Literature Digital media and culture
Week 1, Zubroff (2019); The age of surveillance capitalism:
We celebrate the networked world for the many ways in which it enriches our capabilities and
prospects, but it has birthed whole new territories of anxiety, danger, and violence as the sense of a
predictable future slips away.
The entangled dilemmas of knowledge, authority, and power are no longer confined to workplaces
as they were in the 1980s. Now their roots run deep through the necessities of daily life, mediating
nearly every form of social participation.
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.
All creatures orient to home. It is the point of origin from which every species sets its bearings.
Without our bearings, there is no way to navigate unknown territory; without our bearings, we are
lost. Home need not always correspond to a single dwelling or place. We can choose
its form and location but not its meaning. Home is where we know and where we are known, where
we love and are beloved. The sense of home slipping away provokes an unbearable yearning. Now
the disruptions of the twenty-first century have turned these exquisite anxieties and longings for
dislocation into a universal story that engulfs each one of us.
There were three working assumptions in the project “Aware Home”, a living laboratory for the study
of ubiquitous computing:
1. The new data system would produce an entirely new knowledge domain
2. The rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s life would belong
exclusively to the people who live in the house
3. For all of its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take place as a modern incarnation of the
ancient conventions that understood “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its
walls.
The Aware Home information system was imagined as a simple “closed loop” with only two nodes
and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. The house would be constantly monitoring the
occupants whereabouts and activities.
By 2018, the global “smart-home” market was valued at $36 billion and expected to reach
$151 billion by 2023. E.g. the Nest thermostat does many things imagined in the Aware Home. It
collects data about its uses and environment. It uses motion sensors and computation to “learn” the
behaviors of a home’s inhabitants. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected products such
as cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds.
Each thermostat comes with a “privacy policy,” a “terms-of-service agreement,” and an “end-user
licensing agreement.” These reveal oppressive privacy and security consequences in which sensitive
household and personal information are shared with other smart devices, unnamed personnel,
and third parties for the purposes of predictive analyses and sales to other unspecified parties. Nest
takes little responsibility for the security of the information it collects and none for how the
other companies in its ecosystem will put those data to use.
Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into
behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the
rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral 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 for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets.
The most-predictive behavioral data (gedragsmatige data) come from intervening in the state of play
in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes. Competitive pressures
produced this shift, in which automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also
shape our behavior at scale. With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer
enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. surveillance
capitalism births a new species of power that I call instrumentarianism. Instrumentarian power
knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works
its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of
“smart” networked devices, things, and spaces.
Surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience. Google was the pioneer
of surveillance capitalism in thought and practice, but it quickly spread to Facebook and later to
Microsoft. As the pioneer of surveillance capitalism, Google launched an unprecedented market
operation into the unmapped spaces of the internet, where it faced few impediments from law or
competitors, like an invasive species in a landscape free of natural predators.
↑ Surveillance capitalists quickly realized that they could do anything they wanted, and they did.
Surveillance capitalism is no longer confined to the competitive dramas of the large internet
companies, where behavioral futures markets were first aimed at online advertising. Its mechanisms
and economic imperatives have become the default model for most internet-based businesses.
Eventually, competitive pressure drove expansion into the offline world, where the same
foundational mechanisms that expropriate your online browsing, likes, and clicks are trained on your
run in the park, breakfast conversation, or hunt for a parking space.
Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They are the
“hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are
scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends. We are not surveillance capitalism’s
“customers.” 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.
Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for
effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic
numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified. It disposes us
to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate like defense
mechanisms (“I have nothing to hide”), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing
ignorance out of frustration and helplessness.
Surveillance capitalism is unprecedented (ongeevenaard), this is necessarily unrecognizable. When
we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar
categories, thereby rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented.
Our effort to confront the unprecedented begins with the recognition that we hunt the puppet
master, not the puppet. A first challenge to comprehension is the confusion between surveillance
, capitalism and the technologies it employs. Surveillance capitalism is not technology; it is a logic that
imbues technology and commands it into action. Surveillance capitalism is a market form that is
unimaginable outside the digital milieu, but it is not the same as the “digital.” Surveillance capitalism
employs many technologies, but it cannot be equated with any technology. Surveillance capitalism’s
unique economic imperatives are the puppet masters that hide behind the curtain orienting the
machines and summoning them to action.
