Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019; hbk £25 (or less), ebook £15.80.
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RATING: 25
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Buy this book?
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No
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How would you feel if the government made you carry an electronic tagging device wherever you went? How about if it required you to send personal correspondence, maintain social networks, make purchases, and endorse things you liked, all on the same device? What if it analysed the data you generated to produce a profile of your habits, tastes, preferences, purchases and daily itineraries, then sold this information to third parties? And went on to develop technologies that could assess your psychological make-up and emotional state, in order to tap into your inner feelings and current state of mind, and trigger behaviour that suited its purposes? I'm guessing you might complain. Yet if you voluntarily carry a smart phone, and use it for any of the above activities, all this and more is what Google and Facebook do with the data you willingly or unwittingly provide.
I suppose that you know this perfectly well. Zuboff guesses you don't: 'Surveillance capitalism's reliance on secret operations means that most of us simply do not and cannot know the extent to which our phone doubles as a tracking device for corporate surveillance' (243). Actually, I do know, and I expect you do too - it is 100 per cent a tracking device. If you really don't know that, you can learn from this book, and from plenty of other similar critiques. Unfortunately, though, this particular one is a hugely extended version of an article published 4 years ago (Zuboff, 2015) - extended from 15 pages to 691 pages in fact; and it is as long as it is because it erects its analysis of the wave of innovation brought about by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the like and the purposes behind it on a preposterous framework purporting to identify a new stage of capitalism, one that is flawed in the first place, and increasingly unfit for purpose as the book proceeds. Along with that, it features forays into secondary literatures and philosophical musings that could well be done without, and make the book three or four times longer than it need be, and it is excruciatingly badly written. Definitely not 'Das Kapital for the digital generation' then - as suggested by that notable Marxist scholar, Hugo Rifkind, in the Times (18 January 2019). And if any of the ten assorted luminaries whose effusive tributes are published at the beginning of the book actually read it, I'd like to hear from them.
The book is divided into three parts: The Foundations of Surveillance Capitalism; The Advance of Surveillance Capitalism; and Instrumentarian Power for a Third Modernity (the first two 'modernities' are roughly Fordist and post-Fordist respectively; the third is 'defined by a new collectivism owned and operated by surveillance capital', 469-70). Broadly speaking, the three parts are concerned with the collection and analysis of personal data in order to target advertising and boost online sales, techniques intended to modify behaviour in order to induce certainty regarding outcomes (that is, ratchet up the chance that an advertisement will be followed, and a purchase made); and the character of the society these developments will produce if we do nothing to stop it. You can see the problem, even from that bare summary. In a book that claims to identify a new stage of capitalism, there is barely any attention either to production, or to the relationship between labour and capital - the surveillance of workers in the workplace is only touched upon late in the book. Although much is made of the comparison with the transformation represented by Fordist mass production, there is only passing reference to the material base and investment in real estate, computer hardware and communications on which these new activities depend, let alone to the broader revolutions in production in logistics, robotics, nanotechnology, biogenetics and the like that are so central to contemporary capitalism. The focus is on consumption - in other words, in Marxist terms, on realisation, not accumulation - and on retail consumption at that, or online shopping. And in fact Zuboff says as much in her reiterated focus on the market, and in (more accurate) references to 'surveillance capitalists ‘ commercial interests’ and their 'behavioural market regime' (375).
What, then, is 'surveillance capitalism' (SC)? The maximal definition is provided as a frontispiece to the text itself, and it gives a good idea of the apocalyptic nature of the argument:
1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people's sovereignty'.
A couple of these points are at least exaggerated and misleading. The rest are false. Let's start with points 3 and 5 - Zuboff sees SC as a rogue mutation from industrial capitalism, and specifically, claims that while the weakness of industrial capitalism was its tendency to destroy the natural environment, SC tends to destroy human nature, and particularly freedom and autonomy. She argues that: 'Although the market form [of Fordist mass production] and its bosses had many failings and produced many violent facts, its populations of newly modernizing individuals were valued as the necessary sources of customers and employees. It depended upon its communities in ways that would eventually lead to a range of institutionalized reciprocities' (31). This very partial perspective not only overlooks the intrinsic discipline that industrial capital imposes upon labour, suggesting that it was essentially socially harmonious, but also underpins a startling claim on which the larger argument of the book depends. Drawing on Acemoglu and Robinson (2012), and their argument that industrialization in Britain 'produced a new sense of interdependence between ordinary people and elites', she comments:
'In sharp contrast to the pragmatic concessions of Britain's early industrial capitalists, surveillance capitalists' extreme structural independence from people breeds exclusion rather than inclusion and lays the foundation for the unique approach that we have called 'radical indifference'" (504, emphasis mine).
What can she possibly mean? First, she argues that Google and the like employ relatively few workers, considering their market capitalization. This incidentally ignores temporary and contract workers, and in any case rests on a comparison only with Ford and General Motors, rather than the general run of employment in industrial capitalism (500). But it is nothing, compared to this:
'In another decisive break with capitalism's past, surveillance capitalists abandon the organic reciprocities with people that have long been a mark of capitalism's endurance and adaptability. ... Surveillance capitalism ... formally rescinds any remaining reciprocities with its societies. First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely on people as consumers' (499, emphasis mine).
And she goes on: 'Instead, the axis of supply and demand orients the surveillance capitalist firm to businesses intent on anticipating the behaviour of populations, groups, and individuals. The result, as we have seen, is that "users" are sources of raw material for a digital-age production process aimed at a new business customer' (499-500).
This convoluted logic flies in the face of a point that is made repeatedly elsewhere in the book. Both Facebook and Google make every effort to increase the number of users of their 'free' services all the time, because their ability to attract business customers depends entirely upon their ability to deliver a massive user base to them. The whole point of the book, after all, and Point 1 of the definition above, is that users provide the 'free raw material' that feeds the 'hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales'. No users, no customers, no revenue. This is a paradigmatic case of extreme structural dependence upon 'populations, groups and individuals', which explains both the constant concern with the number of users and the pattern and extent of their use, and the intense effort both companies put into countering negative publicity whenever it appears. Here the key point of conflict is privacy, a core issue for the business model as it hinders access to data. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared rather recklessly in 2010, after unilaterally changing the privacy settings of users, that privacy was 'no longer a social norm' (Johnson, 2010, cited here p. 48 and ft. 64, p. 548). It turns out that it is, and the pressure on Facebook and Google arising from repeated scandals has intensified with the introduction of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation in May 2018, as Zuboff herself reports (481-88). If Facebook forfeits the trust of its users, its business model is finished, as Zuckerberg is well aware, and as repeated expressions of contrition from himself and his senior staff attest. Again, Zuboff makes the point herself: in a competitive environment, Google and Facebook are 'compelled to improve predictions' and therefore to command a 'vast and varied' flow of behavioural data (201); they need more users, spending more time on their sites, and clicking on more advertisements, all the time. Not for nothing is the first goal of Facebook 'connecting everyone' (402); and the 'radical indifference' that characterises SC is indifference to the motives that bring people to their sites and what they post there, not to whether they use or not: 'it doesn't matter what is in the pipelines as long as they are full and flowing' (512). This has actually made things worse, as Facebook has been less than zealous in policing the posting of abusive and offensive material, and has attracted negative publicity as a result. So it is not surprising that in April 2019, following reports that millions of users were leaving, Zuckerberg announced new and more stringent privacy protection for Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp, and acknowledged that Facebook had to 'rebuild trust' (BBC News, 2019). There is currently renewed pressure to break Facebook up by reversing its previous purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, a move that would prevent the introduction of an integrated platform across the three. Zuckerberg's co-founder, Chris Hughes (no longer connected with the company) identified the underlying issue in calling for such a break-up in a recent editorial in the New York Times: 'Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. ... Facebook’s business model is built on capturing as much of our attention as possible to encourage people to create and share more information about who they are and who they want to be ... Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared' (Hughes, 2019). Ironically, Facebook has responded to these threats to its business model by recruiting former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (Clegg, 2019), of the ill-fated coalition government that almost destroyed the Liberal Democrats, presumably because of his proven expertise in forfeiting trust. Now, none of this is to say that Facebook is doomed. Rather, it completely invalidates both Zuboff's claim that it is 'structurally independent from people', along with the explicit contrast with industrial capitalism derived from it.
So let's see how the rest of the definition above is developed in the text itself:
'Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietory behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as "machine intelligence," and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, or later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior. ... Competitive pressures produced this shift, in which automated processes not only know our behaviour, but also shape our behaviour 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 (ibid).
Hence, we have a new stage of capitalism: 'As long as surveillance capitalism and its behavioural futures markets are allowed to thrive, ownership of the new means of behavioural modification eclipses ownership of the means of production as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth and power in the twenty-first century' (11). All of this became clear in a flash (literally - regrettably Zuboff's home was struck by lightening in 2009, and burned down): when she returned to the project in 2011 'I could see that this new form had broken away from the norms and practices that define the history of capitalism and in that process something startling and unprecedented had emerged' (13). This 'insight' is now fleshed out through a further set of further concepts which suggest a superficial acquaintance with Marxist terminology: it has its own logic of accumulation, and laws of motion - the extraction imperative, digital dispossession, foundational mechanisms, economic imperatives, economies of supply, construction of power, and principles of social ordering; it reflects a new division of learning; and its inner secret lies in its discovery of behavioural surplus, and associated means of behavioural modification, and behavioural futures markets. Beyond this, contracts based upon the computer-mediated observation of behaviour are denounced as uncontracts (218-21), and the term rendition is commandeered to describe the 'concrete operational practices through which dispossession is accomplished' (233-4). Central to their operation is instrumentarian power, or power stemming from 'the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behaviour for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization and control' (352). Zuboff sees the logic as reflecting B.F. Skinner's utopian novel Walden Two rather than Orwell's 1984, so names the ubiquitous digital apparatus through which SC imposes its will the Big Other (Max Meyer, on whom Skinner drew, published a textbook in 1921 under the title of Psychology of the Other-One – see pp. 361-6). She argues, as others had before (Faife, 2012; Davidow, 2013), that innovations such as Facebook's 'like' function reflect a Skinnerian project of 'operant conditioning', intended to induce addictive behaviour, and concludes:
'Totalitarianism was a transformation of the state into a project of total possession. Instrumentarianism and Big Other signal the transformation of the market into a project of total certainty, an undertaking that is unimaginable outside outside the logic of accumulation that is surveillance capitalism' (382, emphasis mine).
Of course, if it were true that human beings could be 'automated' with total certainty through techniques that have proved effective with pigeons and rats, the idea of 'human nature' to which Zuboff clings would be shown to be an illusion anyway. Leaving this aside, she does seriously claim to have discovered a new form of capitalism in which means of behavioural modification eclipse means of production, and the labour theory of value is replaced by a behavioural data theory of value. In fact, a three-stage process is at work. She starts with a standard account of what Google and Facebook are up to, much of it taken directly from public statements by leading figures in the two companies themselves, despite her insistence on their concealment of their methods and goals (see for example the two perfectly clear accounts by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, 2010, 2014, on which she draws repeatedly). Second, she creates a spurious and portentous re-description, drawing heavily on Marxist terminology, or what she calls ‘fresh and careful naming’ (347). And third, she then denounces as deliberately obfuscatory or euphemistic any account that doesn't use her own only recently invented concepts.
She starts by making a spurious distinction between the user data mined to improve the service provided by Google's search engine and the 'surplus' data not required for this purpose, but turned to account in order to attract advertisers. In fact at the outset,it was the same data, and the two processes went hand in hand. Indeed, in setting out her case, she cites Kenneth Cukier (2010) as saying 'at the time' that 'Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product' (68). It wasn't at the time, but some years later, and the quote she provides puts together in reverse order two excerpts from different sections of a very informative article. Anyway, as Zuboff glosses the process: 'More queries meant more learning; more learning produced more relevance. More relevance meant more searches and more users' (ibid). Six pages on, there is a subtle shift as the turn to specifically targeting advertisements to individuals is described as giving rise to a new rhetoric: 'If there was to be advertising, then it had to be "relevant" to users' (74). The use of scare quotes, Google says, by the way, serves to subtly cast doubt on the reality of a phenomenon. But refining search procedures so that searches fine-tuned results did improve the relevance of searches for both parties. The real shift came, as Zuboff understands perfectly well, when Google introduced an auction system for advertisers, and tweaked searches to favour the highest bidders, to the detriment of users. The idea of a behavioural surplus is superfluous, and without merit. Equally, users were not 'dispossessed' of anything. And while the process had a clear logic, nothing is added by calling it a 'logic of accumulation', and ascribing to it 'laws of motion'. But having introduced this new vocabulary (66-7), Zuboff sets it up as the yardstick of truth. If you don't presciently use her terminology, you are guilty of 'euphemism' and deceit. So the terms "digital exhaust" and "digital breadcrumbs" are denounced as euphemisms: Google 'has been careful to camouflage the significance of its behavioural surplus operations in industry jargon' (90). Similarly:
On car insurance: 'A report by Deloitte's Center for Financial Services counsels "risk minimization" - a euphemism for guaranteed outcomes - through monitoring and enforcing policyholder behaviour in real time, an approach called "behavioural underwriting"' (214).
On 'smart' products such as the Nest thermostat: 'It is important to acknowledge that in this context "smart" is a euphemism for rendition: intelligence that is designed to render some tiny corner of lived experience as behavioural data' (238).
Equally: ' "Personalization" is once again the euphemism that spearheads this generation of prediction products manufactured from the raw materials of the self" (271).
And on Pokémon Go: 'The notion of "sponsored locations" is a euphemism for Niantic's behavioural futures markets, ground zero in [Google Maps product vice president and Street View boss John] Hanke's new gold rush' (316).
Again, we are told that when Google CEO Eric Schmidt declared "The Internet will disappear" in 2015: 'What he really meant was that "The Internet will disappear into the Big Other"'(378).
And in a reverse of this strategy, Zuboff occasionally attributes a conscious practice of these processes to SC itself, as when it ‘formally rescinds any remaining reciprocities with its societies’, or when (of Google) 'some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietory behavioral surplus', both cited above.
This is all very irritating, and if the book were not so heavy, I might more than once have thrown it across the room. The whole of it is marked by a style of extravagantly heightened language and repetition, reiteration, reformulation, reduplication, redundancy and restatement for emphasis and effect that will drive you to distraction, dismay and despair. Such devices might possibly work in a short magazine piece or spoken presentation, but here they quickly begin to grate, and needlessly extend the text. And all this is further compounded by the unevenness of tone, folksy diversions, hyperbole and meaningless pronouncements of a rich and varied kind: 'We know ourselves to be worthy of dignity and the opportunity to live an effective life. This is existential toothpaste that, once liberated, cannot be squeezed back into the tube' (44); 'We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience' (100); 'All that is moist and alive must hand over its facts' (241); 'That we vibrate to one another should be a life-enhancing fact, but this third modernity amplifies our mutual vibration to an excruciating pitch' (444); 'Those ageless polarities in which we discover and elaborate our sense of self are casually eviscerated as immensity installs itself in my refrigerator, the world chatters in my toothbrush, elsewhere stands watch over my bloodstream, and the garden breeze stirs the chimes draped from the willow tree only to be broadcast across the planet' (478).
There is plenty more along these lines, extending to bravura passages such as the following:
'Today's means of behavioural modification are aimed unabashedly at "us." Everyone is swept up in this new market dragnet, including the psychodramas of ordinary, unsuspecting fourteen-year-olds approaching the weekend with anxiety. Every avenue of connectivity serves to bolster private power's need to seize behaviour for profit. Where is the hammer of democracy now, when the threat comes from your phone, your digital assistant, your Facebook login? Who will stand for freedom now, when Facebook threatens to retreat into the shadows if we dare to be the friction that disrupts economies of action that have been carefully, elaborately, and expensively constructed to exploit our natural empathy, elude our awareness, and circumvent our prospects for self-determination? If we fail to take notice now, how long before we are numb to this incursion and to all the incursions? How long until we notice nothing at all? How long before we forget who we were before they owned us, bent over the old texts of self-determination in the dim light, the shawl around our shoulders, magnifying glass in hand, as if deciphering ancient hieroglyphs?' (327).
You can see why the book is so long. It is a throughly unsatisfactory volume, and its core claim, that 'The struggle for power and control in society is no longer associated with the hidden facts of class and its relationship to production but rather by the hidden facts of automated engineered behaviour modification' (309), is unconvincing. Indeed, it is puzzling that it has come to be published in the form it is. But if you attend to the details of its production, you find some clues. You are in the hands not of a single heroic individual, but of Team Zuboff. The author not only has the usual editor and research assistant (the latter having 'mastered the professional art of the research deep dive'), but also a 'tireless' literary agent, and a 'citation manager' - not one like yours or mine, but an actual human being, capable of collating references by the bucketload, as evidenced in 1,301 notes, across 147 pages. Zuboff, condemning the practice of asking users of internet applications and services to click on terms of agreement to acknowledge their assent, reports a calculation that 'a reasonable reading of all the privacy policies that one encounters in a year would require would require 76 full workdays' (50 and ft. 75, p. 549). How long, then, would it take to read even the 160-odd books cited here, let alone the thousands of other references? My suspicion is that some parts of the text reflect the combined ministrations of the research assistant and citations manager, rather than Zuboff's first-hand knowledge. Others are undoubtedly the product of her own stream-of-consciousness method of composition. In short, a book to avoid.
References
Acemoglu, Daron, and James Robinson, 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Profile Books, 2012.
Clegg, Nick, 2019. 'Breaking Up Facebook Is Not the Answer', New York Times, 11 May.
Cukier, Kenneth (2010), 'Data, data everywhere', The Economist, 27 February, 1-14.
Davidow, Bill, 2013. 'Skinner Marketing: We're the rats, and Facebook Likes Are the Reward', The Atlantic, 10 June, accessed 23 May 2019 at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/skinner-marketing-were-the-rats-and-facebook-likes-are-the-reward/276613/.
Faife, Corin, 2012. 'B.F. Skinner Likes Your F.B. Status', Ceasefire Magazine, 2 February, accessed 23 May at https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/modern-times-18-skinner-facebook/
Hughes, Chris, 2019. 'It's Time to Break Up Facebook', New York Times, 9 May.
Johnson, Bobbie, 2010. 'Privacy No Longer a Social Norm', Guardian, 10 January, accessed 22 May 2019 at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy.
Kleinman, Zoe, 2019. 'Facebook boss reveals changes in response to criticism', BBC News, 30 April, accessed 22 May at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48107268.
Varian, Hal, 2010. 'Computer Mediated Transactions', American Economic Review, 100, 2, 1-10.
Varian, Hal. 2014.'Beyond Big Data', Business Economics, 49, 1, 27-31.
Zuboff, Shoshana, 2015. ‘Big Other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization’, Journal of Information Technology, 30, 75-89.
I suppose that you know this perfectly well. Zuboff guesses you don't: 'Surveillance capitalism's reliance on secret operations means that most of us simply do not and cannot know the extent to which our phone doubles as a tracking device for corporate surveillance' (243). Actually, I do know, and I expect you do too - it is 100 per cent a tracking device. If you really don't know that, you can learn from this book, and from plenty of other similar critiques. Unfortunately, though, this particular one is a hugely extended version of an article published 4 years ago (Zuboff, 2015) - extended from 15 pages to 691 pages in fact; and it is as long as it is because it erects its analysis of the wave of innovation brought about by Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the like and the purposes behind it on a preposterous framework purporting to identify a new stage of capitalism, one that is flawed in the first place, and increasingly unfit for purpose as the book proceeds. Along with that, it features forays into secondary literatures and philosophical musings that could well be done without, and make the book three or four times longer than it need be, and it is excruciatingly badly written. Definitely not 'Das Kapital for the digital generation' then - as suggested by that notable Marxist scholar, Hugo Rifkind, in the Times (18 January 2019). And if any of the ten assorted luminaries whose effusive tributes are published at the beginning of the book actually read it, I'd like to hear from them.
The book is divided into three parts: The Foundations of Surveillance Capitalism; The Advance of Surveillance Capitalism; and Instrumentarian Power for a Third Modernity (the first two 'modernities' are roughly Fordist and post-Fordist respectively; the third is 'defined by a new collectivism owned and operated by surveillance capital', 469-70). Broadly speaking, the three parts are concerned with the collection and analysis of personal data in order to target advertising and boost online sales, techniques intended to modify behaviour in order to induce certainty regarding outcomes (that is, ratchet up the chance that an advertisement will be followed, and a purchase made); and the character of the society these developments will produce if we do nothing to stop it. You can see the problem, even from that bare summary. In a book that claims to identify a new stage of capitalism, there is barely any attention either to production, or to the relationship between labour and capital - the surveillance of workers in the workplace is only touched upon late in the book. Although much is made of the comparison with the transformation represented by Fordist mass production, there is only passing reference to the material base and investment in real estate, computer hardware and communications on which these new activities depend, let alone to the broader revolutions in production in logistics, robotics, nanotechnology, biogenetics and the like that are so central to contemporary capitalism. The focus is on consumption - in other words, in Marxist terms, on realisation, not accumulation - and on retail consumption at that, or online shopping. And in fact Zuboff says as much in her reiterated focus on the market, and in (more accurate) references to 'surveillance capitalists ‘ commercial interests’ and their 'behavioural market regime' (375).
What, then, is 'surveillance capitalism' (SC)? The maximal definition is provided as a frontispiece to the text itself, and it gives a good idea of the apocalyptic nature of the argument:
1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people's sovereignty'.
A couple of these points are at least exaggerated and misleading. The rest are false. Let's start with points 3 and 5 - Zuboff sees SC as a rogue mutation from industrial capitalism, and specifically, claims that while the weakness of industrial capitalism was its tendency to destroy the natural environment, SC tends to destroy human nature, and particularly freedom and autonomy. She argues that: 'Although the market form [of Fordist mass production] and its bosses had many failings and produced many violent facts, its populations of newly modernizing individuals were valued as the necessary sources of customers and employees. It depended upon its communities in ways that would eventually lead to a range of institutionalized reciprocities' (31). This very partial perspective not only overlooks the intrinsic discipline that industrial capital imposes upon labour, suggesting that it was essentially socially harmonious, but also underpins a startling claim on which the larger argument of the book depends. Drawing on Acemoglu and Robinson (2012), and their argument that industrialization in Britain 'produced a new sense of interdependence between ordinary people and elites', she comments:
'In sharp contrast to the pragmatic concessions of Britain's early industrial capitalists, surveillance capitalists' extreme structural independence from people breeds exclusion rather than inclusion and lays the foundation for the unique approach that we have called 'radical indifference'" (504, emphasis mine).
What can she possibly mean? First, she argues that Google and the like employ relatively few workers, considering their market capitalization. This incidentally ignores temporary and contract workers, and in any case rests on a comparison only with Ford and General Motors, rather than the general run of employment in industrial capitalism (500). But it is nothing, compared to this:
'In another decisive break with capitalism's past, surveillance capitalists abandon the organic reciprocities with people that have long been a mark of capitalism's endurance and adaptability. ... Surveillance capitalism ... formally rescinds any remaining reciprocities with its societies. First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely on people as consumers' (499, emphasis mine).
And she goes on: 'Instead, the axis of supply and demand orients the surveillance capitalist firm to businesses intent on anticipating the behaviour of populations, groups, and individuals. The result, as we have seen, is that "users" are sources of raw material for a digital-age production process aimed at a new business customer' (499-500).
This convoluted logic flies in the face of a point that is made repeatedly elsewhere in the book. Both Facebook and Google make every effort to increase the number of users of their 'free' services all the time, because their ability to attract business customers depends entirely upon their ability to deliver a massive user base to them. The whole point of the book, after all, and Point 1 of the definition above, is that users provide the 'free raw material' that feeds the 'hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales'. No users, no customers, no revenue. This is a paradigmatic case of extreme structural dependence upon 'populations, groups and individuals', which explains both the constant concern with the number of users and the pattern and extent of their use, and the intense effort both companies put into countering negative publicity whenever it appears. Here the key point of conflict is privacy, a core issue for the business model as it hinders access to data. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared rather recklessly in 2010, after unilaterally changing the privacy settings of users, that privacy was 'no longer a social norm' (Johnson, 2010, cited here p. 48 and ft. 64, p. 548). It turns out that it is, and the pressure on Facebook and Google arising from repeated scandals has intensified with the introduction of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation in May 2018, as Zuboff herself reports (481-88). If Facebook forfeits the trust of its users, its business model is finished, as Zuckerberg is well aware, and as repeated expressions of contrition from himself and his senior staff attest. Again, Zuboff makes the point herself: in a competitive environment, Google and Facebook are 'compelled to improve predictions' and therefore to command a 'vast and varied' flow of behavioural data (201); they need more users, spending more time on their sites, and clicking on more advertisements, all the time. Not for nothing is the first goal of Facebook 'connecting everyone' (402); and the 'radical indifference' that characterises SC is indifference to the motives that bring people to their sites and what they post there, not to whether they use or not: 'it doesn't matter what is in the pipelines as long as they are full and flowing' (512). This has actually made things worse, as Facebook has been less than zealous in policing the posting of abusive and offensive material, and has attracted negative publicity as a result. So it is not surprising that in April 2019, following reports that millions of users were leaving, Zuckerberg announced new and more stringent privacy protection for Messenger, Instagram and Whatsapp, and acknowledged that Facebook had to 'rebuild trust' (BBC News, 2019). There is currently renewed pressure to break Facebook up by reversing its previous purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, a move that would prevent the introduction of an integrated platform across the three. Zuckerberg's co-founder, Chris Hughes (no longer connected with the company) identified the underlying issue in calling for such a break-up in a recent editorial in the New York Times: 'Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. ... Facebook’s business model is built on capturing as much of our attention as possible to encourage people to create and share more information about who they are and who they want to be ... Facebook is indeed more valuable when there are more people on it: There are more connections for a user to make and more content to be shared' (Hughes, 2019). Ironically, Facebook has responded to these threats to its business model by recruiting former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (Clegg, 2019), of the ill-fated coalition government that almost destroyed the Liberal Democrats, presumably because of his proven expertise in forfeiting trust. Now, none of this is to say that Facebook is doomed. Rather, it completely invalidates both Zuboff's claim that it is 'structurally independent from people', along with the explicit contrast with industrial capitalism derived from it.
So let's see how the rest of the definition above is developed in the text itself:
'Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietory behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as "machine intelligence," and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, or later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior. ... Competitive pressures produced this shift, in which automated processes not only know our behaviour, but also shape our behaviour 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 (ibid).
Hence, we have a new stage of capitalism: 'As long as surveillance capitalism and its behavioural futures markets are allowed to thrive, ownership of the new means of behavioural modification eclipses ownership of the means of production as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth and power in the twenty-first century' (11). All of this became clear in a flash (literally - regrettably Zuboff's home was struck by lightening in 2009, and burned down): when she returned to the project in 2011 'I could see that this new form had broken away from the norms and practices that define the history of capitalism and in that process something startling and unprecedented had emerged' (13). This 'insight' is now fleshed out through a further set of further concepts which suggest a superficial acquaintance with Marxist terminology: it has its own logic of accumulation, and laws of motion - the extraction imperative, digital dispossession, foundational mechanisms, economic imperatives, economies of supply, construction of power, and principles of social ordering; it reflects a new division of learning; and its inner secret lies in its discovery of behavioural surplus, and associated means of behavioural modification, and behavioural futures markets. Beyond this, contracts based upon the computer-mediated observation of behaviour are denounced as uncontracts (218-21), and the term rendition is commandeered to describe the 'concrete operational practices through which dispossession is accomplished' (233-4). Central to their operation is instrumentarian power, or power stemming from 'the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behaviour for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization and control' (352). Zuboff sees the logic as reflecting B.F. Skinner's utopian novel Walden Two rather than Orwell's 1984, so names the ubiquitous digital apparatus through which SC imposes its will the Big Other (Max Meyer, on whom Skinner drew, published a textbook in 1921 under the title of Psychology of the Other-One – see pp. 361-6). She argues, as others had before (Faife, 2012; Davidow, 2013), that innovations such as Facebook's 'like' function reflect a Skinnerian project of 'operant conditioning', intended to induce addictive behaviour, and concludes:
'Totalitarianism was a transformation of the state into a project of total possession. Instrumentarianism and Big Other signal the transformation of the market into a project of total certainty, an undertaking that is unimaginable outside outside the logic of accumulation that is surveillance capitalism' (382, emphasis mine).
Of course, if it were true that human beings could be 'automated' with total certainty through techniques that have proved effective with pigeons and rats, the idea of 'human nature' to which Zuboff clings would be shown to be an illusion anyway. Leaving this aside, she does seriously claim to have discovered a new form of capitalism in which means of behavioural modification eclipse means of production, and the labour theory of value is replaced by a behavioural data theory of value. In fact, a three-stage process is at work. She starts with a standard account of what Google and Facebook are up to, much of it taken directly from public statements by leading figures in the two companies themselves, despite her insistence on their concealment of their methods and goals (see for example the two perfectly clear accounts by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian, 2010, 2014, on which she draws repeatedly). Second, she creates a spurious and portentous re-description, drawing heavily on Marxist terminology, or what she calls ‘fresh and careful naming’ (347). And third, she then denounces as deliberately obfuscatory or euphemistic any account that doesn't use her own only recently invented concepts.
She starts by making a spurious distinction between the user data mined to improve the service provided by Google's search engine and the 'surplus' data not required for this purpose, but turned to account in order to attract advertisers. In fact at the outset,it was the same data, and the two processes went hand in hand. Indeed, in setting out her case, she cites Kenneth Cukier (2010) as saying 'at the time' that 'Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product' (68). It wasn't at the time, but some years later, and the quote she provides puts together in reverse order two excerpts from different sections of a very informative article. Anyway, as Zuboff glosses the process: 'More queries meant more learning; more learning produced more relevance. More relevance meant more searches and more users' (ibid). Six pages on, there is a subtle shift as the turn to specifically targeting advertisements to individuals is described as giving rise to a new rhetoric: 'If there was to be advertising, then it had to be "relevant" to users' (74). The use of scare quotes, Google says, by the way, serves to subtly cast doubt on the reality of a phenomenon. But refining search procedures so that searches fine-tuned results did improve the relevance of searches for both parties. The real shift came, as Zuboff understands perfectly well, when Google introduced an auction system for advertisers, and tweaked searches to favour the highest bidders, to the detriment of users. The idea of a behavioural surplus is superfluous, and without merit. Equally, users were not 'dispossessed' of anything. And while the process had a clear logic, nothing is added by calling it a 'logic of accumulation', and ascribing to it 'laws of motion'. But having introduced this new vocabulary (66-7), Zuboff sets it up as the yardstick of truth. If you don't presciently use her terminology, you are guilty of 'euphemism' and deceit. So the terms "digital exhaust" and "digital breadcrumbs" are denounced as euphemisms: Google 'has been careful to camouflage the significance of its behavioural surplus operations in industry jargon' (90). Similarly:
On car insurance: 'A report by Deloitte's Center for Financial Services counsels "risk minimization" - a euphemism for guaranteed outcomes - through monitoring and enforcing policyholder behaviour in real time, an approach called "behavioural underwriting"' (214).
On 'smart' products such as the Nest thermostat: 'It is important to acknowledge that in this context "smart" is a euphemism for rendition: intelligence that is designed to render some tiny corner of lived experience as behavioural data' (238).
Equally: ' "Personalization" is once again the euphemism that spearheads this generation of prediction products manufactured from the raw materials of the self" (271).
And on Pokémon Go: 'The notion of "sponsored locations" is a euphemism for Niantic's behavioural futures markets, ground zero in [Google Maps product vice president and Street View boss John] Hanke's new gold rush' (316).
Again, we are told that when Google CEO Eric Schmidt declared "The Internet will disappear" in 2015: 'What he really meant was that "The Internet will disappear into the Big Other"'(378).
And in a reverse of this strategy, Zuboff occasionally attributes a conscious practice of these processes to SC itself, as when it ‘formally rescinds any remaining reciprocities with its societies’, or when (of Google) 'some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietory behavioral surplus', both cited above.
This is all very irritating, and if the book were not so heavy, I might more than once have thrown it across the room. The whole of it is marked by a style of extravagantly heightened language and repetition, reiteration, reformulation, reduplication, redundancy and restatement for emphasis and effect that will drive you to distraction, dismay and despair. Such devices might possibly work in a short magazine piece or spoken presentation, but here they quickly begin to grate, and needlessly extend the text. And all this is further compounded by the unevenness of tone, folksy diversions, hyperbole and meaningless pronouncements of a rich and varied kind: 'We know ourselves to be worthy of dignity and the opportunity to live an effective life. This is existential toothpaste that, once liberated, cannot be squeezed back into the tube' (44); 'We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience' (100); 'All that is moist and alive must hand over its facts' (241); 'That we vibrate to one another should be a life-enhancing fact, but this third modernity amplifies our mutual vibration to an excruciating pitch' (444); 'Those ageless polarities in which we discover and elaborate our sense of self are casually eviscerated as immensity installs itself in my refrigerator, the world chatters in my toothbrush, elsewhere stands watch over my bloodstream, and the garden breeze stirs the chimes draped from the willow tree only to be broadcast across the planet' (478).
There is plenty more along these lines, extending to bravura passages such as the following:
'Today's means of behavioural modification are aimed unabashedly at "us." Everyone is swept up in this new market dragnet, including the psychodramas of ordinary, unsuspecting fourteen-year-olds approaching the weekend with anxiety. Every avenue of connectivity serves to bolster private power's need to seize behaviour for profit. Where is the hammer of democracy now, when the threat comes from your phone, your digital assistant, your Facebook login? Who will stand for freedom now, when Facebook threatens to retreat into the shadows if we dare to be the friction that disrupts economies of action that have been carefully, elaborately, and expensively constructed to exploit our natural empathy, elude our awareness, and circumvent our prospects for self-determination? If we fail to take notice now, how long before we are numb to this incursion and to all the incursions? How long until we notice nothing at all? How long before we forget who we were before they owned us, bent over the old texts of self-determination in the dim light, the shawl around our shoulders, magnifying glass in hand, as if deciphering ancient hieroglyphs?' (327).
You can see why the book is so long. It is a throughly unsatisfactory volume, and its core claim, that 'The struggle for power and control in society is no longer associated with the hidden facts of class and its relationship to production but rather by the hidden facts of automated engineered behaviour modification' (309), is unconvincing. Indeed, it is puzzling that it has come to be published in the form it is. But if you attend to the details of its production, you find some clues. You are in the hands not of a single heroic individual, but of Team Zuboff. The author not only has the usual editor and research assistant (the latter having 'mastered the professional art of the research deep dive'), but also a 'tireless' literary agent, and a 'citation manager' - not one like yours or mine, but an actual human being, capable of collating references by the bucketload, as evidenced in 1,301 notes, across 147 pages. Zuboff, condemning the practice of asking users of internet applications and services to click on terms of agreement to acknowledge their assent, reports a calculation that 'a reasonable reading of all the privacy policies that one encounters in a year would require would require 76 full workdays' (50 and ft. 75, p. 549). How long, then, would it take to read even the 160-odd books cited here, let alone the thousands of other references? My suspicion is that some parts of the text reflect the combined ministrations of the research assistant and citations manager, rather than Zuboff's first-hand knowledge. Others are undoubtedly the product of her own stream-of-consciousness method of composition. In short, a book to avoid.
References
Acemoglu, Daron, and James Robinson, 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Profile Books, 2012.
Clegg, Nick, 2019. 'Breaking Up Facebook Is Not the Answer', New York Times, 11 May.
Cukier, Kenneth (2010), 'Data, data everywhere', The Economist, 27 February, 1-14.
Davidow, Bill, 2013. 'Skinner Marketing: We're the rats, and Facebook Likes Are the Reward', The Atlantic, 10 June, accessed 23 May 2019 at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/06/skinner-marketing-were-the-rats-and-facebook-likes-are-the-reward/276613/.
Faife, Corin, 2012. 'B.F. Skinner Likes Your F.B. Status', Ceasefire Magazine, 2 February, accessed 23 May at https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/modern-times-18-skinner-facebook/
Hughes, Chris, 2019. 'It's Time to Break Up Facebook', New York Times, 9 May.
Johnson, Bobbie, 2010. 'Privacy No Longer a Social Norm', Guardian, 10 January, accessed 22 May 2019 at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy.
Kleinman, Zoe, 2019. 'Facebook boss reveals changes in response to criticism', BBC News, 30 April, accessed 22 May at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48107268.
Varian, Hal, 2010. 'Computer Mediated Transactions', American Economic Review, 100, 2, 1-10.
Varian, Hal. 2014.'Beyond Big Data', Business Economics, 49, 1, 27-31.
Zuboff, Shoshana, 2015. ‘Big Other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization’, Journal of Information Technology, 30, 75-89.