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authorSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2019-02-04 23:35:28 -0200
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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.