path: root/books/sociology/age-of-surveillance-capitalism.md

[[!meta title="The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"]]

## Excerpts

    Just a moment ago, it still seemed reasonable to focus our concerns on the
    challenges of an information workplace or an information society. Now the
    oldest questions must be addressed to the widest possible frame, which is best
    defined as “civilization” or, more specifically, information civilization. Will
    this emerging civilization be a place that we can call home?

    [...]

    The sense of home slipping away provokes an unbearable yearning. The
    Portuguese have a name for this feeling: saudade, a word said to capture the
    homesickness and longing of separation from the homeland among emigrants across
    the centuries. Now the disruptions of the twenty-first century have turned
    these exquisite anxieties and longings of dislocation into a universal story
    that engulfs each one of us.3

    [...]

    Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that
    is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial
    surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable
    raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers
    are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.

    [...]

    Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that
    is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial
    surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable
    raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers
    are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.

    [...]

    Surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries in
    knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge. Surveillance capitalists
    know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be
    unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but
    not for us. They predict our futures for the sake of others’ gain, not ours. As
    long as surveillance capitalism and its behavioral futures markets are allowed
    to thrive, ownership of the new means of behavioral modification eclipses
    ownership of the means of production as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth
    and power in the twenty-first century.  These facts and their consequences for
    our individual lives, our societies, our democracies, and our emerging
    information civilization are examined in detail in the coming chapters. The
    evidence and reasoning employed here suggest that surveillance capitalism is a
    rogue force driven by novel economic imperatives that disregard social norms
    and nullify the elemental rights associated with individual autonomy that are
    essential to the very possibility of a democratic society.  Just as industrial
    civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us
    the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and
    its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and
    will threaten to cost us our humanity. The industrial legacy of climate chaos
    fills us with dismay, remorse, and fear. As surveillance capitalism becomes the
    dominant form of information capitalism in our time, what fresh legacy of
    damage and regret will be mourned by future generations?

    [...]

    For now, suffice to say that despite all the futuristic sophistication of
    digital innovation, the message of the surveillance capitalist companies barely
    differs from the themes once glorified in the motto of the 1933 Chicago World’s
    Fair: “Science Finds—Industry Applies—Man Conforms.”

    [...]

    In order to challenge such claims of technological inevitability, we must
    establish our bearings. We cannot evaluate the current trajectory of
    information civilization without a clear appreciation that technology is not
    and never can be a thing in itself, isolated from economics and society. This
    means that technological inevitability does not exist. Technologies are always
    economic means, not ends in themselves: in modern times, technology’s DNA comes
    already patterned by what the sociologist Max Weber called the “economic
    orientation.” Economic ends, Weber observed, are always intrinsic to
    technology’s development and deployment. “Economic action” determines
    objectives, whereas technology provides “appropriate means.” In Weber’s
    framing, “The fact that what is called the technological development of modern
    times has been so largely oriented economically to profit-making is one of the
    fundamental facts of the history of technology.”15 In a modern capitalist
    society, technology was, is, and always will be an expression of the economic
    objectives that direct it into action. A worthwhile exercise would be to delete
    the word “technology” from our vocabularies in order to see how quickly
    capitalism’s objectives are exposed.

    [...]

    Surveillance capitalism employs many technologies, but it cannot be equated
    with any technology. Its operations may employ platforms, but these operations
    are not the same as platforms. It employs machine intelligence, but it cannot
    be reduced to those machines. It produces and relies on algorithms, but it is
    not the same as algorithms. Surveillance capitalism’s unique economic
    imperatives are the puppet masters that hide behind the curtain orienting the
    machines and summoning them to action. These imperatives, to indulge another
    metaphor, are like the body’s soft tissues that cannot be seen in an X-ray but
    do the real work of binding muscle and bone. We are not alone in falling prey
    to the technology illusion. It is an enduring theme of social thought, as old
    as the Trojan horse. Despite this, each generation stumbles into the quicksand
    of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests. In modern
    times this means the interests of capital, and in our time it is surveillance
    capital that commands the digital milieu and directs our trajectory toward the
    future. Our aim in this book is to discern the laws of surveillance capitalism
    that animate today’s exotic Trojan horses, returning us to age-old questions as
    they bear down on our lives, our societies, and our civilization.

    [...]

    We have stood at this kind of precipice before. “We’ve stumbled along for a
    while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, but we’ve got to start to
    make this world over.” It was 1912 when Thomas Edison laid out his vision for a
    new industrial civilization in a letter to Henry Ford. Edison worried that
    industrialism’s potential to serve the progress of humanity would be thwarted
    by the stubborn power of the robber barons and the monopolist economics that
    ruled their kingdoms. He decried the “wastefulness” and “cruelty” of US
    capitalism: “Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations
    between capital and labor, our distribution—all wrong, out of gear.” Both
    Edison and Ford understood that the modern industrial civilization for which
    they harbored such hope was careening toward a darkness marked by misery for
    the many and prosperity for the few.

    [...]

    Most important for our conversation, Edison and Ford understood that the
    moral life of industrial civilization would be shaped by the practices of
    capitalism that rose to dominance in their time. They believed that America,
    and eventually the world, would have to fashion a new, more rational capitalism
    in order to avert a future of misery and conflict. Everything, as Edison
    suggested, would have to be reinvented: new technologies, yes, but these would
    have to reflect new ways of understanding and fulfilling people’s needs; a new
    economic model that could turn those new practices into profit; and a new
    social contract that could sustain it all. A new century had dawned, but the
    evolution of capitalism, like the churning of civilizations, did not obey the
    calendar or the clock. It was 1912, and still the nineteenth century refused to
    relinquish its claim on the twentieth.

    [...]

    I describe the “collision” between the centuries-old historical processes
    of individualization that shape our experience as self-determining individuals
    and the harsh social habitat produced by a decades-old regime of neoliberal
    market economics in which our sense of self-worth and needs for
    self-determination are routinely thwarted. The pain and frustration of this
    contradiction are the condition that sent us careening toward the internet for
    sustenance and ultimately bent us to surveillance capitalism’s draconian quid
    pro quo.

    [...]

    The youngest members of our societies already experience many of these
    destructive dynamics in their attachment to social media, the first global
    experiment in the human hive. I consider the implications of these developments
    for a second elemental right: the right to sanctuary. The human need for a
    space of inviolable refuge has persisted in civilized societies from ancient
    times but is now under attack as surveillance capital creates a world of “no
    exit” with profound implications for the human future at this new frontier of
    power.

    [...]

    The Apple inversion depended on a few key elements. Digitalization made it
    possible to rescue valued assets—in this case, songs—from the institutional
    spaces in which they were trapped. The costly institutional procedures that
    Sloan had described were eliminated in favor of a direct route to listeners. In
    the case of the CD, for example, Apple bypassed the physical production of the
    product along with its packaging, inventory, storage, marketing,
    transportation, distribution, and physical retailing. The combination of the
    iTunes platform and the iPod device made it possible for listeners to
    continuously reconfigure their songs at will. No two iPods were the same, and
    an iPod one week was different from the same iPod another week, as listeners
    decided and re-decided the dynamic pattern. It was an excruciating development
    for the music industry and its satellites—retailers, marketers, etc.—but it was
    exactly what the new listeners wanted.

    [...]

    The implication is that new market forms are most productive when they are
    shaped by an allegiance to the actual demands and mentalities of people. The
    great sociologist Emile Durkheim made this point at the dawn of the twentieth
    century, and his insight will be a touchstone for us throughout this book.
    Observing the dramatic upheavals of industrialization in his time—factories,
    specialization, the complex division of labor—Durkheim understood that although
    economists could describe these developments, they could not grasp their cause.
    He argued that these sweeping changes were “caused” by the changing needs of
    people and that economists were (and remain) systematically blind to these
    social facts: The division of labor appears to us otherwise than it does to
    economists. For them, it essentially consists in greater production. For us,
    this greater productivity is only a necessary consequence, a repercussion of
    the phenomenon. If we specialize, it is not to produce more, but it is to
    enable us to live in the new conditions of existence that have been made for
    us.7

    [...]

    The sociologist identified the perennial human quest to live effectively in
    our “conditions of existence” as the invisible causal power that summons the
    division of labor, technologies, work organization, capitalism, and ultimately
    civilization itself. Each is forged in the same crucible of human need that is
    produced by what Durkheim called the always intensifying “violence of the
    struggle” for effective life: “If work becomes more divided,” it is because the
    “struggle for existence is more acute.”

    [...]

    What are these modernities and how do they matter to our story? The advent
    of the individual as the locus of moral agency and choice initially occurred in
    the West, where the conditions for this emergence first took hold. First let’s
    establish that the concept of “individualization” should not be confused with
    the neoliberal ideology of “individualism” that shifts all responsibility for
    success or failure to a mythical, atomized, isolated individual, doomed to a
    life of perpetual competition and disconnected from relationships, community,
    and society. Neither does it refer to the psychological process of
    “individuation” that is associated with the lifelong exploration of
    self-development. Instead, individualization is a consequence of long-term
    processes of modernization.10

    [...]

    The Spanish poet Antonio Machado captured the exhilaration and daring of
    these first-modernity individuals in his famous song: “Traveler, there is no
    road; the road is made as you go.” This is what “search” has meant: a journey
    of exploration and self-creation, not an instant swipe to already composed
    answers.

    [...]

    Socialization and adaptation were the materials of a psychology and
    sociology that regarded the nuclear family as the “factory” for the “production
    of personalities” ready-made for conformity to the social norms of mass
    society.12 Those “factories” also produced a great deal of pain: the feminine
    mystique, closeted homosexuals, church-going atheists, and back-alley
    abortions. Eventually, though, they even produced people like you and me.


    [...]

    The free-market creed originated in Europe as a sweeping defense against
    the threat of totalitarian and communist collectivist ideologies. It aimed to
    revive acceptance of a self-regulating market as a natural force of such
    complexity and perfection that it demanded radical freedom from all forms of
    state oversight. Hayek explained the necessity of absolute individual and
    collective submission to the exacting disciplines of the market as an
    unknowable “extended order” that supersedes the legitimate political authority
    vested in the state: “Modern economics explains how such an extended order…
    constitutes an information-gathering process… that no central planning agency,
    let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess, or control.…”22 Hayek
    and his ideological brethren insisted on a capitalism stripped down to its raw
    core, unimpeded by any other force and impervious to any external authority.
    Inequality of wealth and rights was accepted and even celebrated as a necessary
    feature of a successful market system and as a force for progress.23 Hayek’s
    ideology provided the intellectual superstructure and legitimation for a new
    theory of the firm that became another crucial antecedent to the surveillance
    capitalist corporation: its structure, moral content, and relationship to
    society.

    [...]

    In 1976 Jensen and Meckling published a landmark article in which they
    reinterpreted the manager as a sort of parasite feeding off the host of
    ownership: unavoidable, perhaps, but nonetheless an obstacle to shareholder
    wealth.

    [...]

    In the “crisis of democracy” zeitgeist, the neoliberal vision and its
    reversion to market metrics was deeply attractive to politicians and policy
    makers, both as the means to evade political ownership of tough economic
    choices and because it promised to impose a new kind of order where disorder
    was feared.25 The absolute authority of market forces would be enshrined as the
    ultimate source of imperative control, displacing democratic contest and
    deliberation with an ideology of atomized individuals sentenced to perpetual
    competition for scarce resources. The disciplines of competitive markets
    promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects
    too preoccupied with survival to complain.