Shoshana Zuboff
Around the same time last year, I remember tweeting a quote attributed to Jamie Bartlett – “The end result will be ad targeting so effective that you may well question the notion of free will altogether“. Connecting digital advertising to free will seems absurd, but it wasn’t a facetious remark. It reflected the reality of our times. This is the reality that Shoshana Zuboff explores and confronts in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, frequently echoing the thought that keeps cropping up in my mind – how did we get here?
She begins with a deeply personal story about her home, and brings up an “aware home” project in 2000, which among other things, assumed that the rights to the knowledge would lie in the hands of the human living in it. She then juxtaposes it against the current privacy policy and usage agreements of Google’s Nest, which all but completely gives the ownership to the search giant. This is just one example.
Industrial capitalism thrived by exploiting nature, and surveillance capitalism is thriving by using human nature as a resource. That means that even though, due to rapid industrialisation and mass production, we got to a “second modernity” that provided millions access to experiences which were until then the preserve of a smaller elite, we are now being led back into a “neofeudalism”, a consolidation of elite wealth and power. How did this happen?
Google plays the primary antagonist in this narrative, and though Brin and Page were initially reluctant, the 2000 bust set Google on a path that used the “behavioural surplus” generated by users. At a basic level, it is probably difficult to imagine that when one carries out a search on Google, the machine is searching for patterns in the expressed intent, and making rapid incursions into one’s life. And yet, that’s exactly how it works. It then leads to prediction products, economies of action and future behaviour markets, fuelled by an ever expanding scope of information extraction. Those ridiculous permissions apps require make sense now? And how does a corporation create and grow a future behaviour market? Simple, behaviour modification, whether you realise it or not.
Over a period of time, Google has institutionalised its invasions into private human domains, helped in the beginning by the national security imperative following the 9/11 attacks. Chrome, GMail, Android, Photos, YouTube and so on have created a dependency that now borders on feeling left out of the societal narrative if one is not using these. The behind-the-scenes look at Pokémon Go is chilling – in terms of how users were giving away data of their own volition, how partners were brought on board to expand the scope of surveillance, and how human behaviour was controlled at global scale.
Facebook makes its presence felt in the latter half of the book, thanks to its exploitation of social connections. By creating a prototype of a hive mind through the weaponisation of peer group reinforcement, it increasingly shapes minds and behaviour, especially that of young adults. The author uses Goffman’s framing in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and shows how the “backstage”, where individuals are truly themselves, is now shrinking thanks to the omnipresence of social incursions. Where does this lead to? One example is when the state starts using this power – China’s social credit system now has a direct impact on an individual’s life, driving economies of action in the real world. More broadly, totalitarianism, driven by powerful corporations.
The consequences are that there is increasingly no refuge, no sanctuary, from the relentless efforts of corporations that are intent on controlling every facet of an individual’s existence. At a broader level, it threatens the fabric of society and democracy itself. Capitalism’s latest avatar has clearly gone rogue, refusing to abide by the reciprocal nature of every kind of interaction we have experienced thus far. Regulation isn’t really keeping up, except for some efforts by the EU. But there are those who refuse to give up – activists, and artists who use technology to keep out surveillance. However, this is a fight we have to contribute to, because what’s at stake is what makes us human – free will, or at least the notion of it. This is not an easy read, but it is a must-read.
