{"id":10876,"date":"2020-06-29T13:10:40","date_gmt":"2020-06-29T18:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=10876"},"modified":"2020-06-29T19:03:53","modified_gmt":"2020-06-30T00:03:53","slug":"we-are-surveillance-capital-stock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/06\/29\/we-are-surveillance-capital-stock\/","title":{"rendered":"We are surveillance capital stock"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I\u2019m reading Shoshana Zuboff&#8217;s widely lauded <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicaffairsbooks.com\/titles\/shoshana-zuboff\/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism\/9781610395694\/\">The Age of Surveillance Capitalism<\/a><\/em>, which <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/technology\/2019\/jan\/20\/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook\">some<\/a> have <a href=\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/2019\/02\/02\/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism\/\">placed<\/a> alongside Thomas Piketty\u2019s <em>Capital in the Twenty-First Century<\/em> as <a href=\"https:\/\/shoshanazuboff.com\/book\/recent-work\/\">essential reading<\/a> for understanding today&#8217;s global economy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The big conceptual idea I find most useful in it is its insistence that we are in the midst of a \u201cfourth great transformation\u201d (to use <a href=\"https:\/\/pdfs.semanticscholar.org\/ef78\/55d2f4ff72d69d93cc9ea655392d0504249a.pdf\">Karl Polanyi&#8217;s<\/a> terminology), with &#8220;resources&#8221; &#8212; specifically, land, labor, money, and behavior &#8212; being extracted from the social relations and moral obligations within which they had previously been embedded, to become something new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The first transformed human life into labor, which could be bought and sold in the wage economy.<\/li><li>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.<\/li><li>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.<\/li><li>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 &#8220;behavioral futures markets&#8221; (among other places). In turn, the advertisers coax and prod us, through the &#8220;ubiquitous sensate, networked, computational infrastructure&#8221; of the whole system, to become what best suits the ends of those who control it.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>I find Zuboff&#8217;s account of &#8220;experience&#8221; as the new commodity frontier to be more convincing than the idea of &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/link.springer.com\/chapter\/10.1057\/9780230607187_7\">knowledge<\/a>&#8221; as the fourth transformational commodity (and\/or <a href=\"https:\/\/scholar.harvard.edu\/files\/kaisa\/files\/powell_snellman.pdf\">economy<\/a>). But to my mind this fourth transformation feels like an extension and deepening of the third one, especially as its technologies &#8212; digital informational systems &#8212; 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 &#8220;first&#8221; and &#8220;second modernity.&#8221; (My own, more intuitively based account of &#8220;disembedding&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/12\/01\/beyond-sustainabilitys-3-pillars-an-exercise-in-eco-political-ontology\/\">can be found here<\/a>.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That said, Zuboff&#8217;s notion of &#8220;behavioral surplus&#8221; as the newly found &#8220;resource&#8221; that is rendered, through Google&#8217;s and other companies&#8217; &#8220;machine intelligence,&#8221; into assets that are commodified as surveillance capital, is original and provocative. Here&#8217;s Zuboff&#8217;s diagrammatic depiction of that process :<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><a href=\"http:\/\/discours.es\/2019\/diagrams-from-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism\/\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/zuboff-243x400.jpg?resize=365%2C601&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-10882\" width=\"365\" height=\"601\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/zuboff.jpg?resize=243%2C400&amp;ssl=1 243w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/zuboff.jpg?resize=182%2C300&amp;ssl=1 182w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/zuboff.jpg?resize=167%2C275&amp;ssl=1 167w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/zuboff.jpg?w=768&amp;ssl=1 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 365px) 100vw, 365px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Zuboff tries to balance this largely pessimistic and at times dystopian account with a recognition of the &#8220;goods&#8221; we may want to retain through this transformation &#8212; such as the democratization and &#8220;individualization&#8221; of the first two &#8220;modernities,&#8221; by which we might fight off the &#8220;instrumentarian collective&#8221; of &#8220;information civilization.&#8221; But I&#8217;m not sure that her case here is entirely convincing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 &#8220;surveillance capitalists.&#8221; 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 &#8220;democratization&#8221; and &#8220;individualization&#8221; 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&#8217;t seem well addressed by Zuboff (at least in my reading so far). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And part of the problem is that, as Evgeny Morozov argues <a href=\"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/latest\/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov\">in his lengthy <em>Baffler<\/em> review<\/a>, her theoretical armature remains somewhat obscure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m only part way through the book (though I&#8217;ve skimmed it all and read the conclusions and some reviews), and I have yet to fully grasp her account of &#8220;instrumentarian&#8221; power, which she contrasts with totalitarian power (see the <a href=\"https:\/\/bryanalexander.org\/book-club\/reading-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-chapters-13-and-14\/\">diagrams here<\/a>). 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 &#8220;empire&#8221; and &#8220;the multitude,&#8221; and with other accounts of &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wiley.com\/en-us\/Cognitive+Capitalism-p-9780745647326\">cognitive capitalism<\/a>,&#8221; &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.wiley.com\/en-us\/Platform+Capitalism-p-9781509504862\">platform capitalism<\/a>,&#8221; &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/spheres-journal.org\/contribution\/communicative-capitalism-and-class-struggle\/\">communicative capitalism<\/a>,&#8221; and the like (none of which she addresses, as Morozov points out). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;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 &#8220;extended sensorium&#8221; of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbvaopenmind.com\/en\/articles\/augmented-environments-and-new-media-forms\/\">augmented<\/a>, bio- and geo- <a href=\"http:\/\/drainmag.com\/beyond-beyond-locative-media-art-data-and-the-politics-of-place\/\">locative<\/a> media used for <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/06\/23\/bioregionalism-primer\/\">bioregional<\/a> and radically democratizing goals.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the book makes for a provocative read and an insightful analysis of the driving forces of digital capitalism. Thoughts welcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/ageofsurveillance-258x400.jpg?resize=167%2C259&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-10879\" width=\"167\" height=\"259\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/ageofsurveillance.jpg?resize=258%2C400&amp;ssl=1 258w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/ageofsurveillance.jpg?resize=193%2C300&amp;ssl=1 193w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/ageofsurveillance.jpg?resize=177%2C275&amp;ssl=1 177w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/06\/ageofsurveillance.jpg?w=435&amp;ssl=1 435w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 167px) 100vw, 167px\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m reading Shoshana Zuboff&#8217;s widely lauded The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which some have placed alongside Thomas Piketty\u2019s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as essential reading for understanding today&#8217;s global economy. The big conceptual idea I find most useful in it is its insistence that we are in the midst of a \u201cfourth great transformation\u201d [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[689701,691215],"tags":[628511,5700,628424,628516,628432,628509,628515,628514,628510,628506,628508,4478,628505,628504,628512,628503,628507],"class_list":["post-10876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media_ecology","category-politics_postpolitics","tag-behavioral-surplus","tag-books","tag-cognitive-capitalism","tag-communicative-capitalism","tag-digital-media","tag-disembedding","tag-information-civilization","tag-information-economy","tag-instrumentarian-power","tag-karl-polanyi","tag-knowledge-economy","tag-media-ecology","tag-polanyi","tag-shoshana-zuboff","tag-stages-of-capitalism","tag-surveillance-capitalism","tag-the-great-transformation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2Pq","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11568,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/01\/31\/the-information-coup\/","url_meta":{"origin":10876,"position":0},"title":"The information coup","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 31, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Shoshana Zuboff's analysis of \"The Coup We Are Not Talking About,\" published in today's Sunday New York Times, is an essential follow-up to her book Surveillance Capitalism, applying that book's analysis to the situation we are living through. This other coup is the \"epistemic coup\" which, she writes, \"proceeds in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Media ecology&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":1334,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/09\/06\/eco-marxism-the-4-laws-of-ecology\/","url_meta":{"origin":10876,"position":1},"title":"eco-Marxism &amp; the &#8220;4 laws of ecology&#8221;","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 6, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Marx\u2019s insights for ecology are many. The four \u201cinformal laws of ecology,\u201d as Levi Bryant points out in his post on John Bellamy Foster's Marx's Ecology, are not one of them (let alone four). These \u201claws\u201d have been making their rounds ever since biologist and eco-socialist (and one-time Citizens Party\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Philosophy&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8302,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/23\/cinema-ecology-the-death-of-carbon-capitalism\/","url_meta":{"origin":10876,"position":2},"title":"Cinema, ecology, &amp; the death of carbon capitalism","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 23, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Rice University's\u00a0Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences\u00a0(CENHS) has made my Cultures of Energy talk available on their YouTube channel. It's a longer version of the material I presented\u00a0at the SCMS \"Post-Cinema\" panel. Here's the abstract: This paper thinks through the intersections of three developments: (1) the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/25_cwFE2vKI\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":13861,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2025\/12\/31\/books-of-the-quarter-century-in-ecocultural-theory\/","url_meta":{"origin":10876,"position":3},"title":"Books of the quarter-century in ecocultural theory","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 31, 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"We're now a quarter of the way into the present century, and what a rollercoaster it's become. Every ten years this century I've posted a list of the \"Books of the Decade in Ecocultural Theory.\" (The last one was here; the previous, here.) Given how quickly things are evolving --\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Anthropocene&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/12\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/12\/image.png?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/12\/image.png?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2025\/12\/image.png?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":10684,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/05\/19\/the-machine-has-stopped-what-now\/","url_meta":{"origin":10876,"position":4},"title":"The machine has stopped: what now?","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 19, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"The \"reopening\" of the world's economies, locally and nationally, piece by piece, after the sudden and massive stoppage of the entire economic system, is raising important questions about whether the system can be put back into motion selectively and into a more viable direction than it had been moving beforehand.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Manifestos &amp; auguries&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Manifestos &amp; auguries","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/manifestos-and-auguries\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/05\/article-2084425-0f65483900000578-825_964x636.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/05\/article-2084425-0f65483900000578-825_964x636.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/05\/article-2084425-0f65483900000578-825_964x636.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2020\/05\/article-2084425-0f65483900000578-825_964x636.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":6525,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/02\/25\/vik-muniz-his-waste-pickers\/","url_meta":{"origin":10876,"position":5},"title":"Vik Muniz &amp; his waste pickers","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 25, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Here are my introductory comments to the 2010 documentary Waste Land, delivered yesterday at the Fleming Museum in Burlington and shown in connection with the exhibition High Trash, which runs until May 19. http:\/\/vimeo.com\/16290358 Every society implicitly or explicitly acknowledges that things have an ending, and that that ending is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Cinema&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10876"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10887,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10876\/revisions\/10887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}