I’m reading Shoshana Zuboff’s widely lauded The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which some have placed alongside Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as essential reading for understanding today’s global economy.
The big conceptual idea I find most useful in it is its insistence that we are in the midst of a “fourth great transformation” (to use Karl Polanyi’s terminology), with “resources” — specifically, land, labor, money, and behavior — being extracted from the social relations and moral obligations within which they had previously been embedded, to become something new.
- The first transformed human life into labor, which could be bought and sold in the wage economy.
- The second transformed nature itself, including the bonds between communities and land, into resource and property, which could be bought and sold as real estate.
- The third transformed exchange into money, and ultimately into finance in a global marketplace that renders (potentially) everything else into commodifiable data and accumulable profit.
- The fourth is currently converting human experience (i.e., what remains of human nature) into behavioral data, which can be bought and sold to advertisers for profit in “behavioral futures markets” (among other places). In turn, the advertisers coax and prod us, through the “ubiquitous sensate, networked, computational infrastructure” of the whole system, to become what best suits the ends of those who control it.
I find Zuboff’s account of “experience” as the new commodity frontier to be more convincing than the idea of “knowledge” as the fourth transformational commodity (and/or economy). But to my mind this fourth transformation feels like an extension and deepening of the third one, especially as its technologies — digital informational systems — were developed as an expansion and amplification of the financial, governance, and (later) entertainment systems of what she elsewhere (drawing on Ulrich Beck and others) calls “first” and “second modernity.” (My own, more intuitively based account of “disembedding” can be found here.)
That said, Zuboff’s notion of “behavioral surplus” as the newly found “resource” that is rendered, through Google’s and other companies’ “machine intelligence,” into assets that are commodified as surveillance capital, is original and provocative. Here’s Zuboff’s diagrammatic depiction of that process :
The great strength of the book is the detail with which she describes surveillance capitalism, its purveyors and promoters, its mechanics, and its impacts upon us, who constitute its raw material.
Zuboff tries to balance this largely pessimistic and at times dystopian account with a recognition of the “goods” we may want to retain through this transformation — such as the democratization and “individualization” of the first two “modernities,” by which we might fight off the “instrumentarian collective” of “information civilization.” But I’m not sure that her case here is entirely convincing.
Part of the problem is that her untangling of the threads of capital, governance, and the desires and expectations of everyday people lacks the clarity and nuance of her analysis of Google, Facebook, and the “surveillance capitalists.” For instance, what do people get and enjoy from social media, and how do those enjoyments get woven into the ways in which those media can also become part of “democratization” and “individualization” processes? How are they part of the terrain over which we are currently struggling, and not just an instrument of our oppression? These questions don’t seem well addressed by Zuboff (at least in my reading so far).
And part of the problem is that, as Evgeny Morozov argues in his lengthy Baffler review, her theoretical armature remains somewhat obscure.
I’m only part way through the book (though I’ve skimmed it all and read the conclusions and some reviews), and I have yet to fully grasp her account of “instrumentarian” power, which she contrasts with totalitarian power (see the diagrams here). But I sense that there is room for dialogue between her and theorists like Hardt and Negri, with and their more collectivist and networked understanding of “empire” and “the multitude,” and with other accounts of “cognitive capitalism,” “platform capitalism,” “communicative capitalism,” and the like (none of which she addresses, as Morozov points out).
There’s also room for dialogue with those who would break up tech monopolies while reining them into more locally manageable ends. (I still harbor hopes, utopian perhaps, for an “extended sensorium” of augmented, bio- and geo- locative media used for bioregional and radically democratizing goals.)
But the book makes for a provocative read and an insightful analysis of the driving forces of digital capitalism. Thoughts welcome.
