The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff (Public Affairs Books, 2019)
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Harvard Business School Professor emerita and former tech columnist, Shoshana Zuboff describes how the proliferation of digital technologies is prompting a transformation not only in how subjects experience the world, but in its fundamental nature as well. Quotidian features of the analog world, brushing one’s teeth, walking to work, having a coffee, are re-figured by the “life-crawling” operations of tech companies like Google and Facebook as information-rich behavior (259). The world at large is re-disclosed as having been information all along, in a perpetual state of waiting to be harvested.
Initially hailed as a “masterpiece” (Reich, 2019), Zuboff’s book has since come under fire in a number of critical academic reviews (Morozov, 2019; Ball, 2019; Haggart, 2019). In one prominent case, for too much surveillance, too little capitalism. Evgeny Morozov: “If you don’t want to talk about capitalism then you’d better keep quiet about surveillance capitalism” (Morozov, 2019). Another set of critical appraisals, such as the review by surveillance studies scholar Kirstie Ball, dismisses the book for its failure to add nuance to pre-existing debates within new media fields. Ball: “For me, it contained very few surprises. The phenomena detailed within its pages have been a concern of surveillance scholars for the last twenty years. I would even go so far as to say it is not a work of surveillance scholarship at all” (Ball, 2019: 253).
In these reviews the forest is often missed for the title. Whether one prefers “platform capitalism,” “cognitive capitalism,” or Ball’s “surveillance assemblages” and “the political economy of interiority,” what’s relevant in reading Zuboff’s book is less the frame of “surveillance capitalism,” and instead how one accounts for the ways emerging digital technologies operate within what she calls “a new global architecture of behavior modification” (vii). Centering the architecture instead of the age re-orients how one understands the book’s approach—less a final word on the nature of the present, more a genealogical investigation tracing how technological and capitalist modes of apprehending converge on everyday behavior, diagnosis rather than periodization. In this respect, Zuboff’s book has more in common with critical investigations of design, Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies for example, than it does with economic treatises like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
In “The Foundations of Surveillance Capitalism,” the first of the book’s three parts, capitalism and technology are initially held apart in order for Zuboff to establish a two-pronged economic and technical lineage of behavior modification. For economics, analysis of thinkers such as Hayek, Polanyi, Schumpeter and Friedman unveils the “shareholder value movement” of the 1970s and the “neoliberal habitat” of deregulation it spawned as the key historical inflections that set the stage for the arrival behavioral modification (37-41).
Enter Google, “the pioneer of surveillance capitalism,” whose early abrogation of privacy rights in favor of data extraction and analysis, Zuboff says, filled the void created by deregulation (9). Quoting Larry Page: “In general, having the data present in companies like Google is better than having it in the government […] because we obviously care about our reputation” (60-63). For Zuboff, Page’s words are a rhetorical smokescreen, shrouding Google’s capture of behavioral surplus—the excess data generated by everyday activity—in the optimistic rhetoric of a privately administered democracy. For her, it is not only that Google adds information to capitalism’s extractive tendencies, but that information extraction displaces how and when capital’s effects are sensed. Data-oriented decision-making is “not eroded, but redistributed” by corporations like Google, which seize power by fiat in their refashioning privacy matters into internal technical concerns (90). “A one-way mirror” is how Zuboff describes the working of these proprietary methods, their circumnavigating the “friction” of user consent (80). For her, the outcome is that the assertion of privacy rights, in contesting what has already been taken, arrives too late, implicitly acceding to Google’s a priori assertion of dominance. From this embryonic moment, Zuboff says, comes a panoply of large-scale corporate datatizing projects meant to “kidnap, corner, compete.” These, she notes, open a gulf of educational asymmetry between the “priesthood of privately employed computational specialists” and everyone else (190).
Although scholars of new media will find in Part I a useful account of the early days of Google (especially chapter 3), that work ought to be understood in terms of the second part, “The Advance of Surveillance Capitalism,” where the book truly shines. Besides being where Zuboff theorizes the architecture of behavior modification, Part II ought to be centralized, because it is what has been lost in aforementioned critical evaluations. For example, a common critique of Zuboff’s work is of her first and third parts’ proposed solutions or lack thereof. This is made clear when, in describing surveillance capitalism as a disease, she suggests that what is being corrupted is the dignity and good health of an enlightened body politic sharing in liberal humanist values. Her solution, a vaccination, implies the belief that if only we could curtail the excesses of surveillance capitalism, things might return to normal (62). As critics have suggested, returning to a pre-digital capitalism is no panacea, but the suggestion itself portends potentially disastrous effects i.e. the mystification of systemic environmental, racial, interpersonal and international harms caused by even analog incarnations of capitalism (Weiskopf, 2019). While valuable, criticisms like these have directed readings of Part II to take place primarily in terms of the book’s ultimate political trajectory.
Scholars of digital design, control, interfaces, information, behavior, neuroplasticity and cybernetics, to name a few areas, will find interesting and relevant conclusions within the book’s second part. Relevant to those conversations is Zuboff’s archival material. In the introduction she notes that the “ground truth” of surveillance capitalism is made visible through “interviews, patents, earnings calls, speeches, conferences, videos, and company programs and policies […] [interviews with] 52 data scientists from 19 different companies with a combined 586 years of experience in high-technology corporations and startups, primarily in Silicon Valley.” Combined in Part II are a critical theoretical orientation and her journalistic archive and methodology. The result is an inductively elaborated theory of behavior modification whose techniques acquire their definition in analysis of corporate and engineering points of view. To ongoing research in the humanities, this adds the layer of designers’ perspectives, their self-described anticipations of digital technological transformations.
In this part Zuboff expands upon her claim that surveillance capitalism is a “logic in action” (15), unpacking its operations in terms of a quadripartite dynamic of extract-render-predict-modify:
Extraction-Rendition: desires for the world’s digital disclosure (“Google’s mission ‘to organize the world’s information’”) combine with ever-broadening means of data extraction (“smart vodka bottles to internet-enabled rectal thermometers, and quite literally everything in between”) in the form of a positive feedback cycle of extraction and analysis (70, 238). For Zuboff, this takes place against the backdrop of a will to know whose desired outcome is the banishing of life’s mysteries. Zuboff: “All that is moist and alive must hand over its facts. There can be no shadow, no darkness. The unknown is intolerable.” (241). The result she says is a technological “apparatus of ubiquity” and the desired production of “digital omniscience” (208, 225).
Prediction: the rendering of everyday life as data reveals a new mode of capitalization: prediction products, parcels of knowledge “designed to forecast what we will feel, think, and do” (96). Market forces compete for these in what Zuboff calls “behavioral futures markets,” where mathematical knowledge of user profiles (UPI) becomes a profitable means to leverage bets on future consumer demand.
Modification: surveillance capitalism’s final frontier; when passive sensors become “actuators,” capable of intervening in the flow of activity and shaping behavior towards desired ends in real time. For Zuboff, this happens in three distinct modes (294-299): (1) “tuning,” the subliminal cues that structure decision-making such as the design of space. She gives the example of a classroom, seats facing the teacher implicitly directing attention forwards; (2) “herding,” the top-down control of one’s environment, or as one software developer described it, the ability to remotely shut down your car, fridge or TV if data suggests you shouldn’t be driving, eating or watching; (3) “conditioning,” the intellectual descendent of 20th century behavioral science and the most impactful of the three. Conditioning is about “reinforcement learning” and the manipulation of routines toward selected behavior. An illuminating quotation from a Silicon Valley chief data scientist:
The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. We want to figure out the construction of changing a person’s behavior, and then we want to change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions […] we develop “treatments” or “data pellets” that select good behaviors. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us. (296-297).
The extraction-rendition-prediction-modification dynamic is the logic of surveillance capitalism at work. Whereas extraction-rendition-prediction initially operated behind a silicon curtain of technical-financial expertism, with modification accumulated knowledge is brought to bear on everyday life. Financial incentives converge with technical sensing operations in an inverted realization of Alan Kay’s famous dictum that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Now the future is invented for us by forces we do not control. If surveillance capitalism is logic in action and if, per Alex Galloway, “logic is the science of appearing,” then the logic of surveillance capitalism is the science by which our future is made to appear as the set of all possible behaviors now fully open to their unlimited technological-corporate modification (Galloway, 2010: 9).
In general, Zuboff’s book can help scholars refine questions of where politics takes place in a world shot through with digital disclosure. For example, new media scholars might use her conclusions to probe how corporate attitudes concerning behavior inform claims like Gilles Deleuze’s in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” that “one is never finished with anything” (Deleuze, 1992: 5). Or, if following Alex Galloway in The Interface Effect, one thinks of the computer as a mode of mediation that simulates being and in so doing instantiates as ethical principle a practice of calculative encoding, then Zuboff’s work might help to understand how an architecture of ubiquitous sensing upgrades Galloway’s hypothesis, i.e. that emerging technology no longer simulates being, but becoming (Galloway, 2012: 21-23). For Zuboff, digital technology is fast becoming capable of simulating life in the process of its chaotic evolution; how we understand the relationship between computation and calculative reason must evolve as well. In these terms, Zuboff’s work could also serve as a bridge between Galloway and Luciana Parisi, distinguishing protocols designed to simulate life (Galloway) from machinic modes of sensing that operate in logical modes all their own, avatars of an alien mode of thought (Parisi).
From “Instrumentarian Power For A Third Modernity,” the book’s third part, two chapters, “Two Species of Power” and “The Instrumentarian Collective,” stand out in their continuing theorization of global behavior modification. By actualizing data-driven conclusions, modification seems to confirm the hypotheses of radical behaviorists B.F. Skinner and John B. Watson. For them, decision-making, problem solving, even the attribution of causality, are mathematically explicable, complex functions manipulating numerous variables. Behavioral actuation suggests what was missing for Skinner and Watson was merely exactitude in observation and measurement (368). Zuboff argues that digital sensing technologies are seen to provide this missing precision; referencing MIT Media Lab’s Alex Pentland, she says, “[he] ‘completes’ Skinner, fulfilling his social vision with big data, ubiquitous digital instrumentation, advanced mathematics…” (418).
In desiring to push Zuboff’s logic further, I suggest that Pentland embodies what Luciano Floridi terms “digital ontology”: “the ultimate nature of reality is digital, and the universe is a computational system equivalent to a Turing Machine” (Floridi, 2009: 151). Not only does behavioral modification testify to Skinner and Watson’s mathematics, but also to digital means of perceiving and operating thereupon. For the digital ontologist, life’s unfolding is the execution of an immensely complex algorithm. Belief in digital ontology affords to surveillance capitalism confidence in the truth of its quest for unlimited data, no matter the cost. As behavioral modification expands, the digital ontological proposition becomes more plausible, not only to data-literate priests, but to user-parishioners as well. Another positive feedback: as surveillance capitalism dons the mask of the digital ontological, we are encouraged to trust in the truth of its logic—surveillance capitalism as something to be believed in.
To reach this conclusion, Part II must be allowed to speak for itself. Thus, readers ought to keep the book’s animating question, ‘what happens when the technical project to render the world as data joins forces with the capitalist pursuit of profitability?’ but refuse to let the title become a burden. Prioritizing architecture over age means understanding that surveillance capitalism is about an apparatus of ubiquitous sensing working in concert with corporate profiteering to re-disclose the everyday.
Performing this translation of understanding, from surveillance capitalism as defining structure to surveillance capitalism as revealing logic, has been the goal of this review. If, as a result, Zuboff’s work is no longer tasked to provide a final word on the present, we might return to the goals the book sets for itself. In Part I, Zuboff says her book’s purpose is a) to help hold open the terrain of political mobilization, while b) naming covert dynamics at work in digital technology’s re-shaping the present and c) to invent concepts at the same time as inviting further work, both aiding in the invention of new political forms that refuse techno-capitalism’s annexation of the future (50-60). If indeed these are the standards by which we ought to judge The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, then it absolutely succeeds.
References
Ball, K. (2019) ‘Review of Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, Surveillance & Society, vol. 17, no. 1/2, pp. 252–256.
Deleuze, G. (1992) ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, vol. 59, pp. 3–7.
Floridi, L. (2009) ‘Against Digital Ontology’, Synthese, vol. 168, no. 1, pp. 151–178.
Galloway, A. (2012) The Interface Effect. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Galloway, A. (2011) ‘Black Box, Black Bloc’, In: B. Noys, ed., Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, pp.238-249.
Haggart, B. (2019) ‘Evaluating scholarship, or why I won’t be teaching Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, Blayne Haggart’s Orangespace, 15 February. Available at: https://blaynehaggart.wordpress.com/2019/02/15/evaluating-scholarship-or-why-i-wont-be-teaching-shoshana-zuboffs-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/ (Accessed: 20 May 2019).
Morozov, E. (2019) ‘Capitalism’s New Clothes’, The Baffler, February 4, 2019.
Morozov, E. (2019) 5 February. Available at https://twitter.com/evgenymorozov/ (Accessed: 18 May 2019).
Parisi, L. (2019) ‘XENO-PATTERNING: predictive intuition and automated imagination.’ Angelaki, 24(1), pp.81-97.
Reich, R. (2019) ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: Comments and Reviews | Shoshana Zuboff’, viewed 20 May 2019, https://www.shoshanazuboff.com/new/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-comments-and-reviews/.
Weiskopf, R. (2019) ‘Book Review: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power’, Organization. doi: 10.1177/1350508419842708.
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