ZUBOFF, Shoshana

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance capitalism is not technology; it is a logic that imbues technology and commands it into action….That surveillance capitalism is a logic in action and not a technology is a vital point because surveillance capitalists want us to think that their practices are inevitable expressions of the technologies they employ….We cannot evaluate the current trajectory of information civilization without a clear appreciation that technology is not and never can be a thing in itself, isolated from economics and society. This means that technological inevitability does not exist. Technologies are always economic means, not ends in themselves

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Consider that the internet has become essential for social participation, that the internet is now saturated with commerce, and that commerce is now subordinated to surveillance capitalism. Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified.

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Surveillance capitalism’s ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts. Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organisation and presentation of the world’s information. One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks.

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The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product or service as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying. Where you might least expect it, products of every sort are remade by the new economic requirements of connection and rendition. Each is reimagined as a gateway to the new apparatus, praised for being ‘smart’ while traditional alternatives are reviled for remaining ‘dumb’. It is important to acknowledge that in this context, ‘smart’ is euphemism for rendition: intelligence that is designed to render some tiny corner of lived experience as behavioural data. Each smart object is a kind of marionette; for all its ‘smartness’, it remains a hapless puppet dancing to the puppet master’s hidden economic imperatives.

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Totalitarianism operated through the means of violence, but instrumentarian power operates through the means of behavioural modification, and this is where our focus must shift. Instrumentarian power has no interest in our souls or any principle to instruct. There is no training or transformation for spiritual salvation, no ideology against which to judge our actions. [...] It is profoundly 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, monetisation, 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.

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