The Age of Surveillance Capitalism quote dump
Last year, across a couple of months, I read Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. It's one of the best books I've read in years and put words to a lot of things that have been nagging at the back of my head ever since I started thinking consciously about this particular awful technological age we've entered. I regret not taking better notes to make this a more coherent post, so I'm just going to post some quotes I pulled that made me think. (Page numbers from the paperback edition, ISBN 9781541758001. It will bug me if I don't clarify this.)
Surveillance capitalism's products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the "hooks" that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others' ends. We are not surveillance capitalism's "customers." Although the saying tells us, "If it's free, then you are the product," that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism's crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism's actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.
This logic turns ordinary life into the daily renewal of a twenty-first-century Faustian compact. "Faustian because it is nearly impossible to tear ourselves away, despite the fact that what we must give in return will destroy life as we have known it. 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 incursion. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined and modified. It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate like defense mechanisms ("I have nothing to hide"), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness. In this way, surveillance capitalism imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first-century individuals should not have to make, and its normalization leaves us singing in our chains. (11)
The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading. In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed, as decision rights over privacy are claimed for surveillance capital. Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism. Google discovered this necessary element of the new logic of accumulation: it must assert the rights to take the information upon which its success depends. (90)
On the strength of its unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power, surveillance capitalism achieves dominance over the division of learning in society — the axial principle of social order in an information civilization. […] Any consideration of the division of learning must resolves these dilemmas expressed in three essential questions. The first question is "Who knows?" This is a question about the distribution of knowledge and whether one is included or excluded from the opportunity to learn. The second question is "Who decides?" This is a question about authority: which people, institutions, or processes determine who is included in learning, what they are able to learn, and how they are able to act on their knowledge. What is the legitimate basis of that authority? The third question is "Who decides who decides?" This is question about power. What is the source of power that undergirds the authority to share or withhold knowledge? (180)
Google rendered the Earth, its streets and its dwelling places, bypassing our consent and defying our protests. Facebook rendered the social network and its limitless details for the sake of the company's behavioral futures markets. Now the ubiquitous apparatus is the means to the ubiquitous rendition of human experience. We have seen the urgency with which surveillance capitalists pursue the elimination of "friction" as a critical success factor in supply operations. The prediction imperative makes boundaries and borders intolerable, and surveillance capitalists will do almost anything to eliminate them. This pursuit transforms "connection" into a commercial imperative and transforms individual autonomy into a threat to surveillance revenues. (240)
Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, individuals do not render their experience out of choice or obligation but rather out of ignorance and the dictatorship of no alternatives. (252)
Individual awareness is the enemy of telestimulation because it is the necessary condition for the mobilization of cognitive and existential resources. There is no autonomous judgement without awareness. Agreement and disagreement, participation and withdrawal, resistance or collaboration: none of these self-regulating choices can exist without awareness. […]
The capacity for self-determination is understood as an essential foundation for many of the behaviors that we associate with critical capabilities such as empathy, volition, reflection, personal development, authenticity, integrity, learning, goal accomplishment, impulse control, creativity, and the sustenance of intimate enduring relationships. "Implicit in this process is a self that sets goals and standards, is aware of its own thoughts and behaviors, and has the capacity to change them," write Ohio State University professor Dylan Wagner and Dartmouth professor Todd Heatherton in an essay about the centrality of self-awareness to self-determination: "Indeed, some theorists have suggested that the primary purpose of self-awareness is to enable self-regulation." Every threat to human autonomy begins with an assault on awareness, "tearing down our capacity to regulate our thoughts, emotions, and desires."
The salience of self-awareness as a bulwark against self-regulatory failure is also underscored in the work of two Cambridge University researchers who developed a scale to measure a person's "susceptibility to persuasion." They found that the single most important determinant of one's ability to resist persuasion is what they call "the ability to premeditate". This means that people who harness self-awareness to think though the consequences of their actions are more disposed to chart their own course and are significantly less vulnerable to persuasion techniques. Self-awareness also figures in the second-highest-ranking factor on their scale: commitment. People who are consciously committed to a course of action or set of principles are less likely to be persuaded to do something that violates that commitment. (307)
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. […] I suggest that we now face the moment in history when the elemental "right to the future tense" is endangered by a panvasive digital architecture of behavior modification owned and operated by surveillance capital, necessitated by its economic imperatives, and driven by its laws of motion, all for the sake of its guaranteed outcomes. (331)
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. [...] By positing our lives together as already failed, [the uncontract] justifies coercive intervention for the sake of certainty. [...] Human replenishment from the failures and triumphs of choosing the future in the face of uncertainty gives way to the blankness of perpetual compliance.
[…]
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. (336)
Under surveillance capitalism, the "means of production" serves the "means of behavioral modification." Machine processes replace human relationships so that certainty can replace trust. (351)
Thanks to Big Other's capabilities, instrumentarian power aims for a condition of certainty without terror in the form of "guaranteed outcomes." Because it does not claim our bodies for some grotesque regime of pain and murder, we are prone to undervalue its effects and lower our guard. Instead of death, torture, reeducation, or conversion, instrumentarianism effectively exiles us from our own behavior. (378)
The velocity of instrumentarian society leaves us no time to get our bearings, and that speed is repurposed here as a moral imperative demanding that we relinquish individual agency to the automated systems that can keep up the pace in order to quickly perceive and impose correct answers for the greater good. There is no room for politics in this instrumentarian society because politics means establishing and asserting our bearings. Individual moral and political bearings are a source of friction that wastes precious time and diverts behavior from confluence. (434)
Self-determination and autonomous moral judgement, generally regarded as the bulwark of civilization, are recast as a threat to collective well-being. Social pressure, well-known to psychologists for its dangerous production of obedience and conformity, is elevated to the highest good as the means to extinguish the unpredictable influences of autonomous thought and moral judgement. (444)
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?" But as we have seen, 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. (479)
Surveillance capitalism's antidemocratic and antiegalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above. It is not a coup d'etat in the classic sense but rather a coup de gens: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse that is Big Other. (513)
Instead of violence directed at our bodies, the instrumentarian third modernity operates more like a taming. Its solution to the increasingly clamorous demands for effective life pivots on the gradual elimination of chaos, uncertainty, conflict, abnormality, and discord in favor of predictability, automatic regularity, transparency, confluence, persuasion, and pacification. (515)
I reject inevitability, and it is my hope that as a result of our journey together, you will too. We are at the beginning of this story, not the end. […] Whatever has gone wrong, the responsibility to right it is renewed with each generation. (522)
These quotes might make no sense out of context. I highly recommend reading the book; it's enlightening, and a long read but not a hard one.
What strikes me as I copy these down is that recurring theme that human assertion of humanity is what is most important at this moment in time. The things we are trained (especially for Americans with money) to find unpleasant, to avoid if possible, or to turn our eyes away from, are the exact things that we need to be doing: engaging with discomfort, actively choosing friction over ease, looking at the easy life we've been sold and deciding to do something different for, maybe, no other reason than because it is hard, and the ability to choose intention over instinct is what separates us from the animals. I read this months ago now and I remember being mildly frustrated by Zuboff's conclusion, because that is really where she ends. She doesn't lay out a plan for beating surveillance capitalism or tell us "this is what we must do to fix things" or anything that reassuringly concrete. The conclusion of the book is an oddly optimistic expression of faith in the human spirit. If we solve anything, if we save ourselves and each other, that human spirit will be why; and simultaneously, as long as there are people there will be people trying to solve things and save ourselves and each other, and therefore we will never be without that human spirit. I do think that's true. We are never going to reach a point in history where every person in the world is lazy or evil or acquiescent. People will always be fighting somewhere as long as there are people. The desire for a simple solution to an infinitely complex problem is exactly what she's warning against. That's what they're trying to sell us; that's what we have to say no to. We won't fix the world tomorrow; we will be fixing it forever. That's the point. That's not hopeless. That's hope.