Talking Tuesday: The Age of Survelliance Capitalism

 

I've been slogging through Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Survelliance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.  Her book is important, but it would greatly have benefited from a strong editorial hand, as she is very wordy in a way that is frustrating to read.  That said, there have been some real gems in the book so far.  Her main insight is that the big tech companies that run our world (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter) are all in the business of shaping human beings into something off whom they can make money.  In other words, consumers who are merely the sum total of their desires. In order to do so, these companies have decided it is better to ask forgiveness than permission to smash through existing landscapes, and often not even to ask forgiveness.

The mantra of "move fast and break things," plus the increased fear after 9/11 has meant that not only do these companies regularly get away with it, the government is colluding with them to do so.  When the government pushes back against the lawlessness, they find themselves greatly outmatched by the money and resources available to these behemoths.  I found that part particularly disheartening.  She writes that capitalism is never meant to be eaten raw, and that it should be cooked through the democratic processes of government and society, but the current system is bypassing all those things to present us with a rather raw state of affairs.  Mostly without our consent.  

Writes Zuboff: "Survelliance capitalism's ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts.  Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world's information.  One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks" (127).

Furthermore, these men ask us to "trust them" when called to account for their actions.  It's a sorry state of affairs, to be sure.  Zuboff's book is important, as I said, but it could be much leaner, and it seems like so much of what she writes about is stuff commonly acknowledged at this point: namely that Big Tech wants to shape everything about us for monetary gain, including our private lives, leaving nothing beyond Big Data's reach.  We must, in the way of Seeing Like a State, be made as legible as possible as human beings, and our behavior must be channeled and corralled into acceptable (read: profitable) avenues.  Unpredictable human behavior means lost revenue opportunities.  Therefore, the more a company can guide the user into predictable behavior channels, the more reliable the profit. 

What the internet initially offered was the promise of individualized experience and greater access to information, within an interconnected human framework.  The Internet was held out as scaffolding to thicken the ties that bind us, but in truth, it has served as an acid bath, dissolving much of what holds us together.

In a more elegant rendering of this same thought David Brooks writes in The Atlantic: 

 "We think of the 1960s as the classic Boomer decade, but the false summer of the 1990s was the high-water mark of that ethos. The first great theme of that era was convergence. Walls were coming down. Everybody was coming together. The second theme was the triumph of classical liberalism. Liberalism was not just a philosophy—it was a spirit and a zeitgeist, a faith that individual freedom would blossom in a loosely networked democratic capitalist world. Enterprise and creativity would be unleashed. America was the great embodiment and champion of this liberation. The third theme was individualism. Society flourished when individuals were liberated from the shackles of society and the state, when they had the freedom to be true to themselves.

...

When you look back on it from the vantage of 2020, moral freedom, like the other dominant values of the time, contained within it a core assumption: If everybody does their own thing, then everything will work out for everybody. If everybody pursues their own economic self-interest, then the economy will thrive for all. If everybody chooses their own family style, then children will prosper. If each individual chooses his or her own moral code, then people will still feel solidarity with one another and be decent to one another. This was an ideology of maximum freedom and minimum sacrifice.

It all looks naive now. We were naive about what the globalized economy would do to the working class, naive to think the internet would bring us together, naive to think the global mixing of people would breed harmony, naive to think the privileged wouldn’t pull up the ladders of opportunity behind them. We didn’t predict that oligarchs would steal entire nations, or that demagogues from Turkey to the U.S. would ignite ethnic hatreds. We didn’t see that a hyper-competitive global meritocracy would effectively turn all of childhood into elite travel sports where a few privileged performers get to play and everyone else gets left behind" (Brooks, The Atlantic).

Essentially, the business model pursued by Big Tech has so completely changed our human landscape, it is almost impossible to bridge the gap between the analog and digital generations.  The analog generation has learned to work in the digital age, but still fundamentally thinks of the world in analog.  Digital natives have a hard time understanding the world before the Internet; online existence is presented with a predetermined menu of options, based on previous behavior, movement, and interests, all controlled by shadowy figures, cloaked in secrecy, who are accountable to no one; certainly not the paean users of their products.  They are not interested in gaining or retaining our trust, rather we are the product to be shaped for profit only, discarded when no longer useful.

I'm not sure what the solution is, given the reality of the world today; it is not possible for most of us to go off-grid and make shift for ourselves.  I'm not even sure it is desirable, after seeing the effects of the isolation of the pandemic, for off-grid life is necessarily isolated.  

We are meant to be in human community, bonded together by common goals and mutual affection and trust.  I suppose one solution is to live as much life off-line as is feasible, and to find some bright red lines to guide usage, while understanding that no matter what steps we take to protect our privacy, any online activity is going to be tracked in some way.  We must do what we can to curtain the prying eyes and deafen the listening ears.  

References:

Zuboff, Shoshana.  The Age of Survelliance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future At the New Frontier of Power.  New York: PublicAffairs/Hachette, 2020.

Brooks, David. "Collapsing Levels of Trust Are Devastating America," The Atlantic, October 5, 2020.