The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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+[[!meta title="The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"]]
+
+## Excerpts
+
+    Just a moment ago, it still seemed reasonable to focus our concerns on the
+    challenges of an information workplace or an information society. Now the
+    oldest questions must be addressed to the widest possible frame, which is best
+    defined as “civilization” or, more specifically, information civilization. Will
+    this emerging civilization be a place that we can call home?
+
+    [...]
+
+    The sense of home slipping away provokes an unbearable yearning. The
+    Portuguese have a name for this feeling: saudade, a word said to capture the
+    homesickness and longing of separation from the homeland among emigrants across
+    the centuries. Now the disruptions of the twenty-first century have turned
+    these exquisite anxieties and longings of dislocation into a universal story
+    that engulfs each one of us.3
+
+    [...]
+
+    Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that
+    is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial
+    surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable
+    raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers
+    are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that
+    is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial
+    surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable
+    raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers
+    are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries in
+    knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge. Surveillance capitalists
+    know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be
+    unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but
+    not for us. They predict our futures for the sake of others’ gain, not ours. As
+    long as surveillance capitalism and its behavioral futures markets are allowed
+    to thrive, ownership of the new means of behavioral modification eclipses
+    ownership of the means of production as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth
+    and power in the twenty-first century.  These facts and their consequences for
+    our individual lives, our societies, our democracies, and our emerging
+    information civilization are examined in detail in the coming chapters. The
+    evidence and reasoning employed here suggest that surveillance capitalism is a
+    rogue force driven by novel economic imperatives that disregard social norms
+    and nullify the elemental rights associated with individual autonomy that are
+    essential to the very possibility of a democratic society.  Just as industrial
+    civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us
+    the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and
+    its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and
+    will threaten to cost us our humanity. The industrial legacy of climate chaos
+    fills us with dismay, remorse, and fear. As surveillance capitalism becomes the
+    dominant form of information capitalism in our time, what fresh legacy of
+    damage and regret will be mourned by future generations?
+
+    [...]
+
+    For now, suffice to say that despite all the futuristic sophistication of
+    digital innovation, the message of the surveillance capitalist companies barely
+    differs from the themes once glorified in the motto of the 1933 Chicago World’s
+    Fair: “Science Finds—Industry Applies—Man Conforms.”
+
+    [...]
+
+    In order to challenge such claims of technological inevitability, we must
+    establish our bearings. We cannot evaluate the current trajectory of
+    information civilization without a clear appreciation that technology is not
+    and never can be a thing in itself, isolated from economics and society. This
+    means that technological inevitability does not exist. Technologies are always
+    economic means, not ends in themselves: in modern times, technology’s DNA comes
+    already patterned by what the sociologist Max Weber called the “economic
+    orientation.” Economic ends, Weber observed, are always intrinsic to
+    technology’s development and deployment. “Economic action” determines
+    objectives, whereas technology provides “appropriate means.” In Weber’s
+    framing, “The fact that what is called the technological development of modern
+    times has been so largely oriented economically to profit-making is one of the
+    fundamental facts of the history of technology.”15 In a modern capitalist
+    society, technology was, is, and always will be an expression of the economic
+    objectives that direct it into action. A worthwhile exercise would be to delete
+    the word “technology” from our vocabularies in order to see how quickly
+    capitalism’s objectives are exposed.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Surveillance capitalism employs many technologies, but it cannot be equated
+    with any technology. Its operations may employ platforms, but these operations
+    are not the same as platforms. It employs machine intelligence, but it cannot
+    be reduced to those machines. It produces and relies on algorithms, but it is
+    not the same as algorithms. Surveillance capitalism’s unique economic
+    imperatives are the puppet masters that hide behind the curtain orienting the
+    machines and summoning them to action. These imperatives, to indulge another
+    metaphor, are like the body’s soft tissues that cannot be seen in an X-ray but
+    do the real work of binding muscle and bone. We are not alone in falling prey
+    to the technology illusion. It is an enduring theme of social thought, as old
+    as the Trojan horse. Despite this, each generation stumbles into the quicksand
+    of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests. In modern
+    times this means the interests of capital, and in our time it is surveillance
+    capital that commands the digital milieu and directs our trajectory toward the
+    future. Our aim in this book is to discern the laws of surveillance capitalism
+    that animate today’s exotic Trojan horses, returning us to age-old questions as
+    they bear down on our lives, our societies, and our civilization.
+
+    [...]
+
+    We have stood at this kind of precipice before. “We’ve stumbled along for a
+    while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, but we’ve got to start to
+    make this world over.” It was 1912 when Thomas Edison laid out his vision for a
+    new industrial civilization in a letter to Henry Ford. Edison worried that
+    industrialism’s potential to serve the progress of humanity would be thwarted
+    by the stubborn power of the robber barons and the monopolist economics that
+    ruled their kingdoms. He decried the “wastefulness” and “cruelty” of US
+    capitalism: “Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations
+    between capital and labor, our distribution—all wrong, out of gear.” Both
+    Edison and Ford understood that the modern industrial civilization for which
+    they harbored such hope was careening toward a darkness marked by misery for
+    the many and prosperity for the few.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Most important for our conversation, Edison and Ford understood that the
+    moral life of industrial civilization would be shaped by the practices of
+    capitalism that rose to dominance in their time. They believed that America,
+    and eventually the world, would have to fashion a new, more rational capitalism
+    in order to avert a future of misery and conflict. Everything, as Edison
+    suggested, would have to be reinvented: new technologies, yes, but these would
+    have to reflect new ways of understanding and fulfilling people’s needs; a new
+    economic model that could turn those new practices into profit; and a new
+    social contract that could sustain it all. A new century had dawned, but the
+    evolution of capitalism, like the churning of civilizations, did not obey the
+    calendar or the clock. It was 1912, and still the nineteenth century refused to
+    relinquish its claim on the twentieth.
+
+    [...]
+
+    I describe the “collision” between the centuries-old historical processes
+    of individualization that shape our experience as self-determining individuals
+    and the harsh social habitat produced by a decades-old regime of neoliberal
+    market economics in which our sense of self-worth and needs for
+    self-determination are routinely thwarted. The pain and frustration of this
+    contradiction are the condition that sent us careening toward the internet for
+    sustenance and ultimately bent us to surveillance capitalism’s draconian quid
+    pro quo.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The youngest members of our societies already experience many of these
+    destructive dynamics in their attachment to social media, the first global
+    experiment in the human hive. I consider the implications of these developments
+    for a second elemental right: the right to sanctuary. The human need for a
+    space of inviolable refuge has persisted in civilized societies from ancient
+    times but is now under attack as surveillance capital creates a world of “no
+    exit” with profound implications for the human future at this new frontier of
+    power.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The Apple inversion depended on a few key elements. Digitalization made it
+    possible to rescue valued assets—in this case, songs—from the institutional
+    spaces in which they were trapped. The costly institutional procedures that
+    Sloan had described were eliminated in favor of a direct route to listeners. In
+    the case of the CD, for example, Apple bypassed the physical production of the
+    product along with its packaging, inventory, storage, marketing,
+    transportation, distribution, and physical retailing. The combination of the
+    iTunes platform and the iPod device made it possible for listeners to
+    continuously reconfigure their songs at will. No two iPods were the same, and
+    an iPod one week was different from the same iPod another week, as listeners
+    decided and re-decided the dynamic pattern. It was an excruciating development
+    for the music industry and its satellites—retailers, marketers, etc.—but it was
+    exactly what the new listeners wanted.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The implication is that new market forms are most productive when they are
+    shaped by an allegiance to the actual demands and mentalities of people. The
+    great sociologist Emile Durkheim made this point at the dawn of the twentieth
+    century, and his insight will be a touchstone for us throughout this book.
+    Observing the dramatic upheavals of industrialization in his time—factories,
+    specialization, the complex division of labor—Durkheim understood that although
+    economists could describe these developments, they could not grasp their cause.
+    He argued that these sweeping changes were “caused” by the changing needs of
+    people and that economists were (and remain) systematically blind to these
+    social facts: The division of labor appears to us otherwise than it does to
+    economists. For them, it essentially consists in greater production. For us,
+    this greater productivity is only a necessary consequence, a repercussion of
+    the phenomenon. If we specialize, it is not to produce more, but it is to
+    enable us to live in the new conditions of existence that have been made for
+    us.7
+
+    [...]
+
+    The sociologist identified the perennial human quest to live effectively in
+    our “conditions of existence” as the invisible causal power that summons the
+    division of labor, technologies, work organization, capitalism, and ultimately
+    civilization itself. Each is forged in the same crucible of human need that is
+    produced by what Durkheim called the always intensifying “violence of the
+    struggle” for effective life: “If work becomes more divided,” it is because the
+    “struggle for existence is more acute.”
+
+    [...]
+
+    What are these modernities and how do they matter to our story? The advent
+    of the individual as the locus of moral agency and choice initially occurred in
+    the West, where the conditions for this emergence first took hold. First let’s
+    establish that the concept of “individualization” should not be confused with
+    the neoliberal ideology of “individualism” that shifts all responsibility for
+    success or failure to a mythical, atomized, isolated individual, doomed to a
+    life of perpetual competition and disconnected from relationships, community,
+    and society. Neither does it refer to the psychological process of
+    “individuation” that is associated with the lifelong exploration of
+    self-development. Instead, individualization is a consequence of long-term
+    processes of modernization.10
+
+    [...]
+
+    The Spanish poet Antonio Machado captured the exhilaration and daring of
+    these first-modernity individuals in his famous song: “Traveler, there is no
+    road; the road is made as you go.” This is what “search” has meant: a journey
+    of exploration and self-creation, not an instant swipe to already composed
+    answers.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Socialization and adaptation were the materials of a psychology and
+    sociology that regarded the nuclear family as the “factory” for the “production
+    of personalities” ready-made for conformity to the social norms of mass
+    society.12 Those “factories” also produced a great deal of pain: the feminine
+    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
+    the threat of totalitarian and communist collectivist ideologies. It aimed to
+    revive acceptance of a self-regulating market as a natural force of such
+    complexity and perfection that it demanded radical freedom from all forms of
+    state oversight. Hayek explained the necessity of absolute individual and
+    collective submission to the exacting disciplines of the market as an
+    unknowable “extended order” that supersedes the legitimate political authority
+    vested in the state: “Modern economics explains how such an extended order…
+    constitutes an information-gathering process… that no central planning agency,
+    let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess, or control.…”22 Hayek
+    and his ideological brethren insisted on a capitalism stripped down to its raw
+    core, unimpeded by any other force and impervious to any external authority.
+    Inequality of wealth and rights was accepted and even celebrated as a necessary
+    feature of a successful market system and as a force for progress.23 Hayek’s
+    ideology provided the intellectual superstructure and legitimation for a new
+    theory of the firm that became another crucial antecedent to the surveillance
+    capitalist corporation: its structure, moral content, and relationship to
+    society.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In 1976 Jensen and Meckling published a landmark article in which they
+    reinterpreted the manager as a sort of parasite feeding off the host of
+    ownership: unavoidable, perhaps, but nonetheless an obstacle to shareholder
+    wealth.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the “crisis of democracy” zeitgeist, the neoliberal vision and its
+    reversion to market metrics was deeply attractive to politicians and policy
+    makers, both as the means to evade political ownership of tough economic
+    choices and because it promised to impose a new kind of order where disorder
+    was feared.25 The absolute authority of market forces would be enshrined as the
+    ultimate source of imperative control, displacing democratic contest and
+    deliberation with an ideology of atomized individuals sentenced to perpetual
+    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.