Book Review: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
by Shoshana Zuboff
This book will boil your blood. Supported by extensive empirical research, Professor Shoshana Zuboff exposes the effective digital implementation of the late B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity. It centers around three related factors: The distribution of knowledge: “Who knows?” Authority: “Who decides who knows?” and Power: “Who decides who decides who knows?” (Hint: it’s not you). Orders of magnitude beyond just tracking cookies and the creepy anticipation of your interests by entities such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, the new instrumentarianism is used by surveillance capitalists to control not just what you buy but also what you think about and how you think it.
This is not even the theoretical Capitalism of Friedman, Hayek, or Adam Smith, as there is no equality of individual choice in it. In other words there’s no free market here, as surveillance capitalists deliberately orchestrate your life for their benefit irrespective of yours. Thus it’s not a fair trade; there is no reciprocity in the conveniences you think you receive from even the simplest transactions.
You are not their customers (or even the “product” as in the cliché); their customers are the people purchasing the information harvested about you, which is extracted without your awareness. In this digital realm, it is as if you are the third world country having your natural resources extracted for the exclusive profits of foreign capitalists. Another clear analogy is we are like chickens being farmed for our eggs: they feed us with incentives, not for our well-being but so that we will lay more eggs to go into omelets not for us. You and your personal information are only the objects, the “Other,” that are for sale for the benefit of people who are not you.
The key feature of all of this is that willingness is irrelevant, as we are unknowing and thus unwitting participants. Their salient objective is the obscene profits garnered from not just your profiles and posts, but the shadow text that you don’t see from the fusion of the backscatter data about you that is harvested into separate secret databases. They actively hide that they have this information on you, as their modus operandi requires that you not be aware of it for this process to be successful.
Much of this activity is beyond the reach of laws and courts, as the surveillance capitalists would just go underground with their operations if regulations were imposed. It is accompanied by an acceleration of the deliberate assault on democracy through lobbying and revolving door employment between government and the commercial interests that control it. Thus just voting for politicians that promise to tame surveillance capitalism will be of insufficient effect.
Zuboff offers hope and some thoughts on what to do about it. European history has shown that when the people have had enough of oppression, they join together to rebel, as when the Berlin Wall came down without resistance from the guards. A similar event must occur today to escape the glass walls of the hive surveillance capitalists have put us in for the purpose of harvesting and orchestrating even our most personal thoughts, all for their profit and not ours. We need walls of our own, not to keep us in their hive, but to keep them out of our personal sanctuary.
Public opinion is key to taming this monster. In the end if enough of the public rose up against surveillance capitalism, possibly by throwing its shadow text in disarray and diminishing its value, the money and influence behind it would then be of little effect. There is hope if humans would willingly help each other to the extent that surveillance capitalists take without asking. Then the world would be a much friendlier and more prosperous place for everyone. and not just the few.
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