Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.
1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales;
This new book seems essential to understanding the digital economy we all live in. And although I've just gotten as far as chapter 2, it already looks important enough to be on the radar of fellow Kossacks.
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. -The Guardian UK
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification;
Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.
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. -LA Review of Books
3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history;
Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers. But, as Zuboff makes clear, this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders. Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience. -LA Review of Books
4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy;
It seemed obvious to the regulators (prior to 9/11) that ownership of personal data should by default lie in the hands of private citizens, not corporations. The 9/11 attacks changed the calculus. The centralized collection and analysis of online data, on a vast scale, came to be seen as essential to national security. “The privacy provisions debated just months earlier vanished from the conversation more or less overnight,” Zuboff writes.
Google and other Silicon Valley companies benefited directly from the government’s new stress on digital surveillance (after 9/11). They earned millions through contracts to share their data collection and analysis techniques with the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. But they also benefited indirectly. Online surveillance came to be viewed as normal and even necessary by politicians, government bureaucrats, and the general public. -LA Review of Books
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;
Behavior modification is the thread that ties today’s search engines, social networks, and smartphone trackers to tomorrow’s facial-recognition systems, emotion-detection sensors, and artificial-intelligence bots. What the industries of the future will seek to manufacture is the self. -LA Review of Books
6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy;
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. -The Guardian UK
7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty.
What we lose under this regime is something more fundamental than privacy. It’s the right to make our own decisions about privacy — to draw our own lines between those aspects of our lives we are comfortable sharing and those we are not. -LA Review of Books
8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.
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."