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3.97 AVERAGE
3.97 AVERAGE
dark
informative
tense
slow-paced
challenging
informative
slow-paced
In Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of Power, the Harvard Business School Professor, outlines a new form of capitalist accumulation, one that she argues is wholly different from anything that came before. “Surveillance capitalism” builds on the early twentieth-century political economist Karl Polanyi’s notion of fictitious commodities. While Polanyi identified labor, land, and money as fictitious commodities, Zuboff argues that under “surveillance capitalism,” it is humans and their wants, behaviors, and desires that are appropriated and commodified under the banner of “behavioral surplus.” According to Zuboff, this “behavioral surplus” is then made into “prediction products” that anticipate and influence behavior, while being sold in the marketplace to a wide variety of companies and advertisers looking to sell their wares. The ultimate goal for surveillance capitalists, however, isn’t simply profiting off that surveillance, but using that surveillance to modify human behaviors in ways that create a totally predictable society.
To build on this thesis, Zuboff splits her book into three distinct parts. The first part lays the foundations of surveillance capitalism. Through this section Zuboff highlights a wide variety of important postulates about surveillance capitalism, most notably that this is something new and wholly different from the accumulation methods of industrial capitalism, and that it is working to restructure not only the marketplace and society as a whole, but the social relations structuring that society. Moreover, this section trains its focus on Google, the company that Zuboff claims is the “pioneer” of surveillance capitalism. It was Google, more than any of the other tech giants that developed innovative ways to mine data whether through their search engines, email services, or mapping services to use to sell to advertisers, making it one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Up until that discovery, Zuboff argued data was largely being used as a means to improve products and user experiences.
The second section of the book delves more into the theoretical dynamic of behavioral surplus accumulation, or the central operations and motives behind surveillance capitalism. It delves deeper into the technologies being developed that will make this economic strategy more ubiquitous, whether it is through wearable technology, or inundating all environments with a conglomeration of sensors that incorporate both real-time data collection and analysis. Such a process not only strengthens the grip of surveillance capitalism but more importantly dehumanizes individuals even more than they are under industrial capitalism. As Zuboff notes, under this realm, “the body is simply a set of coordinates in both time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable “it”” (211). What becomes even more disconcerting is that such processes are being structured into children’s products, including toys, thus socializing the next generation into this world. Zuboff notes “the children will learn first that there are no boundaries between self and market. Later they will wonder how it could have ever have been different” (267).
The third section moves from the market to the realm of politics and society itself, focusing on the power apparatus of surveillance capitalism. To Zuboff, surveillance capitalism brings with it a new form of power, which she calls “instrumentation.” Instrumentation operates its power through data collected through digital surveillance and creates nudges, rewards, and sanctions predicated on that data. The central goal here isn’t just to transform human behavior but to control, make knowable, and predict all forms of human behavior operating through each other within the context of society. Zuboff admits that such a scheme isn’t new, but its methods are. To highlight this, she compares it to the rise of totalitarianism in the early twentieth century. In terms of its similarities both totalitarianism and instrumentation were shocks to the system, wholly reorienting people to a new order. However, the similarities stop there. While totalitarianism, Zuboff notes “was bent on the reconstruction of the human species through the dual mechanisms of genocide and the “engineering of the soul,” (353) instrumentation is trained on making measurable action knowable and accessible “to its ever-evolving operations of rendition, calculation, modification, monetization, and control” (360). While totalitarianism found its roots in the authoritarian states of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, instrumentation finds its roots in the radical behaviorism of twentieth-century psychologists, most notably B.F. Skinner, and his successors, particularly the computer scientist and founder of the MIT Media Lab, Alex Pentland. Both Skinner and Pentland imagine the creation of a perfectly rational utopia developed through instrumentation, one whose all-knowing certainty does away with irrational behaviors, emotions, and even individual freedoms, as well as any escape or sanctuary from its all-powerful grasp.
Zuboff goes to lengths to showcase the unprecedented rise and power of surveillance capitalism and those companies and individuals that have shaped that rise and expansion. However, Zuboff continually repeats in the book that the ascent of these companies and the growing totality of surveillance capitalism isn’t inevitable. Building off many social scientists before her, Zuboff makes the claim that it isn’t technology that drives society but instead the opposite. The uses and abuses of technology are mediated through social relationships. Because of this fact, change and resistance are possible. While Zuboff doesn’t provide any concrete strategies for such change, she does show how different individuals and groups are attempting to resist, and she hopes that her book can be a starting point for developing more comprehensive methods.
Overall, I was extremely impressed with this book and the brief summary I provide above nowhere near covers the totality of what Zuboff packs into the totality of her book. I truly admire her attempt at creating a theoretical project geared toward the information society born out of the computer and digital revolution of the late twentieth century, and how she contextualizes not only within a particular historical context but also different schools of theoretical thought. That said, there were some parts I was hesitant to accept. First, is her claims made in the conclusion that older forms of capitalism were more democratic due to their reliance on reciprocity with consumers, which is a marked difference from surveillance capitalism that “no longer rely on people as consumers” (499). However, I question this view, considering the history of exploited and coerced workers throughout the different eras of capitalism. Second, I’m not wholly convinced of her claims that surveillance capitalism can totally be separated from older forms of capitalism like industrial capitalism. In making such a claim, Zuboff tends to discount the power industrial capitalism still holds and subsumes it under the realm of surveillance capitalism. While surveillance capitalism is creating an all-encompassing hold based on the power of information to make human behaviors, and society in general, more predictable, it still can’t directly produce or consume what is necessary to reproduce human life, namely food, shelter, clothing, etc.
In all, this is a book I will keep coming back to and diving more deeply into. I would definitely recommend it for those interested in social theory and where companies like Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Apple, and many more Silicon Valley companies fit into it.
To build on this thesis, Zuboff splits her book into three distinct parts. The first part lays the foundations of surveillance capitalism. Through this section Zuboff highlights a wide variety of important postulates about surveillance capitalism, most notably that this is something new and wholly different from the accumulation methods of industrial capitalism, and that it is working to restructure not only the marketplace and society as a whole, but the social relations structuring that society. Moreover, this section trains its focus on Google, the company that Zuboff claims is the “pioneer” of surveillance capitalism. It was Google, more than any of the other tech giants that developed innovative ways to mine data whether through their search engines, email services, or mapping services to use to sell to advertisers, making it one of the most valuable companies on the planet. Up until that discovery, Zuboff argued data was largely being used as a means to improve products and user experiences.
The second section of the book delves more into the theoretical dynamic of behavioral surplus accumulation, or the central operations and motives behind surveillance capitalism. It delves deeper into the technologies being developed that will make this economic strategy more ubiquitous, whether it is through wearable technology, or inundating all environments with a conglomeration of sensors that incorporate both real-time data collection and analysis. Such a process not only strengthens the grip of surveillance capitalism but more importantly dehumanizes individuals even more than they are under industrial capitalism. As Zuboff notes, under this realm, “the body is simply a set of coordinates in both time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable “it”” (211). What becomes even more disconcerting is that such processes are being structured into children’s products, including toys, thus socializing the next generation into this world. Zuboff notes “the children will learn first that there are no boundaries between self and market. Later they will wonder how it could have ever have been different” (267).
The third section moves from the market to the realm of politics and society itself, focusing on the power apparatus of surveillance capitalism. To Zuboff, surveillance capitalism brings with it a new form of power, which she calls “instrumentation.” Instrumentation operates its power through data collected through digital surveillance and creates nudges, rewards, and sanctions predicated on that data. The central goal here isn’t just to transform human behavior but to control, make knowable, and predict all forms of human behavior operating through each other within the context of society. Zuboff admits that such a scheme isn’t new, but its methods are. To highlight this, she compares it to the rise of totalitarianism in the early twentieth century. In terms of its similarities both totalitarianism and instrumentation were shocks to the system, wholly reorienting people to a new order. However, the similarities stop there. While totalitarianism, Zuboff notes “was bent on the reconstruction of the human species through the dual mechanisms of genocide and the “engineering of the soul,” (353) instrumentation is trained on making measurable action knowable and accessible “to its ever-evolving operations of rendition, calculation, modification, monetization, and control” (360). While totalitarianism found its roots in the authoritarian states of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler, instrumentation finds its roots in the radical behaviorism of twentieth-century psychologists, most notably B.F. Skinner, and his successors, particularly the computer scientist and founder of the MIT Media Lab, Alex Pentland. Both Skinner and Pentland imagine the creation of a perfectly rational utopia developed through instrumentation, one whose all-knowing certainty does away with irrational behaviors, emotions, and even individual freedoms, as well as any escape or sanctuary from its all-powerful grasp.
Zuboff goes to lengths to showcase the unprecedented rise and power of surveillance capitalism and those companies and individuals that have shaped that rise and expansion. However, Zuboff continually repeats in the book that the ascent of these companies and the growing totality of surveillance capitalism isn’t inevitable. Building off many social scientists before her, Zuboff makes the claim that it isn’t technology that drives society but instead the opposite. The uses and abuses of technology are mediated through social relationships. Because of this fact, change and resistance are possible. While Zuboff doesn’t provide any concrete strategies for such change, she does show how different individuals and groups are attempting to resist, and she hopes that her book can be a starting point for developing more comprehensive methods.
Overall, I was extremely impressed with this book and the brief summary I provide above nowhere near covers the totality of what Zuboff packs into the totality of her book. I truly admire her attempt at creating a theoretical project geared toward the information society born out of the computer and digital revolution of the late twentieth century, and how she contextualizes not only within a particular historical context but also different schools of theoretical thought. That said, there were some parts I was hesitant to accept. First, is her claims made in the conclusion that older forms of capitalism were more democratic due to their reliance on reciprocity with consumers, which is a marked difference from surveillance capitalism that “no longer rely on people as consumers” (499). However, I question this view, considering the history of exploited and coerced workers throughout the different eras of capitalism. Second, I’m not wholly convinced of her claims that surveillance capitalism can totally be separated from older forms of capitalism like industrial capitalism. In making such a claim, Zuboff tends to discount the power industrial capitalism still holds and subsumes it under the realm of surveillance capitalism. While surveillance capitalism is creating an all-encompassing hold based on the power of information to make human behaviors, and society in general, more predictable, it still can’t directly produce or consume what is necessary to reproduce human life, namely food, shelter, clothing, etc.
In all, this is a book I will keep coming back to and diving more deeply into. I would definitely recommend it for those interested in social theory and where companies like Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Apple, and many more Silicon Valley companies fit into it.
Too long, too repetitive, and too preachy, but still gets 5+ stars from me because Zuboff is so right and so important. Zuboff gets the economics, politics, and sociology of the surveillance capitalists 100% right and I was 100% disturbed. She is a canary in a coal mine for all of us.
i started this book 5 months ago when i was awakening to the fact that most of my deepest personal and collective anxieties are rooted in the feedback loop of rapidly developing tech and new market forms that were systematically targeting the weaknesses of my own self concept, existing social hierarchies, and democracy as a whole. i became somewhat obsessive about it as i was seeing the effects of this phenomenon everywhere but it wasn’t something that had ever been expressly named, analyzed, and critiqued on a personal and societal scale. this book was a perfect foundational text on the topic. its dense and definitely repetitive (-.5 stars) but explains the issues that have arisen from behavioral futures markets with a breadth i found extremely satisfying and with a healthy sense of urgency. zuboffs writing is pragmatic while maintaining an enjoyable reading experience with personal anecdotes and analogies that are beautifully constructed and arresting. i am very invested in the questions she poses but it still took me ages to get through. its sort of exhausting and easy to get cynical about but ultimately hopeful. naming a problem is the first step in addressing it. so if you really want to get into the history and theory and political implications of the tech companies that are directing our online experience and fundamentally tuning our experience of reality i recommend this book. but there are probably less academically intensive ways to go about it. (see how to do nothing: resisting the attention economy by jenny odell & amusing ourselves to death by neil postman)
One of the most important non-fiction books I've read so far, maybe up there with Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep or Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus. Very long, but worth (almost) every word.
An intricate economic framework and analysis of "data mining" capitalism, buried in prose that can charitably be described as turgid. Google and Facebook need not fear that this book will be widely disseminated.
I’m interested in the subject matter but this is a denser, more academic text than I can engage with right now. May revisit in the future.
When I've discussed current surveillance practices of online platforms (whether search or social media) with students, I often encounter an attitude of inevitability. This inevitability is somewhat frustrating for those of us barely old enough to remember a time before it felt this way, and I often end up agreeing with them because I too feel powerless at times. Inevitability is the first of several traits Zuboff identifies in the new social norms that clearly signalled to me how thorough her understanding and theorizing is of this new form of capitalism. The scope of this is impressive and warrants the 500+ pages (excluding notes and an exemplary index). I came of age while all of these historical moments came to pass, and I remember thinking, especially of Facebook, that it could have been radically different if the profit imperative weren't the driver...lol.
I plan to use parts of chapters from this (3,10,16) to supplement a syllabus on algorithms and bias for a first year seminar where we're reading nearly all of Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction. Though I find Zuboff's writing clear and accessible, I realize it's a stretch for college freshmen because there are marxist terms that her audience would most likely find familiar but a strictly general audience would not.
Most engaging theory on inequality leaves me renewed to get angry, find agency, and do something. Zuboff's book, especially those last two chapters, accomplished just that.
I plan to use parts of chapters from this (3,10,16) to supplement a syllabus on algorithms and bias for a first year seminar where we're reading nearly all of Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction. Though I find Zuboff's writing clear and accessible, I realize it's a stretch for college freshmen because there are marxist terms that her audience would most likely find familiar but a strictly general audience would not.
Most engaging theory on inequality leaves me renewed to get angry, find agency, and do something. Zuboff's book, especially those last two chapters, accomplished just that.
challenging
dark
informative
tense
slow-paced
This is an important read.