
+    with Alexa
+
+    [...]
+
+    one direction lies the possibility of a synthetic declaration for a
+    third modernity based on the strengthening of democratic institutions
+    and the creative construction of a double movement for our time. On
+    this road we harness the digital to forms of information capitalism
+    that reunite supply and demand in ways that are both genuinely
+    productive of effective life and compatible with a flourishing
+    democratic social order. The first step down this road begins with
+    naming, establishing our bearings, reawakening our astonishment, and
+    sharing a sense of righteous indignity.
+
+    [...]
+
+    They aim to fashion a new society that emulates machine learning in
+    much the same way that industrial society was patterned on the
+    disciplines and methods of factory production. In their vision,
+    instrumentarian power replaces social trust, Big Other substitutes
+    certainty for social relations, and society as we know it shades into
+    obsolescence
+
+    [...]
+
+    Citing Abraham Lincoln, Facebook’s founder located his company’s
+    mission in the evolutionary time line of civilization, during which
+    humanity organized itself first in tribes, then cities, then nations.
+    The next phase of social evolution would be “global community,” and
+    Facebook was to lead the way, constructing the means and overseeing the
+    ends.14 Speaking at Facebook’s 2017 developers’ conference, Zuckerberg
+    linked his assertion of the company’s historic role in establishing a
+    “global community” to the standard myth of the modern utopia, assuring
+    his followers, “In the future, technology is going to… free us up to
+    spend more time on the things we all care about, like enjoying and
+    interacting with each other and expressing ourselves in new ways.… A
+    lot more of us are gonna do what today is considered the arts, and
+    that’s gonna form the basis of a lot of our communities
+
+    [...]
+
+    The “societal goal” articulated by the leading surveillance capitalists
+    fits snugly into the notion of limitless technological progress that
+    dominated utopian thought from the late eighteenth century through the
+    late nineteenth century, culminating with Marx. Indeed, surveillance
+    capitalists such as Nadella, Page, and Zuckerberg conform to five of
+    the six elements with which the great scholars of utopian thought,
+    Frank and Fritzie Manuel, define the classic profile of the most
+    ambitious modern utopianists: (1) a tendency toward highly focused
+    tunnel vision that simplifies the utopian challenge, (2) an earlier and
+    more trenchant grasp of a “new state of being” than other
+    contemporaries, (3) the obsessive pursuit and defense of an idée fixe,
+    (4) an unshakable belief in the inevitability of one’s ideas coming to
+    fruition, and (5) the drive for total reformation at the level of the
+    species and the entire world system
+
+    [...]
+
+    Often a utopian foresees the later evolution and consequences of
+    technological development already present in an embryonic state; he may
+    have antennae sensitive to the future. His gadgets, however, rarely go
+    beyond the mechanical potentialities of his age. Try as he may to
+    invent something wholly new, he cannot make a world out of nothing.”18
+    In our time, however, surveillance capitalists can and do make such a
+    world—a genuinely historic deviation from the norm. Individually and
+    collectively, the
+
+    [...]
+
+    The only way to grasp the theory advanced in their applied utopistics
+    is to reverse engineer their operations and scrutinize their meaning,
+    as we have done throughout these chapters.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Microsoft’s instrumentarian society, the factories and workplaces are
+    like Skinner’s labs, and the machines replace his pigeons and rats.
+    These are the settings where the architecture and velocities of
+    instrumentarian power are readied for translation to society in a
+    digital-age iteration of Walden Two in which machine relations are the
+    model for social relations. Nadella’s construction site exemplifies the
+    grand confluence in which machines and humans are united as objects in
+    the cloud, all instrumented and orchestrated in accordance with the
+    “policies.” The magnificence of “policies” lies precisely in the fact
+
+    [...]
+
+    result is that “policies” are functionally equivalent to plans, as Big
+    Other directs human and machine action. It ensures that doors will be
+    locked or unlocked, car engines will shut down or come to life, the
+    jackhammer will scream “no” in suicidal self-sacrifice, the worker will
+    adhere to norms, the group will swarm to defeat anomalies. We will all
+    be safe as each organism hums in harmony with every other organism,
+    less a society than a population that ebbs and flows in perfect
+    frictionless confluence, shaped by the means of behavioral modification
+    that elude our awareness and thus can neither be mourned nor resisted.
+
+    [...]
+
+    the twentieth century the critical success factors of industrial
+    capitalism—efficiency, productivity, standardization,
+    interchangeability, the minute division of labor, discipline,
+    attention, scheduling, conformity, hierarchical administration, the
+    separation of knowing and doing, and so forth—were discovered and
+    crafted in the workplace and then transposed to society, where they
+    were institutionalized in schools, hospitals, family life, and
+    personality. As generations of scholars have documented, society became
+    more factory-like so that we might train and socialize the youngest
+    among us to fit the new requirements of a mass production order.
+
+    [...]
+
+    With conspicuously thin theory complemented by thick practice, the
+    patented device is designed to monitor user behavior in order to
+    preemptively detect “any deviation from normal or acceptable behavior
+    that is likely to affect the
+
+    [...]
+
+    Alternatively, the behavior could be assessed in relation to a “feature
+    distribution representing normal and/or acceptable behavior for an
+    average member of a population
+
+    [...]
+
+    user’s mental state
+
+    [...]
+
+    the circle widens as the patent specifications unfold. The scientists
+    note the utility of alerts for health care providers, insurance
+    companies, and law-enforcement personnel. Here is a new
+    surveillance-as-a-service opportunity geared to preempt whatever
+    behavior clients choose. Microsoft’s patent returns us to Planck,
+
+    [...]
+
+    In each case, corporate objectives define the “policies” toward which
+    confluent behavior harmoniously streams.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The machine hive—the confluent mind created by machine learning—is the
+    material means to the final elimination of the chaotic elements that
+    interfere with guaranteed outcomes
+
+    [...]
+
+    Instead of the typical assurances that machines can be designed to be
+    more like human beings and therefore less threatening, Schmidt and
+    Thrun argue just the opposite: it is necessary for people to become
+    more machine-like.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In this world the “correct” outcomes are known in advance and
+    guaranteed in action. The same ubiquitous instrumentation and
+    transparency that define the machine system must also define the social
+    system, which in the end is simply another way of describing the ground
+    truth of instrumentarian society.
+
+    [...]
+
+    this human hive, individual freedom is forfeit to collective knowledge
+    and action. Nonharmonious elements are preemptively targeted with high
+    doses of tuning, herding, and conditioning, including the full
+    seductive force of social persuasion and influence. We march in
+    certainty, like the smart machines. We learn to sacrifice our freedom
+    to collective knowledge imposed by others and for the sake of their
+    guaranteed outcomes. This is the signature of the third modernity
+    offered up by surveillance capital as its answer to our quest for
+    effective life together
+
+    [...]
+
+    Pentland is often referred to as the “godfather of wearables,”
+    especially Google Glass. In 1998 he predicted that wearables “can
+    extend one’s senses, improve memory, aid the wearer’s social life and
+    even help him or her stay calm and collected
+
+    [...]
+
+    Most noteworthy is that Pentland “completes” Skinner, fulfilling his
+    social vision with big data, ubiquitous digital instrumentation,
+    advanced mathematics, sweeping theory, numerous esteemed coauthors,
+    institutional legitimacy, lavish funding, and corporate friends in high
+    places without having attracted the worldwide backlash, moral
+    revulsion, and naked vitriol once heaped on Harvard’s outspoken
+    behaviorist. This fact alone suggests the depth of psychic numbing to
+    which we have succumbed and the loss of our collective bearings.
+
+    [...]
+
+    ’s like watching beavers from outer space, like Jane Goodall watching
+    gorillas. You observe from a distance.”7 (This is a slur on Goodall, of
+    course, whose seminal genius was her ability to understand the gorillas
+    she studied not as “other ones” but rather as “one of us.”)
+
+    [...]
+
+    The team saw that it would be possible to exploit the increasingly
+    “ubiquitous infrastructure” of mobile phones and combine those data
+    with new streams of information from their wearable behavioral
+    monitors. The result was a radical new solution that Pentland and Eagle
+    called “reality mining
+
+    [...]
+
+    Pentland argued that information gathered by his
+    sociometers—“unobtrusive wearable sensors” measuring communication,
+    voice tones, and body language—“could help managers understand who is
+    working with whom and infer the relationships between colleagues” and
+    “would be an efficient way to find people who might work well
+    together.”20
+
+    [...]
+
+    people analytics
+
+    [...]
+
+    Pentland appeared in 2016 at a conference organized by Singularity
+    University, a Silicon Valley hub of instrumentarian ideology funded in
+    part by Larry Page. An interviewer tasked to write about Pentland
+    explains, “Though people are one of the most valuable assets in an
+    organization, many companies are still approaching management with a
+    20th century mentality.… Pentland saw the factor that was always
+    messing things up was—the people.”29 Like Nadella, Pentland described
+    his aims as developing the social systems that would work along the
+    same lines as the machine systems, using behavioral data flows to judge
+    the “correctness” of action patterns and to intervene when it is
+    necessary to change “bad” action to “correct” action. “If people aren’t
+    interacting correctly and information isn’t spreading correctly,”
+    Pentland warns, “people
+
+    [...]
+
+    Pentland articulated his ambitions for the capabilities and objectives
+    of this new milieu in a series of papers, published primarily between
+    2011 and 2014, but one remarkable 2011 essay of which he is the sole
+    author stands out: “Society’s Nervous System: Building Effective
+    Government, Energy, and Public Health Systems.”31
+
+    [...]
+
+    The initial premise is reasonable enough: industrial-age technology
+    once revolutionized the world with reliable systems for water, food,
+    waste, energy, transportation, police, health care, education, and so
+    forth, but these systems are now hopelessly “old,” “centralized,”
+    “obsolete,” and “unsustainable.” New digital systems are required that
+    must be “integrated,” “holistic,” “responsive,” “dynamic,” and
+    “self-regulating”: “We need a radical rethinking of societies’ systems.
+    We must create a nervous system for humanity that maintains the
+    stability of our societies’ systems
+
+    [...]
+
+    What is missing… are the dynamic models of demand and reaction,” along
+    with an architecture that guarantees “safety, stability, and
+    efficiency.… The models required must describe human
+
+    [...]
+
+    Regarding incentives, Pentland outlines a principle of “social
+    efficiency,” which means that participation must provide value to the
+    individual but also to the system as a whole.37 For the sake of this
+    wholeness, it is believed, each of us will surrender to a totally
+    measured life of instrumentarian order
+
+    [...]
+
+    Skinner advocated, via Frazier, that the virtue of a “planned society”
+    is “to keep intelligence on the right track, for the good of society
+    rather than of the intelligent individual.… It does this by making sure
+    that the individual will not forget his
+
+    [...]
+
+    Pentland says that “continuous streams of data about human behavior”
+    mean that everything from traffic, to energy use, to disease, to street
+    crime will be accurately forecast, enabling a “world without war or
+    financial crashes, in which infectious disease is quickly detected and
+    stopped, in which energy, water, and other resources are no longer
+    wasted, and in which governments are part of the solution rather than
+    part of the problem.”48 This new “collective intelligence” operates to
+    serve the greater good as we learn to act “in a coordinated manner”
+    based on “social universals.” “Great leaps in health care,
+    transportation
+
+    [...]
+
+    The main barriers are privacy concerns and the fact that we don’t yet
+    have any consensus around the trade-offs between personal and social
+    values.” Like Skinner, he is emphatic that these attachments to a
+    bygone era of imperfect knowledge threaten to undermine the prospect of
+    a perfectly engineered future society: “We cannot ignore the public
+    goods that such a nervous system could provide.…”49 Pentland avoids the
+    question “Whose greater good?” How is the greater good determined when
+    surveillance capitalism owns the machines and the means of behavioral
+    modification? “Goodness” arrives already oriented toward the interests
+    of the owners of the means of behavioral modification and the clients
+    whose guaranteed outcomes they seek to achieve. The greater good is
+    someone’s, but it may not be ours
+
+    [...]
+
+    Capitalism and socialism are equally tainted by their shared emphasis
+    on economic growth, which breeds overconsumption and pollution. Skinner
+    is intrigued by the Chinese system but rejects it on the grounds of the
+    bloody revolution that any effort to convert Westerners would entail.
+    “Fortunately,” Skinner concludes in the preface to Walden Two, “there
+    is another possibility.” This option is Skinner’s version of a
+    behaviorist society that provides a way in which “political action is
+    to be avoided.” In Walden Two a “plan” replaces politics, overseen by a
+    “noncompetitive” group of “Planners” who eschew power in favor of the
+    dispassionate administration of the schedules of reinforcement aimed at
+    the greater good.52 Planners exercise unique control over society but
+    “only because that control is necessary for the proper functioning of
+    the community
+
+    [...]
+
+    Pentland worries that our political-economic constructs such as
+    “market” and “class” hail from an old, slow world of the eighteenth and
+    nineteenth centuries. The new, “light-speed hyperconnected world”
+    leaves no time for the kind of rational deliberation and face-to-face
+    negotiation and compromise that characterized the social milieu in
+    which such political concepts originated
+
+    [...]
+
+    There is no room for politics in this instrumentarian society because
+    politics means establishing and asserting our bearings. Individual
+    moral and political bearings are a source of friction that wastes
+    precious time and diverts behavior from confluence
+
+    [...]
+
+    Computation thus replaces the political life of the community as the
+    basis for governance. The depth and breadth of instrumentation make it
+    possible, Pentland says, to calculate idea flow, social network
+    structure, the degree of social influence between people, and even
+    “individual susceptibilities to new ideas.” Most important,
+    instrumentation makes it possible for those with the God view to modify
+    others’ behavior. The data provide a “reliable prediction of how
+    changing any of these variables will change the performance of all the
+    people
+
+    [...]
+
+    Frazier acknowledges that you cannot coerce people into doing the right
+    thing. The solution is far more subtle and sophisticated, based upon
+    scientifically calibrated schedules of reinforcement: “Instead you have
+    to set up certain behavioral processes which will lead the individual
+    to design his own ‘good’ conduct.… We call that sort of thing
+    ‘self-control.’ But don’t be misled, the control always rests in the
+    last analysis in the hands of society
+
+    [...]
+
+    Pentland’s idea is comparable: “The social physics approach to getting
+    everyone to cooperate” is “social network incentives,” his version of
+    “reinforcement.” With such incentives, he explains, “we focus on
+    changing the connections between people rather than focusing on getting
+    people individually to change their behavior.… We can leverage those
+    exchanges to generate social pressure for change.”60 Social media is
+    critical to establishing these tuning capabilities, Pentland believes,
+    because this is the environment in which social pressure can best be
+    controlled, directed, manipulated, and scaled
+
+    [...]
+
+    Pentland ignores the role of empathy in emulation because empathy is a
+    felt experience that is not subject to the observable metrics required
+    for computational governance. Instead, Pentland subscribes to the label
+    Homo imitans to convey that it is mimicry, not empathy, and certainly
+    not politics, which defines human existence
+
+    [...]
+
+    stream of ideas as a swarm or collective intelligence, flowing through
+    time, with all the humans in it learning from each other’s experiences
+    in order to jointly discover the patterns of preferences and habits of
+    action that best
+
+    [...]
+
+    What is being abolished is autonomous man—the inner man, the
+    homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures
+    of freedom and dignity
+
+    [...]
+
+    One important study of Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that relies on
+    blockchain, suggests that such machine solutions both express and
+    contribute to the general erosion of the social fabric in ways that are
+    both consistent with instrumentarianism and further pave the way for
+    its success. Information scholars Primavera De Filippi and Benjamin
+    Loveluck conclude that contrary to popular belief, “Bitcoin is neither
+    anonymous nor privacy-friendly
+
+    [...]
+
+    We can begin by asking our children. Without knowing it, we sent the
+    least formed and most vulnerable among us to scout the hive and settle
+    its wilderness. Now their messages are filtering in from the frontier
+
+    [...]
+
+    Indeed, Facebook’s early advantage in this work arose in no small
+    measure from the simple fact that its founders and original designers
+    were themselves adolescents and emerging adults. They designed
+    practices for an imagined universe of adolescent users and college
+
+    [...]
+
+    contrary to Pentland’s belief that “class” divisions would disappear,
+    life in the hive produces new cleavages and forms of stratification:
+    not only tune or be tuned but also pressure or be pressured
+
+    [...]
+
+    Schüll learned that addictive players seek neither entertainment nor
+    the mythical jackpot of cash. Instead, they chase what Harvard Medical
+    School addiction researcher Howard Shaffer calls “the capacity of the
+    drug or gamble to shift subjective experience,” pursuing an
+    experiential state that Schüll calls the “machine zone,” a state of
+    self-forgetting in which one is carried along by an irresistible
+    momentum that feels like one is “played by the machine.”12 The machine
+    zone achieves a sense of complete immersion
+
+    [...]
+
+    Addiction by Design
+
+    [...]
+
+    Shaffer, the addiction researcher, has identified five elements that
+    characterize this state of compulsion: frequency of use, duration of
+    action, potency, route of administration, and player attributes
+
+    [...]
+
+    Perhaps the most difficult quality to capture is that in this period
+    that precedes the hard bargaining, an “inner” sense of “self” simply
+    does not yet exist. It is a time when “I” am whatever the “others”
+    think of me, and how “I” feel is a function of how the “others” treat
+    me. Instead of a stable sense of identity, there is only a chameleon
+    that reinvents itself depending upon the social mirror into which it is
+    drawn. In this condition, the “others” are not individuals but the
+    audience for whom I perform. Who “I” am depends upon the audience. This
+    state
+
+    [...]
+
+    Research shows that these big leaps in self-construction are stimulated
+    by experiences such as structured reflection, conflict, dissonance,
+    crisis, and failure. The people who help trigger this new inward
+    connection refuse to act as our mirrors. They reject fusion in favor of
+    genuine reciprocity
+
+    [...]
+
+    What are the consequences of the failure to win a healthy balance
+    between inner and outer, self and relationship? Clinical studies
+    identify specific patterns associated with this developmental
+    stagnation. Not surprisingly, these include an inability to tolerate
+    solitude, the feeling of being merged with others, an unstable sense of
+    self, and even an excessive need to control others as a way of keeping
+    the mirror close. Loss of the mirror is the felt equivalent of
+    extinction
+
+    [...]
+
+    The cultivation of inner resources is thus critical to the capacity for
+    intimacy and relationship, challenges that have become more
+    time-consuming with each new phase of the modern era. And while young
+    people are bound as ever to the enduring existential task of
+    self-making, our story suggests three critical ways in which this task
+    now converges with history and the unique conditions of existence in
+    our time
+
+    [...]
+
+    For example, Evil by Design author Chris Nodder, a user-experience
+    consultant, explains that evil design aims to exploit human weakness by
+    creating interfaces that “make users emotionally involved in doing
+    something that benefits the designer more than them.” He coaches his
+    readers in psychic numbing, urging them to accept the fact that such
+    practices have become the standard suggesting that consumers and
+    designers find ways to “turn them to your advantage
+
+    [...]
+
+    Facebook’s precocious mastery of “social proof”: “Much of our behavior
+    is determined by our impressions of what is the correct thing to do…
+    based on what we observe others doing.… This influence is known as
+    social proof
+
+    [...]
+
+    Most critical is that the more the need for the “others” is fed, the
+    less able one is to engage the work of self-construction. So
+    devastating is the failure to attain that positive equilibrium between
+    inner and outer life that Lapsley and Woodbury say it is “at the heart”
+    of most adult personality disorders
+
+    [...]
+
+    more that a user “liked,” the more that she informed Facebook about the
+    precise shape and composition of her “hand,” thus allowing the company
+    to continuously tighten the glove and increase the predictive value of
+    her signals.
+
+    [...]
+
+    On the demand side, Facebook’s “likes” were quickly coveted and craved,
+    morphing into a universal reward system or what one young app designer
+    called “our generation’s crack cocaine.” “Likes” became those variably
+    timed dopamine shots, driving users to double down on their bets “every
+    time they
+
+    [...]
+
+    News Feed is also the fulcrum of the social mirror. In the years
+    between revulsion and reverence, News Feed became Facebook’s most
+    intensely scrutinized object of data science and the subject of
+    extensive organizational innovation, all of it undertaken at a level of
+    sophistication and capital intensity that one might more naturally
+    associate with the drive to solve world hunger, cure cancer, or avert
+    climate destruction
+
+    [...]
+
+    laugh, cry, smile, click, like, share, or comment.”40 The glove
+    tightens around the hand with closed feedback loops enabled by the God
+    view, which favors posts from people with whom you have already
+    interacted, posts that have drawn high levels of engagement from
+    others, and posts that are like the ones with which you have already
+    engaged
+
+    [...]
+
+    According to the 302 most significant quantitative research studies on
+    the relationships between social media use and mental health (most of
+    them produced since 2013), the psychological process that most defines
+    the Facebook experience is what psychologists call “social
+    comparison.”45 It is usually considered a natural and virtually
+
+    [...]
+
+    One study found an increase in criminal larceny as television diffused
+    across society, awakening an awareness of and desire for consumer
+    goods. A related issue was that increased exposure to television
+    programs depicting affluence led to “the overestimation of others’
+    wealth and more dissatisfaction with one’s own life
+
+    [...]
+
+    Both television and social media deprive us of real-life encounters, in
+    which we sense the other’s inwardness and share something of our own,
+    thus establishing some threads of communality. Unlike
+
+    [...]
+
+    consequence of the new density of social comparison triggers and their
+    negative feedback loops is a psychological condition known as FOMO
+    (“fear of missing out”). It
+
+    [...]
+
+    Profile inflation triggers more negative self-evaluation among
+    individuals as people compare themselves to others, which then leads to
+    more profile inflation, especially among larger networks that include
+    more “distant friends.” As one study concluded, “Expanding one’s social
+    network by adding a number of distant friends through Facebook may be
+    detrimental by stimulating negative emotions for users
+
+    [...]
+
+    This compulsive behavior is intended to produce relief in the form of
+    social reassurance, but it predictably breeds more anxiety and more
+    searching.52 Social comparison
+
+    [...]
+
+    When considered from the vantage point of the self-other balance,
+    positive social comparisons are just as pernicious as negative
+    comparisons. Both are substitutes for the “hard bargain” of carving out
+    a self that is capable of reciprocity rather than fusion
+
+    [...]
+
+    Facebook use does not promote well-being.… Individual social media
+    users might do well to curtail their use of social media and focus
+    instead on real-world relationships
+
+    [...]
+
+    This is the world of Pentland’s “social learning,” his theory of
+    “tuning” little more than the systematic manipulation of the rewards
+    and punishments of inclusion and exclusion. It succeeds through the
+    natural human inclination to avoid psychological pain
+
+    [...]
+
+    confluence,” in which harmonies are achieved at the expense of the
+    psychological integrity of participants
+
+    [...]
+
+    This synthetic hive is a devilish pact for a young person. In terms of
+    sheer everyday effectiveness—contact, logistics, transactions,
+    communications—turn away, and you are lost. And if you simply crave the
+    fusion juice that is proof of life at a certain age and stage—turn
+    away, and you are extinguished
+
+    [...]
+
+    Just as Pentland stipulated, these closed loops are imposed outside the
+    realm of politics and individual volition. They move in stealth,
+    crafting their effects at the level of automatic psychological
+    responses and tipping the self-other balance toward the
+    pseudo-harmonies of the hive mind. In this process, the inwardness that
+    is the necessary source of autonomous action and moral judgment suffers
+    and suffocates. These are the preparatory steps toward the death of
+    individuality that Pentland advocates. In fact, this
+
+    [...]
+
+    the eighteenth century’s political ideal of the individual as the
+    repository of inalienable dignity, rights, and obligations; (2) the
+    early twentieth century’s individualized
+
+    [...]
+
+    human being called into existence by history, embarking on Machado’s
+    road because she must, destined to create “a life of one’s own” in a
+    world of ever-intensifying social complexity and receding traditions;
+    and (3) the late twentieth century’s psychologically autonomous
+    individual whose inner resources and capacity for moral judgment rise
+    to the challenges of self-authorship that history demands and act as a
+    bulwark against the predations of power. The self-authorship toward
+    which young people strive
+
+    [...]
+
+    post-political societal processes that bind the hive rely on social
+    comparison and social pressure for their durability and predictive
+    certainty, eliminating the need for trust
+
+    [...]
+
+    the closing lines of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential drama No Exit, the
+    character Garcin arrives at his famous realization, “Hell is other
+    people.” This was not intended as a statement of misanthropy but rather
+    a recognition that the self-other balance can never be adequately
+    struck as long as the “others” are constantly “watching.” Another
+    mid-century social psychologist, Erving Goffman, took up these themes
+    in his immortal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman
+    developed the idea of the “backstage” as the region in which the self
+    retreats from the performative demands of social life.
+
+    [...]
+
+    work as in life, “control of the backstage” allows individuals “to
+    buffer themselves from the deterministic demands that surround them.”
+    Backstage, the language is one of reciprocity, familiarity, intimacy,
+    humor. It offers the seclusion in which one can surrender to the
+    “uncomposed” face in sleep, defecation, sex, “whistling, chewing,
+    nibbling, belching, and flatulence.” Perhaps most of all, it is an
+    opportunity for “regression,” in which we don’t have to be “nice”: “The
+    surest sign of backstage solidarity is to feel that it is safe to lapse
+    into an asociable mood of sullen, silent irritability.” In the absence
+    of such respite where a “real” self can incubate and grow, Sartre’s
+    idea of hell begins to make sense.62
+
+    [...]
+
+    Milgram identified three key themes in the subway experiment as he and
+    his students debriefed their experiences. The first was a new sense of
+    gravitas toward “the enormous inhibitory anxiety that ordinarily
+    prevents us from breaching social norms.” Second was that the reactions
+    of the “breacher” are not an expression of individual personality but
+    rather are “a compelled playing out of the logic of social relations
+
+    [...]
+
+    Embarrassment and the fear of violating apparently trivial norms often
+    lock us into intolerable predicaments.… These are not minor regulatory
+    forces in social life, but basic ones.” Finally, Milgram understood
+    that any confrontation of social norms crucially depends upon the
+    ability to escape. It was not an adolescent who boarded the subway that
+    day. Milgram was an erudite adult and an expert on human behavior,
+    especially the mechanisms entailed in obedience to authority, social
+    influence, and conformity. The subway was just an ordinary slice of
+    life, not a capital-intensive architecture of surveillance and behavior
+    modification, not a “personalized reward device.” Still, Milgram could
+    not fight off the anxiety of the situation. The only thing that made it
+    tolerable was the possibility of an exit. Unlike Milgram, we face an
+    intolerable situation
+
+    [...]
+
+    are meant to fuse with the system and play to extinction: not the
+    extinction of our funds but rather the extinction of our selves.
+    Extinction is a design feature formalized in the conditions of no exit.
+    The aim of the tuners is to contain us within “the power of immediate
+    circumstances” as we are compelled by the “logic of social relations”
+    in the hive to bow to social pressure exerted in calculated patterns
+    that exploit our natural empathy. Continuously tightening feedback
+    loops cut off the means of exit, creating impossible levels of anxiety
+    that further drive the loops toward confluence. What is to be killed
+    here is the inner impulse toward autonomy and the arduous, exciting
+    elaboration of the autonomous self as a source of moral judgment and
+    authority capable of asking for a subway seat or standing against rogue
+    power.
+
+    [...]
+
+    To exit means to enter the place where a self can be birthed and
+    nurtured. History has a name for that kind of place: sanctuary
+
+    [...]
+
+    We know that nothing guarantees safety and certainty in this world, but
+    we are comforted by the serenity of this home and its layered silences.
+    The days unfurl now
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the march of institutional interests intent on implementing Big
+    Other, the very first citadel to fall is the most ancient: the
+    principle of sanctuary. The sanctuary privilege has stood as an
+    antidote to power since the beginning of the human story. Even in
+    ancient societies where tyranny prevailed, the right of sanctuary stood
+    as a fail-safe. There was an exit from totalizing power, and that exit
+    was the entrance to a sanctuary in the form of a city, a community, or
+    a temple.4 By the time of the Greeks, sanctuaries were sacred sites
+    built across the ancient Greek world and consecrated to the purposes of
+    asylum and religious sacrifice. The Greek word asylon means
+    “unplunderable” and founds the notion
+
+    [...]
+
+    sanctuary as an inviolable space.5 The right of asylum survived into
+    the eighteenth century in many parts of Europe, attached to holy sites,
+    churches, and monasteries. The demise of the sanctuary privilege was
+    not a repudiation but rather a reflection of social evolution and the
+    firm establishment of the rule of law. One historian summarized this
+    transformation: “justice as sanctuary.”6 In the modern
+
+    [...]
+
+    empirical study makes the point. In “Psychological Functions of
+    Privacy,” Darhl Pedersen defines privacy as a “boundary control
+    process” that invokes the decision rights associated with “restricting
+    and seeking interaction
+
+    [...]
+
+    The same themes appear from the perspective of psychology. Those who
+    would eviscerate sanctuary are keen to take the offensive, putting us
+    off guard with the guilt-inducing question “What have you got to hide?”
+    But as we have seen, the crucial developmental challenges of the
+    self-other balance cannot be negotiated adequately without the sanctity
+    of “disconnected” time and space for the ripening of inward awareness
+    and the possibility of reflexivity: reflection on and by oneself. The
+    real psychological truth is this: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you
+    are nothing.
+
+    [...]
+
+    six categories of privacy behaviors: solitude, isolation
+
+    [...]
+
+    proper realm of inaccessibility or secrecy with respect to the world at
+    large as well as a recognition of the important social dimension of
+    such protected inner space.…”7
+
+    [...]
+
+    contemplation, autonomy, rejuvenation, confiding, freedom, creativity,
+    recovery, catharsis, and concealment
+
+    [...]
+
+    anonymity, reserve, intimacy with friends, and intimacy with family
+
+    [...]
+
+    billions of sensors filled with personal data fall outside of Fourth
+    Amendment protections, a large-scale surveillance network will exist
+    without constitutional limits
+
+    [...]
+
+    This theme is illustrated in the odyssey of Belgian mathematician and
+    data protection activist Paul-Olivier Dehaye, who in December 2016
+    initiated a request for his personal data collected through Facebook’s
+    Custom Audiences and tracking Pixel tools, which would reveal the web
+    pages where Facebook had tracked him. Dehaye probably knew more about
+    the rogue data operations of Cambridge Analytica than anyone in the
+    world, outside of its own staff and masterminds
+
+    [...]
+
+    of the right to contest “automatic decision making.” If the algorithms
+    are to be contestable in any meaningful way, it will require new
+    countervailing authority and power, including machine resources and
+    expertise to reach into the core disciplines of machine intelligence
+    and construct new approaches that are available for inspection, debate,
+    and combat. Indeed, one expert has already proposed the creation of a
+    government agency—an “FDA for algorithms
+
+    [...]
+
+    is already possible to see a new awakening to empowering collective
+    action, at least in the privacy domain. One example is None of Your
+    Business (NOYB), a nonprofit organization led by privacy activist Max
+    Schrems. After many years of legal contest, Schrems made history in
+    2015 when his challenge to Facebook’s data-collection and
+    data-retention practices—which he asserted were in violation of EU
+    privacy law—led the Court of Justice of the European Union to
+    invalidate the Safe Harbor agreement that governed data transfers
+
+    [...]
+
+    the absence of synthetic declarations that secure the road to a human
+    future, the intolerability of glass life turns us toward a societal
+    arms race of counter-declarations in which we search for and embrace
+    increasingly complex ways to hide in our own lives, seeking respite
+    from lawless machines and their masters. We do this to satisfy our
+    enduring need for sanctuary and as an act of resistance with which to
+    reject the instrumentarian disciplines of the hive, its “extended
+    chilling effects,” and Big Other’s relentless greed. In the context of
+    government surveillance, the practices of “hiding” have been called
+    “privacy protests” and are well-known for drawing the suspicion of
+    law-enforcement agencies.33 Now, hiding is also invoked by Big Other
+    and its market masters, whose reach is far and deep as they install
+    themselves in our walls, our bodies, and on our streets, claiming our
+    faces, our feelings, and our fears of exclusion. I have suggested
+
+    [...]
+
+    Equally more poignant is the way in which a new generation of
+    activists, artists, and inventors feels itself called to create the art
+    and science of hiding.34 The intolerable conditions of glass life
+    compel these
+
+    [...]
+
+    Chicago artist Leo Selvaggio produces 3-D–printed resin prosthetic
+    masks to confound facial recognition. He calls his effort “an organized
+    artistic intervention.”35 Perhaps most poignant is the Backslash Tool
+    Kit: “a series of functional devices designed for protests and riots of
+    the future,
+
+    [...]
+
+    New Museum for Contemporary Art in Manhattan, and you pass a display of
+    its bestseller: table-top mirrors whose reflecting surface is covered
+    with the bright-orange message “Today’s Selfie Is Tomorrow’s Biometric
+    Profile.” This “Think Privacy Selfie Mirror” is a project of the young
+    Berlin-based artist Adam Harvey, whose work is aimed at the problem of
+    surveillance and
+
+    [...]
+
+    Trevor Paglen’s richly orchestrated performance art combines music,
+    photography, satellite imagery, and artificial intelligence to reveal
+    Big Other’s omnipresent knowing and doing. “It’s trying to look inside
+    the software that is running an AI… to look into the architectures of
+    different computer vision
+
+    [...]
+
+    greatest danger is that we come to feel at home in glass life or in the
+    prospect of hiding from it. Both alternatives rob us of the
+    life-sustaining inwardness
+
+    [...]
+
+    Glass life is intolerable, but so is fitting our faces with masks and
+    draping our bodies in digitally resistant fabrics to thwart the
+    ubiquitous lawless machines. Like every counter-declaration, hiding
+    risks becomes an adaptation when it should be a rallying point for
+    outrage. These conditions are unacceptable. Tunnels under this wall are
+    not enough. This wall must come down.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Surveillance capitalists are no different from other capitalists in
+    demanding freedom from any sort of constraint. They insist upon the
+    “freedom to” launch every novel practice while aggressively asserting
+    the necessity of their “freedom from” law and regulation. This classic
+    pattern reflects two bedrock assumptions about capitalism made by its
+    own theorists: The first is that markets are intrinsically unknowable.
+    The second is that the ignorance produced by this lack of knowledge
+    requires wide-ranging freedom of action for market actors
+
+    [...]
+
+    Adam Smith’s famous metaphor of the “invisible hand” drew on these
+    enduring realities of human life. Each individual, Smith reasoned,
+    employs his capital locally in pursuit of immediate comforts and
+    necessities. Each one attends to “his own security… his own gain… led
+    by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his
+    intention.” That end is the efficient employ of capital in the broader
+    market: the wealth of nations. The individual actions that produce
+    efficient markets add up to a staggeringly complex pattern, a mystery
+    that no one person or entity could hope to know or understand, let
+    alone to direct
+
+    [...]
+
+    Adam Smith,” Hayek wrote, “was the first to perceive that we have
+    stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic cooperation that
+    exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception. His ‘invisible hand’
+    had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or unsurveyable
+    pattern
+
+    [...]
+
+    As with Planck, Meyer, and Skinner, both Hayek and Smith unequivocally
+    link freedom and ignorance. In Hayek’s framing, the mystery of the
+    market is that a great many people can behave effectively while
+    remaining ignorant of the whole. Individuals not only can choose
+    freely, but they must freely choose their own pursuits because there is
+    no alternative, no source of total knowledge or conscious control to
+    guide them. “Human design” is impossible, Hayek says, because the
+    relevant information flows are “beyond the span of the control of any
+    one mind
+
+    [...]
+
+    However, Big Other and the steady application of instrumentarian power
+    challenge the classic quid pro quo of freedom for ignorance. When it
+    comes to surveillance capitalist operations, the “market” is no longer
+    invisible
+
+    [...]
+
+    Hayek chose the market over democracy, arguing that the market system
+    enabled not only the division of labor but also “the coordinated
+    utilization of resources based on equally divided knowledge.” This
+    system, he argued, is the only one compatible with freedom. Perhaps
+    some other kind of civilization might have been devised, he reckoned,
+    “like the ‘state’ of the termite ants,” but it would not be compatible
+    with human freedom.4
+
+    [...]
+
+    More astonishing still is that surveillance capital derives from the
+    dispossession of human experience, operationalized in its unilateral
+    and pervasive programs of rendition: our lives are scraped and sold to
+    fund their freedom and our subjugation, their knowledge and our
+    ignorance about what they know
+
+    [...]
+
+    One conclusion of our investigations is that surveillance capitalism’s
+    command and control of the division of learning in society are the
+    signature feature that breaks with the old justifications of the
+    invisible hand and its entitlements. The combination of knowledge and
+    freedom works to accelerate the asymmetry of power between surveillance
+    capitalists and the societies in which they operate. This cycle will be
+    broken only when we acknowledge as citizens, as societies, and indeed
+    as a civilization that surveillance capitalists know too much to
+    qualify for freedom
+
+    [...]
+
+    The surveillance capitalists that operate at hyperscale or outsource to
+    hyperscale operations dramatically diminish any reliance on their
+    societies as sources of employees, and the few for whom they do
+    compete, as we have seen, are drawn from the most-rarefied strata of
+    data science
+
+    [...]
+
+    The absence of organic reciprocities with people as either sources of
+    consumers or employees is a matter of exceptional importance in light
+    of the historical relationship between market capitalism and democracy
+
+    [...]
+
+    ’s dependency on the “masses” and their contribution to the prosperity
+    necessitated by the new organization of production.23 The rise of
+    volume production and its wage-earning labor force established British
+    workers’ economic power and led to a growing appreciation of their
+    political legitimacy and power. This produced a new sense of
+    interdependence between ordinary people and elites. Acemoglu and
+    Robinson conclude that the “dynamic positive feedback” between
+    “inclusive economic institutions” (i.e., industrial firms defined by
+    employment reciprocities) and political institutions was critical to
+    Britain’s substantial and nonviolent democratic reforms. Inclusive
+    economic institutions, they argue, “level the playing field,”
+    especially when it comes to the fight for power, making it more
+    difficult for elites to “crush the masses” rather than accede to their
+    demands. Reciprocities in employment produced and sustained
+    reciprocities in politics
+
+    [...]
+
+    sharp contrast to the pragmatic concessions of Britain’s early
+    industrial capitalists, surveillance capitalists’ extreme structural
+    independence from people breeds exclusion rather than inclusion and
+    lays the foundation for the unique approach that we have called
+    “radical indifference
+
+    [...]
+
+    significant result of the systematic application of radical
+    indifference is that the public-facing “first text” is vulnerable to
+    corruption with content that would normally be perceived as repugnant:
+    lies, systematic disinformation, fraud, violence, hate speech, and so
+    on. As long as content contributes to “growth tactics,” Facebook
+    “wins.” This vulnerability can be an explosive problem on
+
+    [...]
+
+    guiding principles of radical indifference are reflected in the
+    operations of Facebook’s hidden low-wage labor force charged with
+    limiting the perversion of the first text. Nowhere is surveillance
+    capitalism’s outsized influence over the division of learning in
+    society more concretely displayed than in this outcast function of
+    “content moderation,” and nowhere is the nexus of economic imperatives
+    and
+
+    [...]
+
+    The larger point of the exercise is to find the point of equilibrium
+    between the ability to pull users and their surplus into
+
+    [...]
+
+    site and the risk of repelling them. This is a calculation of radical
+    indifference that has nothing to do with assessing the truthfulness of
+    content or respecting reciprocities with users.36 This tension helps to
+    explain why disinformation is not a priority. One investigative report
+    quotes a Facebook insider: “They absolutely have the tools to shut down
+    fake news.
+
+    [...]
+
+    radical indifference is a permanent invitation to the corruption of the
+    first text
+
+    [...]
+
+    It is obvious that the rogue forces of disinformation grasp this fact
+    more crisply than do Facebook’s or Google’s genuine users and customers
+    as those forces learn to exploit the blind eye of radical indifference
+    and escalate the perversion of learning in an open society
+
+    [...]
+
+    Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic and antiegalitarian juggernaut
+    is best described as a market-driven coup from above. It is not a coup
+    d’état in the classic sense but rather a coup de gens: an overthrow of
+    the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse that is Big
+    Other. 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: the
+    privatization of the central principle of social ordering in the
+    twenty-first century. Like the adelantados and their silent
+    incantations of the Requirimiento, surveillance capitalism operates in
+    the declarative form and imposes the social relations of a premodern
+    absolutist authority. It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but
+    is not of the people. In a surreal paradox, this coup is celebrated as
+    “personalization,” although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and
+    displaces everything about you and me that is personal
+
+    [...]
+
+    Tyranny” is not a word that I choose lightly. Like the instrumentarian
+    hive, tyranny is the obliteration of politics. It is founded on its own
+    strain of radical indifference in which every person, except the
+    tyrant, is understood as an organism among organisms in an equivalency
+    of Other-Ones. Hannah Arendt observed that tyranny is a perversion of
+    egalitarianism because it treats all others as equally insignificant:
+    “The tyrant rules in accordance with his own will and interest… the
+    ruler who rules one against all, and the ‘all’ he oppresses are all
+    equal, namely equally powerless.” Arendt notes that classical political
+    theory regarded the tyrant as “out of mankind altogether… a wolf in
+    human shape.…”55Surveillance capitalism rules by instrumentarian power
+    through its materialization in Big Other, which, like the ancient
+    tyrant, exists out of mankind while paradoxically assuming human shape
+
+    [...]
+
+    Polanyi’s lens, we see that surveillance capitalism annexes human
+    experience to the market dynamic so that it is reborn as behavior: the
+    fourth “fictional commodity.” Polanyi’s first three fictional
+    commodities—land, labor, and money—were subjected to law. Although
+    these laws have been imperfect, the institutions of labor law,
+    environmental law, and banking law are regulatory frameworks intended
+    to defend society (and nature, life, and exchange) from the worst
+    excesses of raw capitalism’s destructive power. Surveillance
+    capitalism’s expropriation of human experience has faced no such
+    impediments.
+
+    [...]
+
+    will be Facebook, he says, that will address problems that are
+    civilizational in scale and scope, building “the long-term
+    infrastructure to bring humanity together” and keeping people safe with
+    “artificial intelligence” that quickly understands “what is happening
+    across our community.”56 Like Pentland, Zuckerberg imagines machine
+    intelligence that can “identify risks that nobody would have flagged at
+    all, including terrorists planning attacks using private channels,
+    people bullying someone too afraid to report it themselves, and other
+    issues both local and global.”57 When asked about his responsibility to
+    shareholders, Zuckerberg told CNN, “That’s why it helps to have control
+    of the company
+
+    [...]
+
+    industrial civilization aimed to exert control over nature for the sake
+    of human betterment. Machines were our means of extending and
+    overcoming the limits of the animal body so that we could accomplish
+    this aim of domination. Only later did we begin to fathom the
+    consequences
+
+    [...]
+
+    Years later, in his moving 1966 essay “Education after Auschwitz,”
+    social theorist Theodor Adorno attributed the success of German fascism
+    to the ways in which the quest for effective life had become an
+    overwhelming burden for too many people: “One must accept that fascism
+    and the terror it caused are connected with the fact that the old
+    established authorities… decayed and were toppled, while the people
+    psychologically were not yet ready for self-determination. They proved
+    to be unequal to the freedom that fell into their laps.”67
+
+    [...]
+
+    We can now see that surveillance capitalism takes an even more
+    expansive turn toward domination than its neoliberal source code would
+    predict, claiming its right to freedom and knowledge, while setting its
+    sights on a collectivist vision that claims the totality of society.
+    Though still sounding like Hayek, and even Smith, its antidemocratic
+    collectivist ambitions reveal it as an insatiable child devouring its
+    aging fathers
+
+    [...]
+
+    The critical role of public opinion explains why even the most
+    destructive “ages” do not last forever. I echo here what Edison said a
+    century ago: that capitalism is “all wrong, out of gear.” The
+    instability of Edison’s day threatened every promise of industrial
+    civilization. It had to give way, he insisted, to a new synthesis that
+    reunited capitalism and its populations. Edison was prophetic.
+    Capitalism has survived the longue durée less because of any specific
+    capability and more because of its plasticity. It survives and thrives
+    by periodically renewing its roots in the social, finding new ways to
+    generate new wealth by meeting new needs. Its evolution has been marked
+    by a convergence of basic principles—private property, the profit
+    motive, and
+
+    [...]
+
+    It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance, and desire to be
+    catalogued, manipulated, and then used to surreptitiously herd us
+    through the future tense for the sake of someone else’s profit. “These
+    things are brand-new,” I tell them. “They are unprecedented. You should
+    not take them for granted because they are not OK
+
+    [...]
+
+    Burnham’s cowardice is a cautionary tale. We are living in a moment
+    when surveillance capitalism and its instrumentarian power appear to be
+    invincible. Orwell’s courage demands that we refuse to cede the future
+    to illegitimate power. He asks us to break the spell of enthrallment,
+    helplessness, resignation, and numbing. We answer his call when we bend
+    ourselves toward friction, rejecting the smooth flows of coercive
+    confluence. Orwell’s courage sets us against the relentless tides of
+    dispossession that demean all human experience. Friction, courage, and
+    bearings are the resources we require to begin the shared work of
+    synthetic declarations that claim the digital future as a human place,
+    demand that digital capitalism operate as an inclusive force bound to
+    the people it must serve, and defend the division of learning in
+    society as a source of genuine democratic renewal