[[!meta title="The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"]] ## Topics * Second-modernity individuals. * Dispossession Cycle: incursion, adaptation, habituation, redirection. * Division of learning: who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? * Shadow text. ## 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. [...] 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