The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Metadata

Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Full Title: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Category: #books

Highlights

Eventually, surveillance capitalists discovered that the most-predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes. Competitive pressures produced this shift, in which automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior 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.
The sociologist identified the perennial human quest to live effectively in our “conditions of existence” as the invisible causal power that summons the division of labor, technologies, work organization, capitalism, and ultimately civilization itself. Each is forged in the same crucible of human need that is produced by what Durkheim called the always intensifying “violence of the struggle” for effective life: “If work becomes more divided,” it is because the “struggle for existence is more acute.”8 The rationality of capitalism reflects this alignment, however imperfect, with the needs that people experience as they try to live their lives effectively, struggling with the conditions of existence that they encounter in their time and place.
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The Spanish poet Antonio Machado captured the exhilaration and daring of these first-modernity individuals in his famous song: “Traveler, there is no road; the road is made as you go.” This is what “search” has meant: a journey of exploration and self-creation, not an instant swipe to already composed answers.
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The first modernity suppressed the growth and expression of self in favor of collective solutions, but by the second modernity, the self is all we have. The new sense of psychological sovereignty broke upon the world long before the internet appeared to amplify its claims. We learn through trial and error how to stitch together our lives. Nothing is given. Everything must be reviewed, renegotiated, and reconstructed on the terms that make sense to us: family, religion, sex, gender, morality, marriage, community, love, nature, social connections, political participation, career, food…
It held out the promise of a new digital market form that might transcend the collision: an early intimation of a third-modernity capitalism summoned by the self-determining aspirations of individuals and indigenous to the digital milieu. The opportunity for “my life, my way, at a price I can afford” was the human promise that quickly lodged at the very heart of the commercial digital project, from iPhones to one-click ordering to massive open online courses to on-demand services to hundreds of thousands of web-based enterprises, apps, and devices.
This new market form declares that serving the genuine needs of people is less lucrative, and therefore less important, than selling predictions of their behavior. Google discovered that we are less valuable than others’ bets on our future behavior.
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So here is what is at stake: surveillance capitalism is profoundly antidemocratic, but its remarkable power does not originate in the state, as has historically been the case. Its effects cannot be reduced to or explained by technology or the bad intentions of bad people; they are the consistent and predictable consequences of an internally consistent and successful logic of accumulation. Surveillance capitalism rose to dominance in the US under conditions of relative lawlessness. From there it spread to Europe, and it continues to make inroads in every region of the world. Surveillance capitalist firms, beginning with Google, dominate the accumulation and processing of information, especially information about human behavior. They know a great deal about us, but our access to their knowledge is sparse: hidden in the shadow text and read only by the new priests, their bosses, and their machines.
As the marketing director of a Silicon Valley firm that sells software to link smart devices told me, “There’s all that dumb real estate out there and we’ve got to turn it into revenue. The ‘internet of things’ is all push, not pull. Most consumers do not feel a need for these devices. You can say ‘exponential’ and ‘inevitable’ as much as you want. The bottom line is that the Valley has decided that this has to be the next big thing so that firms here can grow.”
In the course of this research, the team came to appreciate the magic of behavioral surplus, discovering, for example, that a person’s disclosure of specific personal information such as religion or political affiliation contributes less to a robust personality analysis than the fact that the individual is willing to share such information in the first place. This insight alerted the team to a new genre of powerful behavioral metrics. Instead of analyzing the content of user lists, such as favorite TV shows, activities, and music, they learned that simple “meta-data”—such as the amount of information shared—“turned out to be much more useful and predictive than the original raw data.” The computations produced on the strength of these behavioral metrics, when combined with automated linguistic analysis and internal Facebook statistics, led the research team to conclude that “we can predict a user’s score for a personality trait to within just more than one-tenth of its actual value.”
Personality analysis for commercial advantage is built on behavioral surplus—the so-called meta-data or mid-level metrics—honed and tested by researchers and destined to foil anyone who thinks that she is in control of the “amount” of personal information that she reveals in social media. In the name of, for example, affordable car insurance, we must be coded as conscientious, agreeable, and open. This is not easily faked because the surplus retrieved for analysis is necessarily opaque to us. We are not scrutinized for substance but for form. The price you are offered does not derive from what you write about but how you write it. It is not what is in your sentences but in their length and complexity, not what you list but that you list, not the picture but the choice of filter and degree of saturation, not what you disclose but how you share or fail to, not where you make plans to see your friends but how you do so: a casual “later” or a precise time and place? Exclamation marks and adverb choices operate as revelatory and potentially damaging signals of your self.
As Kosinski told an interviewer in 2015, few people understand that companies such as “Facebook, Snapchat, Microsoft, Google and others have access to data that scientists would not ever be able to collect.”
Although it is still possible to imagine automated behavioral modification without surveillance capitalism, it is not possible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the marriage of behavior modification and the technological means to automate its application. This marriage is essential to economies of action. For example, one can imagine a fitness tracker, a car, or a refrigerator whose data and operational controls are accessible exclusively to their owners for the purposes of helping them to exercise more often, drive safely, and eat healthily. But as we have already seen in so many domains, the rise of surveillance capitalism has obliterated the idea of the simple feedback loop characteristic of the behavioral value reinvestment cycle. In the end, it’s not the devices; it’s Max Weber’s “economic orientation,” now determined by surveillance capitalism.
The report depicted the corporation’s systems for gathering “psychological insights” on 6.4 million high school and tertiary students as well as young Australians and New Zealanders already in the workforce. The Facebook document detailed the many ways in which the corporation uses its stores of behavioral surplus to pinpoint the exact moment at which a young person needs a “confidence boost” and is therefore most vulnerable to a specific configuration of advertising cues and nudges: “By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions, and Internet activity, Facebook can work out when young people feel ‘stressed,’ ‘defeated,’ ‘overwhelmed,’ ‘anxious,’ ‘nervous,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘silly,’ ‘useless,’ and a ‘failure.’”
In one sense there is nothing remarkable in observing that capitalists would prefer individuals who agree to work and consume in ways that most advantage capital. We need only to consider the ravages of the subprime mortgage industry that helped trigger the great financial crisis of 2008 or the daily insults to human autonomy at the hands of countless industries from airlines to insurance for plentiful examples of this plain fact. However, it would be dangerous to nurse the notion that today’s surveillance capitalists simply represent more of the same. This structural requirement of economies of action turns the means of behavioral modification into an engine of growth. At no other time in history have private corporations of unprecedented wealth and power enjoyed the free exercise of economies of action supported by a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computational knowledge and control constructed and maintained by all the advanced scientific know-how that money can buy.
Throughout the days and evenings that followed, knots of Pokémon seekers formed on his front lawn, some of them young and others long past that excuse. They held up their phones, pointing and shouting as they scanned his house and garden for the “augmented-reality” creatures. Looking at this small slice of world through their phones, they could see their Pokémon prey but only at the expense of everything else. They could not see a family’s home or the boundaries of civility that made it a sanctuary for the man and woman who lived there. Instead, the game seized the house and the world around it, reinterpreting all of it in a vast equivalency of GPS coordinates. Here was a new kind of commercial assertion: a for-profit declaration of eminent domain in which reality is recast as an unbounded expanse of blank spaces to be sweated for others’ enrichment.
Our freedom flourishes only as we steadily will ourselves to close the gap between making promises and keeping them. Implicit in this action is an assertion that through my will I can influence the future. It does not imply total authority over the future, of course, only over my piece of it. In this way, the assertion of freedom of will also asserts the right to the future tense as a condition of a fully human life.
Why should an experience as elemental as this claim on the future tense be cast as a human right? The short answer is that it is only necessary now because it is imperiled. Searle argues that such elemental “features of human life” rights are crystallized as formal human rights only at that moment in history when they come under systematic threat. So, for example, the ability to speak is elemental. The concept of “freedom of speech” as a formal right emerged only when society evolved to a degree of political complexity that the freedom to speak came under threat. The philosopher observes that speech is not more elemental to human life than breathing or being able to move one’s body. No one has declared a “right to breathe” or a “right to bodily movement” because these elemental rights have not come under attack and therefore do not require formal protection. What counts as a basic right, Searle argues, is both “historically contingent” and “pragmatic.”
Most simply put, there is no freedom without uncertainty; it is the medium in which human will is expressed in promises.
Of course, we do not only make promises to ourselves; we also make promises to one another. When we join our wills and our promises, we create the possibility of collective action toward a shared future, linked in determination to make our vision real in the world. This is the origin of the institution we call “contract,” beginning with the ancient Romans.6
It is no secret that the institution of the contract has been twisted and abused in every age, from the Requirimiento to the “slave contract,” as incumbent power imposes painful inequalities that drain the meaning, and indeed the very possibility, of mutual promising.9 For example, Max Weber warned that the great achievements of contractual freedom create opportunities to exploit property ownership as a means to “the achievement of power over others.”10
Like builders, people in contractual agreements undertake this kind of collaboration. It’s not simply finding the way through a maze to an already agreed-upon end point, but rather the continuous refinement and clarification of ends and means in the face of unanticipated obstacles. This sociality of contract may entail conflict, frustration, oppression, or anger, but it can also produce trust, cooperation, cohesion, and adaptation as the means through which human beings confront an unknowable future.
This is the essence of the uncontract, which transforms the human, legal, and economic risks of contracts into plans constructed, monitored, and maintained by private firms for the sake of guaranteed outcomes: less contract utopia than uncontract dystopia.
In the dystopia of the uncontract, this daily human thing is not normal. What if the Kippings’ credit union employed Spireon’s telematics and merely had to instruct the vehicular monitoring system to disable the car? There would be no loan manager engaging in a give-and-take with customers. The algorithm tasked to eliminate the messy, unpredictable, untrustworthy eruptions of human will would have seized the old Buick. There would have been no shared tea time with the Kippings and no one to listen to their story. There would have been no opportunity to find an alternate route through the maze, no opportunity to build trust, no occasion for collective action, no heartwarming holiday story of kindness, no glimmer of hope for a human future in which the best of our institutions is preserved and fortified, no shared challenge of uncertainty, and no shared freedom.
In the dystopia of the uncontract, surveillance capitalism’s drive toward certainty fills the space once occupied by all the human work of building and replenishing social trust, which is now reinterpreted as unnecessary friction in the march toward guaranteed outcomes. The deletion of uncertainty is celebrated as a victory over human nature: our cunning and our opportunism. All that’s left to matter are the rules that translate reasons into action, the objective measures of behavior, and the degree of conformance between the two.
So let us establish our bearings. Uncertainty is not chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense. We choose the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price we pay for the freedom to will, which founds our right to the future tense. In the absence of this freedom, the future collapses into an infinite present of mere behavior, in which there can be no subjects and no projects: only objects.
In the future that the surveillance capitalism prepares for us, my will and yours threaten the flow of surveillance revenues. Its aim is not to destroy us but simply to author us and to profit from that authorship. Such means have been imagined in the past, but only now are they feasible. Such means have been rejected in the past, but only now have they been allowed to root. We are ensnared without awareness, shorn of meaningful alternatives for withdrawal, resistance, or protection.
The need for scale drove a relentless search for new high-volume supplies of behavioral surplus, producing competitive dynamics aimed at cornering these supplies of raw material and seeking lawless undefended spaces in which to prosecute these unexpected and poorly understood acts of dispossession. All the while, surveillance capitalists stealthily but steadfastly habituated us to their claims. In the process, our access to necessary information and services became hostage to their operations, our means of social participation fused with their interests.
Surveillance capitalists’ interests have shifted from using automated machine processes to know about your behavior to using machine processes to shape your behavior according to their interests. In other words, this decade-and-a-half trajectory has taken us from automating information flows about you to automating you. Given the conditions of increasing ubiquity, it has become difficult if not impossible to escape this audacious, implacable web.
Earlier incursions of behavior modification at scale were understood as an extension of the state, and we were not prepared for the onslaught from private firms.
Google learned the art of invasion by declaration, taking what it wanted and calling it theirs.
surveillance capitalist leaders mastered the rhythms and stages of dispossession. Audacious incursions are pursued until resistance is met, followed by a range of tactics from elaborate public relations gambits to legal combat, all designed to buy time for gradual habituation to once-outrageous facts. A third stage features public demonstrations of adaptability and even retreat, while in the final stage resources are redirected to achieve the same objectives camouflaged by new rhetoric and tactics.
Once bitten, the apple was irresistible. As surveillance capitalism spread across the internet, the means of social participation become coextensive with the means of behavioral modification. The exploitation of second-modernity needs that enabled surveillance capitalism from the start eventually imbued nearly every channel of social participation. Most people find it difficult to withdraw from these utilities, and many ponder if it is even possible.
It is easy to fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy, which suggests that because the companies are successful, they must also be right. As a result, many of us are respectful of these leaders’ expert status and are eager to participate in innovations that anticipate the future.
The “dictatorship of no alternatives” is in full force here. We have seen that the behavioral value reinvestment cycle is increasingly rare. The Aware Home gave way to the Google Home. Surveillance capitalism spread across the internet, and the drive toward economies of scope and action has forced it out into the real world. From apps to devices to the One Voice, it is ever more difficult to identify avenues of escape, let alone genuine alternatives.
surveillance capitalism has eagerly weaponized behavioral economics’ ideology of human frailty, a worldview that frames human mentation as woefully irrational and incapable of noticing the regularity of its own failures. Surveillance capitalists employ this ideology to legitimate their means of behavior modification: tuning, herding, and conditioning individuals and populations in ways that are designed to elude awareness.
Surveillance capitalists dominate an abnormal division of learning in which they know things that we cannot know while compelled to conceal their intentions and practices in secret backstage action. It is impossible to understand something that has been crafted in secrecy and designed as fundamentally illegible. These systems are intended to ensnare us, preying on our vulnerabilities bred by an asymmetrical division of learning and amplified by our scarcity of time, resources, and support.
velocity is consciously deployed to paralyze awareness and freeze resistance while distracting us with immediate gratifications. Surveillance capitalism’s velocities outrun democracy even as they outrun our ability to understand what is happening and consider the consequences. This strategy is borrowed from a long legacy of political and military approaches to the production of speed as a form of violence, most recently known as “shock and awe.”19
If the declaration is “check,” the counter-declaration is “checkmate,” and the synthetic declaration changes the game. It asserts an alternative framework that transforms the opposing facts. We bide our time with counter-declarations and make life more tolerable, but only a synthetic alternative vision will transform raw surveillance capitalism in favor of a digital future that we can call home.
Industrial capitalism followed its own logic of shock and awe, taking aim at nature to conquer “it” in the interests of capital; now surveillance capitalism has human nature in its sights.
The logic of industrial capitalism exempted the enterprise from responsibility for its destructive consequences, unleashing the destabilization of the climate system and the chaos it spells for all creatures. Polanyi understood that raw capitalism could not be cooked from within. He argued that it was up to society to impose those obligations on capitalism by insisting on measures that tether the capitalist project to the social, preserving and sustaining life and nature.
If we are to rediscover our sense of astonishment, then let it be here: if industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism will thrive at the expense of human nature and threatens to cost us our humanity.
The idea from the start was that naming and taming are inextricable, that fresh and careful naming can better equip us to intercept these mechanisms of dispossession, reverse their action, produce urgently needed friction, challenge the pathological division of learning, and ultimately synthesize new forms of information capitalism that genuinely meet our needs for effective life.
The consequences of this new logic of accumulation have already leaked and continue to leak beyond commercial practices into the fabric of our social relations, transforming our relationships to ourselves and to one another. These transformations provide the soil in which surveillance capitalism has flourished: an invasive species that creates its own food supply. In transforming us, it produces nourishment for its own march forward.
Under surveillance capitalism, the “means of production” serves the “means of behavioral modification.” Machine processes replace human relationships so that certainty can replace trust.
This assembly is a market project: its purpose is to fabricate predictions, which become more valuable as they approach certainty. The best predictions feed on totalities of data, and on the strength of this movement toward totality, surveillance capitalists have hijacked the division of learning in society. They command knowledge from the decisive pinnacle of the social order, where they nourish and protect the shadow text: the urtext of certainty. This is the market net in which we are snared.
As I wrote in Chapter 7, there can be no guarantee of outcomes without the power to make it so. This is the dark heart of surveillance capitalism: a new type of commerce that reimagines us through the lens of its own distinctive power, mediated by its means of behavioral modification.
the equation of instrumentarian power with totalitarianism impedes our understanding as well as our ability to resist, neutralize, and ultimately vanquish its potency. There is no historical precedent for instrumentarianism, but there is vivid precedent for this kind of encounter with an unprecedented new species of power.
Totalitarianism was bent on the reconstruction of the human species through the dual mechanisms of genocide and the “engineering of the soul.” Instrumentarian power, as we shall see, takes us in a sharply different direction. Surveillance capitalists have no interest in murder or the reformation of our souls. Although their aims are in many ways just as ambitious as those of totalitarian leaders, they are also utterly distinct.
Totalitarian power cannot succeed by remote control. Mere conformity is insufficient. Each individual inner life must be claimed and transformed by the perpetual threat of punishment without crime.
Instrumentarian power moves differently and toward an opposite horizon. Totalitarianism operated through the means of violence, but instrumentarian power operates through the means of behavioral modification,
It is profoundly and infinitely indifferent to our meanings and motives. Trained on measurable action, it only cares that whatever we do is accessible to its ever-evolving operations of rendition, calculation, modification, monetization, and control.
Totalitarianism was a political project that converged with economics to overwhelm society. Instrumentarianism is a market project that converges with the digital to achieve its own unique brand of social domination.
Although privacy advocates and many other critics of surveillance capitalism are quick to appropriate Orwellian language in the search for meaning and metaphor that capture the sense of new menace, surveillance capital’s instrumentarian power is best understood as the precise antithesis of Orwell’s Big Brother.
Big Brother is a panvasive consciousness that infects and possesses each individual soul, displacing all attachments once formed in romantic love and good fellowship. The essence of its operation is not simply that it knows every thought and feeling but rather the ruthless tenacity with which it aims to annihilate and replace unacceptable inward experience.
Skinner’s cure was different and unique: a utopia of technique that promised a future of social equality and dispassionate harmony founded on the viewpoint of the Other-One, the “organism among organisms,” as the object of “behavioral engineering.”
Instrumentarian power bends the new digital apparatus—continuous, autonomous, omnipresent, sensate, computational, actuating, networked, internet-enabled—to the interests of the surveillance capitalist project, finally fulfilling Skinner’s call for the “instruments and methods” of “a behavioral technology comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology.” The result is a panvasive means of behavioral modification whose economies of action are designed to maximize surveillance revenues.
surveillance capitalism’s behavioral market regime finally has at its disposal the instruments and methods that can impose Skinner’s technology of behavior across the varied domains of everyday life right down to our depths, now conceived as capital’s global laboratory.
Surveillance capitalism is the puppet master that imposes its will through the medium of the ubiquitous digital apparatus. I now name the apparatus Big Other: it is the sensate, computational, connected puppet that renders, monitors, computes, and modifies human behavior. Big Other combines these functions of knowing and doing to achieve a pervasive and unprecedented means of behavioral modification. Surveillance capitalism’s economic logic is directed through Big Other’s vast capabilities to produce instrumentarian power, replacing the engineering of souls with the engineering of behavior.
Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power reduces human experience to measurable observable behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of that experience. I call this new way of knowing radical indifference. It is a form of observation without witness
Instrumentarianism’s radical indifference is operationalized in Big Other’s dehumanized methods of evaluation that produce equivalence without equality. These methods reduce individuals to the lowest common denominator of sameness—an organism among organisms—despite all the vital ways in which we are not the same. From Big Other’s point of view we are strictly Other-Ones: organisms that behave.
Big Other does not care what we think, feel, or do as long as its millions, billions, and trillions of sensate, actuating, computational eyes and ears can observe, render, datafy, and instrumentalize the vast reservoirs of behavioral surplus that are generated in the galactic uproar of connection and communication.
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I think of elephants, that most majestic of all mammals: Big Other poaches our behavior for surplus and leaves behind all the meaning lodged in our bodies, our brains, and our beating hearts, not unlike the monstrous slaughter of elephants for ivory. Forget the cliché that if it’s free, “You are the product.” You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The “product” derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life.
Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power aims for a condition of certainty without terror in the form of “guaranteed outcomes.”
We may confuse Big Other with the behaviorist god of the vortex, but only because it effectively conceals the machinations of surveillance capital that are the wizard behind the digital curtain. The seductive voice crafted on the yonder side of this veil—Google, is that you?—gently nudges us along the path that coughs up the maximum of behavioral surplus and the closest approximation to certainty. Do not slumber in this opiated fog at the network’s edge. That knowing voice is underwritten by the aims and rules of the very place we once hoped to flee, with its commercialized rituals of competition, contempt, and humiliation. Take one wrong step, one deviation from the path of seamless frictionless predictability, and that same voice turns acid in an instant as it instructs “the vehicular monitoring system not to allow the car to be started.”
Our conformity is irrelevant to instrumentarianism’s success. There is no need for mass submission to social norms, no loss of self to the collective induced by terror and compulsion, no offers of acceptance and belonging as a reward for bending to the group. All of that is superseded by a digital order that thrives within things and bodies, transforming volition into reinforcement and action into conditioned response.
Power was once identified with the ownership of the means of production, but it is now identified with ownership of the means of behavioral modification that is Big Other.
It is in the nature of instrumentarian power to operate remotely and move in stealth. It does not grow through terror, murder, the suspension of democratic institutions, massacre, or expulsion. Instead, it grows through declaration, self-authorization, rhetorical misdirection, euphemism, and the quiet, audacious backstage moves specifically crafted to elude awareness as it replaces individual freedom with others’ knowledge and replaces society with certainty.
Unsurprisingly, instrumentarian power is consistently called into action as a solution, if not the solution, to the threat of terrorism. Acts of terror reject the authority of civilizational norms and reveal the impossibility of society without mutual trust. Governments now turn to instrumentarian power as the solution to this new source of societal uncertainty, demanding the certainty machines that promise direct, reliable means of detection, prediction, and even the automatic actuation of countermeasures.
as the Chinese government develops a comprehensive “social credit” system described by one China scholar as the “core” of China’s internet agenda. The aim is “to leverage the explosion of personal data… in order to improve citizens’ behavior.… Individuals and enterprises are to be scored on various aspects of their conduct—where you go, what you buy and who you know—and these scores will be integrated within a comprehensive database that not only links into government information, but also to data collected by private businesses.”28 The system tracks “good” and “bad” behavior across a variety of financial and social activities, automatically assigning punishments and rewards to decisively shape behavior toward “building sincerity” in economic, social, and political life: “The aim is for every Chinese citizen to be trailed by a file compiling data from public and private sources… searchable by fingerprints and other biometric characteristics.”29
In other words, the aim is to achieve guaranteed social rather than market outcomes using instrumentarian means of behavioral modification.
As Hawkins writes, “But rather than promoting the organic return of traditional morality to reduce the gulf of distrust, the Chinese government has preferred to invest its energy in technological fixes… and it’s being welcomed by a public fed up of not knowing who to trust… in part because there’s no alternative.”34 The Chinese government intends to commandeer instrumentarian power to replace a broken society with certain outcomes.
Totalitarianism seeks totality as a political condition and relies on violence to clear its path. Instrumentarianism seeks totality as a condition of market dominance, and it relies on its control over the division of learning in society, enabled and enforced by Big Other, to clear its path. The result is the application of instrumentarian power to societal optimization for the sake of market objectives: a utopia of certainty.
The machine zone achieves a sense of complete immersion that recalls Klein’s description of Facebook’s design principles—engrossing, immersive, immediate—and is associated with a loss of self-awareness, automatic behavior, and a total rhythmic absorption carried along on a wave of compulsion. Eventually, every aspect of casino machine design was geared to echo, enhance, and intensify the hunger for that subjective shift, but always in ways that elude the player’s awareness.
This is not a rehearsal. This is the show. Facebook is a prototype of instrumentarian society, not a prophecy. It is the first frontier of a new societal territory, and the youngest among us are its vanguard.
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The researchers conclude that participation in social media “is profoundly intertwined with the knowledge that information about our offline activities may be communicated online, and that the thought of displeasing ‘imagined audiences’ alters our ‘real-life’ behavior.”
Milgram identified three key themes in the subway experiment as he and his students debriefed their experiences. The first was a new sense of gravitas toward “the enormous inhibitory anxiety that ordinarily prevents us from breaching social norms.” Second was that the reactions of the “breacher” are not an expression of individual personality but rather are “a compelled playing out of the logic of social relations.” The intense “anxiety” that Milgram and others experienced in confronting a social norm “forms a powerful barrier that must be surmounted, whether one’s action is consequential—disobeying an authority—or trivial, asking for a seat on the subway.… Embarrassment and the fear of violating apparently trivial norms often lock us into intolerable predicaments.… These are not minor regulatory forces in social life, but basic ones.” Finally, Milgram understood that any confrontation of social norms crucially depends upon the ability to escape. It was not an adolescent who boarded the subway that day. Milgram was an erudite adult and an expert on human behavior, especially the mechanisms entailed in obedience to authority, social influence, and conformity. The subway was just an ordinary slice of life, not a capital-intensive architecture of surveillance and behavior modification, not a “personalized reward device.” Still, Milgram could not fight off the anxiety of the situation. The only thing that made it tolerable was the possibility of an exit.
Like the gamblers in their machine wombs, we are meant to fuse with the system and play to extinction: not the extinction of our funds but rather the extinction of our selves. Extinction is a design feature formalized in the conditions of no exit. The aim of the tuners is to contain us within “the power of immediate circumstances” as we are compelled by the “logic of social relations” in the hive to bow to social pressure exerted in calculated patterns that exploit our natural empathy. Continuously tightening feedback loops cut off the means of exit, creating impossible levels of anxiety that further drive the loops toward confluence. What is to be killed here is the inner impulse toward autonomy and the arduous, exciting elaboration of the autonomous self as a source of moral judgment and authority capable of asking for a subway seat or standing against rogue power.
According to Big Other’s architects, these walls must come down. There can be no refuge. The primal yen for nests and shells is kicked aside like so much detritus from a fusty human time. With Big Other, the universe takes up residence in our walls, no longer the sentinels of sanctuary. Now they are simply the coordinates for “smart” thermostats, security cameras, speakers, and light switches that extract and render our experience in order to actuate our behavior.
In the march of institutional interests intent on implementing Big Other, the very first citadel to fall is the most ancient: the principle of sanctuary. The sanctuary privilege has stood as an antidote to power since the beginning of the human story. Even in ancient societies where tyranny prevailed, the right of sanctuary stood as a fail-safe. There was an exit from totalizing power, and that exit was the entrance to a sanctuary in the form of a city, a community, or a temple.
In the modern era the sacredness, inviolability, and reverence that once attached to the law of asylum reemerged in constitutional protections and declarations of inalienable rights. English common law retained the idea of the castle as an inviolable fortress and translated that to the broader notion of “home,” a sanctuary free from arbitrary intrusion: unplunderable. The long thread of the sanctuary privilege reappeared in US jurisprudence. Writing in 1995, legal scholar Linda McClain argued that the equation of home with sanctuary has depended less on the sanctity of property rights than on a commitment to the “privacies of life.” As she observed, “There is a strong theme of a proper realm of inaccessibility or secrecy with respect to the world at large as well as a recognition of the important social dimension of such protected inner space.…”
Those who would eviscerate sanctuary are keen to take the offensive, putting us off guard with the guilt-inducing question “What have you got to hide?”
the crucial developmental challenges of the self-other balance cannot be negotiated adequately without the sanctity of “disconnected” time and space for the ripening of inward awareness and the possibility of reflexivity: reflection on and by oneself. The real psychological truth is this: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you are nothing.
Pedersen’s research identifies six categories of privacy behaviors: solitude, isolation, anonymity, reserve, intimacy with friends, and intimacy with family. His study shows that these varied behaviors accomplish a rich array of complex psychological “privacy functions” considered salient for psychological health and developmental success: contemplation, autonomy, rejuvenation, confiding, freedom, creativity, recovery, catharsis, and concealment. These are experiences without which we can neither flourish nor usefully contribute to our families, communities, and society.
In the absence of synthetic declarations that secure the road to a human future, the intolerability of glass life turns us toward a societal arms race of counter-declarations in which we search for and embrace increasingly complex ways to hide in our own lives, seeking respite from lawless machines and their masters.
In Hayek’s framing, the mystery of the market is that a great many people can behave effectively while remaining ignorant of the whole. Individuals not only can choose freely, but they must freely choose their own pursuits because there is no alternative, no source of total knowledge or conscious control to guide them. “Human design” is impossible, Hayek says, because the relevant information flows are “beyond the span of the control of any one mind.” The market dynamic makes it possible for people to operate in ignorance without “anyone having to tell them what to do.”3
Surveillance capitalism thus replaces mystery with certainty as it substitutes rendition, behavioral modification, and prediction for the old “unsurveyable pattern.” This is a fundamental reversal of the classic ideal of the “market” as intrinsically unknowable.
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The combination of knowledge and freedom works to accelerate the asymmetry of power between surveillance capitalists and the societies in which they operate. This cycle will be broken only when we acknowledge as citizens, as societies, and indeed as a civilization that surveillance capitalists know too much to qualify for freedom.
First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely on people as consumers. Instead, the axis of supply and demand orients the surveillance capitalist firm to businesses intent on anticipating the behavior 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.
The GM pattern is the iconic story of the United States in the twentieth century, before globalization, neoliberalism, the shareholder-value movement, and plutocracy unraveled the public corporation and the institutions of the double movement. Those institutions rationalized GM’s employment policies with fair labor practices, unionization, and collective bargaining, emblematic of stable reciprocities during the pre-globalization decades of the twentieth century.
outsource to hyperscale operations dramatically diminish any reliance on their societies as sources of employees, and the few for whom they do compete, as we have seen, are drawn from the most-rarefied strata of data science. The absence of organic reciprocities with people as either sources of consumers or employees is a matter of exceptional importance in light of the historical relationship between market capitalism and democracy. In fact, the origins of democracy in both America and Britain have been traced to these very reciprocities. In America the violation of consumer reciprocities awakened an unstoppable march toward liberty as economic power translated into political power. A half century later in Britain, a grudging, practical, self-interested respect for the necessary interdependence of capital and labor translated into new patterns of political power, expressed in the gradual expansion of the franchise and the nonviolent shift to more-inclusive democratic institutions.
Now the rise of instrumentarian power as the signature expression of surveillance capitalism augurs a different kind of extinction. This “seventh extinction” will not be of nature but of what has been held most precious in human nature: the will to will, the sanctity of the individual, the ties of intimacy, the sociality that binds us together in promises, and the trust they breed. The dying off of this human future will be just as unintended as any other.
When I speak to my children or an audience of young people, I try to alert them to the historically contingent nature of “the thing that has us” by calling attention to ordinary values and expectations before surveillance capitalism began its campaign of psychic numbing. “It is not OK to have to hide in your own life; it is not normal,” I tell them. “It is not OK to spend your lunchtime conversations comparing software that will camouflage you and protect you from continuous unwanted invasion.”
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I tell them that the word “search” has meant a daring existential journey, not a finger tap to already existing answers; that “friend” is an embodied mystery that can be forged only face-to-face and heart-to-heart; and that “recognition” is the glimmer of homecoming we experience in our beloved’s face, not “facial recognition.” I say that it is not OK to have our best instincts for connection, empathy, and information exploited by a draconian quid pro quo that holds these goods hostage to the pervasive strip search of our lives. It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance, and desire to be catalogued, manipulated, and then used to surreptitiously herd us through the future tense for the sake of someone else’s profit. “These things are brand-new,” I tell them. “They are unprecedented. You should not take them for granted because they are not OK.”
The decades of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now, when we recall the lordly “barons” of the late nineteenth century, we call them “robbers.”