Kretischer Ruhrgebietsbayer (Cretan West South German): Ich verstehe nichts mehr in diesem tiefblauen Meer!!! (It's all greek to me in this deep blue sea!!!)
“[Elon] Musk is kind of an unsubtle example of the problem with Tech Bros,” says Cory Doctorow.
If we want to push back against the dystopian dynamics of the tech world, we have to understand how we got here. We need to know what we’re dealing with and what changes might upend the dynamics that currently define our experience of the internet.
We need to seize the means of computation, because while the internet isn’t the most important thing that we have to worry about right now, all the things that are more important, gender and racial justice, inequality, the climate emergency, those are struggles that we’re going to win or lose by organizing on the internet.
And the internet has these foundational characteristics, the interoperability, the universality, working encryption that lets us keep secrets, that allow us to organize mass movements in ways that our forebears could only have dreamt of. And it’s up to us to take control of that technology and make it work for us.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: A longtime Facebook executive has admitted the company’s platform helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, and predicted it may happen again this year. In an internal memo, Facebook Vice President Andrew Bosworth wrote, “So was Facebook responsible for Donald […]
Robert Scheer interviews Noam Chomsky edited by O Society Jan 11, 2019 Robert Scheer: I always say the intelligence comes from my guests; in this case, I’m saying it with great respect and awe. My guest is Noam Chomsky. And actually, this is my first real encounter with this man. But I obviously, as many […]
“… private surveillance capital has institutionalized asymmetries of knowledge unlike anything ever seen in human history. They know everything about us; we know almost nothing about them.” (S. Zuboff)
Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is a chilling exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world. Observer tech columnist John Naughton explains the importance of Zuboff’s work and asks the author 10 key questions.
‘Technology is the puppet, but surveillance capitalism is the puppet master.’
Photograph: Getty Images
We’re
living through the most profound transformation in our information
environment since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing in circa
1439. And the problem with living through a revolution is that it’s
impossible to take the long view of what’s happening. Hindsight is the
only exact science in this business, and in that long run we’re all
dead. Printing shaped and transformed societies over the next four
centuries, but nobody in Mainz (Gutenberg’s home town) in, say, 1495
could have known that his technology would (among other things): fuel
the Reformation and undermine the authority of the mighty Catholic church; enable the rise of what we now recognise as modern science; create unheard-of professions and industries; change the shape of our brains; and even recalibrate our conceptions of childhood. And yet printing did all this and more.
Why choose 1495? Because we’re about the same distance into
our revolution, the one kicked off by digital technology and networking.
And although it’s now gradually dawning on us that this really is a big
deal and that epochal social and economic changes are under way, we’re
as clueless about where it’s heading and what’s driving it as the
citizens of Mainz were in 1495.
That’s not for want of trying, mind. Library shelves groan under the
weight of books about what digital technology is doing to us and our
world. Lots of scholars are thinking, researching and writing about this
stuff. But they’re like the blind men trying to describe the elephant
in the old fable: everyone has only a partial view, and nobody has the
whole picture. So our contemporary state of awareness is – as Manuel
Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace once put it – one of “informed
bewilderment”.
Which is why the arrival of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is such a big
event. Many years ago – in 1988, to be precise – as one of the first
female professors at Harvard Business School to hold an endowed chair
she published a landmark book, The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power,
which changed the way we thought about the impact of computerisation on
organisations and on work. It provided the most insightful account up
to that time of how digital technology was changing the work of both
managers and workers. And then Zuboff appeared to go quiet, though she
was clearly incubating something bigger. The first hint of what was to
come was a pair of startling essays – one in an academic journal in 2015, the other in a German newspaper
in 2016. What these revealed was that she had come up with a new lens
through which to view what Google, Facebook et al were doing – nothing
less than spawning a new variant of capitalism. Those essays promised a
more comprehensive expansion of this Big Idea.
And now it has arrived – the most ambitious attempt yet to paint the
bigger picture and to explain how the effects of digitisation that we
are now experiencing as individuals and citizens have come about.
The headline story is that it’s not so much about the nature of
digital technology as about a new mutant form of capitalism that has
found a way to use tech for its purposes. The name Zuboff has given to
the new variant is “surveillance capitalism”. It works by providing free
services that billions of people cheerfully use, enabling the providers
of those services to monitor the behaviour of those users in
astonishing detail – often without their explicit consent.
“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human
experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.
Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest
are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products
that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these
prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets.
Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these
trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our
future behaviour.”
While the general modus operandi of Google,
Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people)
for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the
insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context. She points
out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with
algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest
phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to
mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial
capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions
covertly derived from the surveillance of users. In that sense, her vast
(660-page) book is a continuation of a tradition that includes Adam
Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and – dare I say it – Karl Marx.
Digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers and the watched
Viewed from this perspective, the behaviour of the digital giants looks rather different from the roseate hallucinations of Wired
magazine. What one sees instead is a colonising ruthlessness of which
John D Rockefeller would have been proud. First of all there was the
arrogant appropriation of users’ behavioural data – viewed as a free
resource, there for the taking. Then the use of patented methods to
extract or infer data even when users had explicitly denied permission,
followed by the use of technologies that were opaque by design and
fostered user ignorance.
And, of course, there is also the fact that the entire project was
conducted in what was effectively lawless – or at any rate law-free –
territory. Thus Google decided that it would digitise and store every
book ever printed, regardless of copyright issues. Or that it would
photograph every street and house on the planet without asking anyone’s
permission. Facebook launched its infamous “beacons”,
which reported a user’s online activities and published them to others’
news feeds without the knowledge of the user. And so on, in accordance
with the disrupter’s mantra that “it is easier to ask for forgiveness
than for permission”.
When the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “surveillance is
the business model of the internet” he was really only hinting at the
reality that Zuboff has now illuminated. The combination of state
surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital
technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups:
the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched.
This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of
knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most
democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state
surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its
privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.
And it won’t be easy to fix because it requires us to tackle the
essence of the problem – the logic of accumulation implicit in
surveillance capitalism. That means that self-regulation is a
nonstarter. “Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists,” says
Zuboff, “or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the
internet is like asking old Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand.
It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up
chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic
mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”
The Age of Surveillance Capital is a striking and illuminating book. A fellow reader remarked to me that it reminded him of Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century,
in that it opens one’s eyes to things we ought to have noticed, but
hadn’t. And if we fail to tame the new capitalist mutant rampaging
through our societies then we will only have ourselves to blame, for we
can no longer plead ignorance.
Ten questions for Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Larry Page saw that human experience could be Google’s virgin wood’
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Continuing a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max
Weber, Karl Polanyi, Marx… Shoshana Zuboff. Photograph: Jason Paige
Smith for the Observer
John Naughton: At the moment, the world is obsessed with Facebook. But as you tell it, Google was the prime mover.
Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism is a human
creation. It lives in history, not in technological inevitability. It
was pioneered and elaborated through trial and error at Google in much
the same way that the Ford Motor Company discovered the new economics of
mass production or General Motors discovered the logic of managerial
capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to
financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling
company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure
mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward
advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their
exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in
combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and
computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through
rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.
Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing
cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data
surplus, and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this
surplus.
The company developed new methods of secret surplus capture that
could uncover data that users intentionally opted to keep private, as
well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or
would not provide. And this surplus would then be analysed for hidden
meanings that could predict click-through behaviour. The surplus data
became the basis for new predictions markets called targeted
advertising.
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Sheryl Sandberg, says Zuboff, played the role of Typhoid
Mary, bringing surveillance capitalism from Google to Facebook.
Photograph: John Lee for the Guardian
Here was the origin of surveillance capitalism in an unprecedented
and lucrative brew: behavioural surplus, data science, material
infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated
platforms. As click-through rates skyrocketed, advertising quickly
became as important as search. Eventually it became the cornerstone of a
new kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale.
The success of these new mechanisms only became visible when Google
went public in 2004. That’s when it finally revealed that between 2001
and its 2004 IPO, revenues increased by 3,590%.
JN:So surveillance capitalism started with advertising, but then became more general?
SZ: Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to
advertising than mass production was limited to the fabrication of the
Ford Model T. It quickly became the default model for capital
accumulation in Silicon Valley, embraced by nearly every startup and
app. And it was a Google executive – Sheryl Sandberg
– who played the role of Typhoid Mary, bringing surveillance capitalism
from Google to Facebook, when she signed on as Mark Zuckerberg’s number
two in 2008. By now it’s no longer restricted to individual companies
or even to the internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of
products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail,
healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more,
birthing whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers,
market-makers, and market players. Nearly every product or service that
begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every internet-enabled
device, every “digital assistant”, is simply a supply-chain interface
for the unobstructed flow of behavioural data on its way to predicting
our futures in a surveillance economy.
JN:In this story of conquest and appropriation, the term “digital natives” takes on a new meaning…
SZ: Yes, “digital natives” is a tragically ironic
phrase. I am fascinated by the structure of colonial conquest,
especially the first Spaniards who stumbled into the Caribbean islands.
Historians call it the “conquest pattern”, which unfolds in three
phases: legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of
justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a
town to legitimate the declaration. Back then Columbus simply declared
the islands as the territory of the Spanish monarchy and the pope.
The sailors could not have imagined that they were writing the first
draft of a pattern that would echo across space and time to a digital
21st century. The first surveillance capitalists also conquered by
declaration. They simply declared our private experience to be theirs
for the taking, for translation into data for their private ownership
and their proprietary knowledge. They relied on misdirection and
rhetorical camouflage, with secret declarations that we could neither
understand nor contest.
Google began by unilaterally declaring that the world wide web was
its to take for its search engine. Surveillance capitalism originated in
a second declaration that claimed our private experience for its
revenues that flow from telling and selling our fortunes to other
businesses. In both cases, it took without asking. Page [Larry, Google
co-founder] foresaw that surplus operations would move beyond the online
milieu to the real world, where data on human experience would be free
for the taking. As it turns out his vision perfectly reflected the
history of capitalism, marked by taking things that live outside the
market sphere and declaring their new life as market commodities.
We were caught off guard by surveillance capitalism because there was
no way that we could have imagined its action, any more than the early
peoples of the Caribbean could have foreseen the rivers of blood that
would flow from their hospitality toward the sailors who appeared out of
thin air waving the banner of the Spanish monarchs. Like the Caribbean
people, we faced something truly unprecedented.
Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Once we thought
of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of
us as free.
JN:Then there’s the “inevitability” narrative – technological determinism on steroids.
SZ: In my early fieldwork in the computerising
offices and factories of the late 1970s and 80s, I discovered the
duality of information technology: its capacity to automate but also to
“informate”, which I use to mean to translate things, processes,
behaviours, and so forth into information. This duality set information
technology apart from earlier generations of technology: information
technology produces new knowledge territories by virtue of its
informating capability, always turning the world into information. The
result is that these new knowledge territories become the subject of
political conflict. The first conflict is over the distribution of
knowledge: “Who knows?” The second is about authority: “Who decides who
knows?” The third is about power: “Who decides who decides who knows?”
Now the same dilemmas of knowledge, authority and power have surged
over the walls of our offices, shops and factories to flood each one of
us… and our societies. Surveillance capitalists were the first movers in
this new world. They declared their right to know, to decide who knows,
and to decide who decides. In this way they have come to dominate what I
call “the division of learning in society”, which is now the central
organising principle of the 21st-century social order, just as the
division of labour was the key organising principle of society in the
industrial age.
JN: So the big story is not really the technology per se but
the fact that it has spawned a new variant of capitalism that is enabled
by the technology?
SZ: Larry Page grasped that human experience could
be Google’s virgin wood, that it could be extracted at no extra cost
online and at very low cost out in the real world. For today’s owners of
surveillance capital the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and
feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful
meadows, rivers, oceans and forests before they fell to the market
dynamic. We have no formal control over these processes because we are
not essential to the new market action. Instead we are exiles from our
own behaviour, denied access to or control over knowledge derived from
its dispossession by others for others. Knowledge, authority and power
rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely “human natural
resources”. We are the native peoples now whose claims to
self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.
While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the
digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance
capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance
capitalism is not technology. Digital technologies can take many forms
and have many effects, depending upon the social and economic logics
that bring them to life. Surveillance capitalism relies on algorithms
and sensors, machine intelligence and platforms, but it is not the same
as any of those.
JN: Where does surveillance capitalism go from here?
SZ: Surveillance capitalism moves from a focus on
individual users to a focus on populations, like cities, and eventually
on society as a whole. Think of the capital that can be attracted to
futures markets in which population predictions evolve to approximate
certainty.
This has been a learning curve for surveillance capitalists, driven
by competition over prediction products. First they learned that the
more surplus the better the prediction, which led to economies of scale
in supply efforts. Then they learned that the more varied the surplus
the higher its predictive value. This new drive toward economies of
scope sent them from the desktop to mobile, out into the world: your
drive, run, shopping, search for a parking space, your blood and face,
and always… location, location, location.
The evolution did not stop there. Ultimately they understood that the
most predictive behavioural data comes from what I call “economies of
action”, as systems are designed to intervene in the state of play and
actually modify behaviour, shaping it toward desired commercial
outcomes. We saw the experimental development of this new “means of
behavioural modification” in Facebook’s contagion experiments and the Google-incubated augmented reality game Pokémon Go.
Democracy has slept, while surveillance capitalists amassed unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power
Shoshana Zuboff
It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the
goal now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to
produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus
eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist
explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular
behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the
music, and then we let the music make them dance.”
This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely
self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral
legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of
individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic
society. The message here is simple: Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.
JN:What are the implications for democracy?
SZ: During the past two decades surveillance
capitalists have had a pretty free run, with hardly any interference
from laws and regulations. Democracy has slept while surveillance
capitalists amassed unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power.
These dangerous asymmetries are institutionalised in their monopolies
of data science, their dominance of machine intelligence, which is
surveillance capitalism’s “means of production”, their ecosystems of
suppliers and customers, their lucrative prediction markets, their
ability to shape the behaviour of individuals and populations, their
ownership and control of our channels for social participation, and
their vast capital reserves. We enter the 21st century marked by this
stark inequality in the division of learning: they know more about us
than we know about ourselves or than we know about them. These new forms
of social inequality are inherently antidemocratic.
At the same time, surveillance capitalism diverges from the history
of market capitalism in key ways, and this has inhibited democracy’s
normal response mechanisms. One of these is that surveillance capitalism
abandons the organic reciprocities with people that in the past have
helped to embed capitalism in society and tether it, however
imperfectly, to society’s interests. First, surveillance capitalists no
longer rely on people as consumers. Instead, supply and demand orients
the surveillance capitalist firm to businesses intent on anticipating
the behaviour of populations, groups and individuals. Second, by
historical standards the large surveillance capitalists employ
relatively few people compared with their unprecedented computational
resources. General Motors employed more people during the height of the
Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights
of market capitalisation. Finally, surveillance capitalism depends upon
undermining individual self-determination, autonomy and decision rights
for the sake of an unobstructed flow of behavioural data to feed
markets that are about us but not for us.
This antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian juggernaut is best described
as a market-driven coup from above: an overthrow of the people
concealed as the technological Trojan horse of digital technology. 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. It is a form of
tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. Paradoxically,
this coup is celebrated as “personalisation”, although it defiles,
ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is
personal.
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‘The power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power
is entirely self-authorising,’ says Zuboff. ‘It has no foundation in
democratic or moral legitimacy.’
JN:Our societies seem transfixed by all this: we are like rabbits paralysed in the headlights of an oncoming car.
SZ: Despite surveillance capitalism’s domination of
the digital milieu and its illegitimate power to take private experience
and to shape human behaviour, most people find it difficult to
withdraw, and many ponder if it is even possible. This does not mean,
however, that we are foolish, lazy, or hapless. On the contrary, in my
book I explore numerous reasons that explain how surveillance
capitalists got away with creating the strategies that keep us
paralysed. These include the historical, political and economic
conditions that allowed them to succeed. And we’ve already discussed
some of the other key reasons, including the nature of the
unprecedented, conquest by declaration. Other significant reasons are
the need for inclusion, identification with tech leaders and their
projects, social persuasion dynamics, and a sense of inevitability,
helplessness and resignation.
We are trapped in an involuntary merger of personal necessity and
economic extraction, as the same channels that we rely upon for daily
logistics, social interaction, work, education, healthcare, access to
products and services, and much more, now double as supply chain
operations for surveillance capitalism’s surplus flows. The result is
that the choice mechanisms we have traditionally associated with the
private realm are eroded or vitiated. There can be no exit from
processes that are intentionally designed to bypass individual awareness
and produce ignorance, especially when these are the very same
processes upon which we must depend for effective daily life. So our
participation is best explained in terms of necessity, dependency, the
foreclosure of alternatives, and enforced ignorance.
JN:Doesn’t all this mean that regulation
that just focuses on the technology is misguided and doomed to fail?
What should we be doing to get a grip on this before it’s too late?
SZ: The tech leaders desperately want us to believe
that technology is the inevitable force here, and their hands are tied.
But there is a rich history of digital applications before surveillance
capitalism that really were empowering and consistent with democratic
values. Technology is the puppet, but surveillance capitalism is the
puppet master.
Surveillance capitalism is a human-made phenomenon and it is in the realm of politics that it must be confronted. The resources of our democratic institutions must be mobilised, including our elected officials. GDPR (a recent EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the EU) is a good start, and time will tell if we can build on
that sufficiently to help found and enforce a new paradigm of
information capitalism. Our societies have tamed the dangerous excesses
of raw capitalism before, and we must do it again.
While there is no simple five-year action plan, much as we yearn for
that, there are some things we know. Despite existing economic, legal
and collective-action models such as antitrust, privacy laws and trade
unions, surveillance capitalism has had a relatively unimpeded two
decades to root and flourish. We need new paradigms born of a close
understanding of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives and
foundational mechanisms.”
For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a
solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in
the first place? All that does is further institutionalise and
legitimate data capture. It’s like negotiating how many hours a day a
seven-year-old should be allowed to work, rather than contesting the
fundamental legitimacy of child labour. Data ownership also fails to
reckon with the realities of behavioural surplus. Surveillance
capitalists extract predictive value from the exclamation points in your
post, not merely the content of what you write, or from how you walk
and not merely where you walk. Users might get “ownership” of the data
that they give to surveillance capitalists in the first place, but they
will not get ownership of the surplus or the predictions gleaned from it
– not without new legal concepts built on an understanding of these
operations.
Another example: there may be sound antitrust reasons to break up the
largest tech firms, but this alone will not eliminate surveillance
capitalism. Instead it will produce smaller surveillance capitalist
firms and open the field for more surveillance capitalist competitors.
So what is to be done? In any confrontation with the unprecedented,
the first work begins with naming. Speaking for myself, this is why I’ve
devoted the past seven years to this work… to move forward the project
of naming as the first necessary step toward taming. My hope is that
careful naming will give us all a better understanding of the true
nature of this rogue mutation of capitalism and contribute to a sea
change in public opinion, most of all among the young.
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff