These developments reflect the simple truth that genuine economic reformation takes time and that the internet world, its investors and shareholders, were and are in a hurry. The credo of digital innovation quickly turned to the language of disruption and an obsession with speed, its campaigns conducted under the flag of “creative destruction.” That famous, fateful phrase coined by evolutionary economist Joseph Schumpeter was seized upon as a way to legitimate what Silicon Valley euphemistically calls “permissionless innovation.”77 Destruction rhetoric promoted what I think of as a “boys and their toys” theory of history, as if the winning hand in capitalism is about blowing things up with new technologies. Schumpeter’s analysis was, in fact, far more nuanced and complex than modern destruction rhetoric suggests.
Although Schumpeter regarded capitalism as an “evolutionary” process, he also considered that relatively few of its continuous innovations actually rise to the level of evolutionary significance. These rare events are what he called “mutations.” These are enduring, sustainable, qualitative shifts in the logic, understanding, and practice of capitalist accumulation, not random, temporary, or opportunistic reactions to circumstances. Schumpeter insisted that this evolutionary mechanism is triggered by new consumer needs, and alignment with those needs is the discipline that drives sustainable mutation: “The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.”78
If a mutation is to be reliably sustained, its new aims and practices must be translated into new institutional forms: “The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.” Note that Schumpeter says “creates,” not “destroys.” As an example of mutation, Schumpeter cites “the stages of organizational development from the craft shop to the factory to a complex corporation like U.S. Steel.…”79
Schumpeter understood creative destruction as one unfortunate by-product of a long and complex process of creative sustainable change. “Capitalism,” he wrote, “creates and destroys.” Schumpeter was adamant on this point: “Creative response shapes the whole course of subsequent events and their ‘long-run’ outcome.… Creative response changes social and economic situations for good.… This is why creative response is an essential element in the historical process: No deterministic credo avails against this.”80 Finally, and contrary to the rhetoric of Silicon Valley and its worship of speed, Schumpeter argued that genuine mutation demands patience: “We are dealing with a process whose every element takes considerable time in revealing its true features and ultimate effects.… We must judge its performance over time, as it unfolds through decades or centuries.”81
The significance of a “mutation” in Schumpeter’s reckoning implies a high threshold, one that is crossed in time through the serious work of inventing new institutional forms embedded in the new needs of new people. Relatively little destruction is creative, especially in the absence of a robust double movement. This is illustrated in Schumpeter’s example of US Steel, founded by some of the Gilded Age’s most notorious “robber barons,” including Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. Under pressure from an increasingly insistent double movement, US Steel eventually institutionalized fair labor practices through unions and collective bargaining as well as internal labor markets, career ladders, professional hierarchies, employment security, training, and development, all while implementing its technological advances in mass production.
Mutation is not a fairy tale; it is rational capitalism, bound in reciprocities with its populations through democratic institutions. Mutations fundamentally change the nature of capitalism by shifting it in the direction of those it is supposed to serve. This sort of thinking is not nearly as sexy or exciting as the “boys and their toys” gambit would have us think, but this is what it will take to move the dial of economic history beyond the collision and toward modernity.
VI. Surveillance Capitalism Fills the Void
A new breed of economic power swiftly filled the void in which every casual search, like, and click was claimed as an asset to be tracked, parsed, and monetized by some company, all within a decade of the iPod’s debut. It was as if a shark had been silently circling the depths all along, just below the surface of the action, only to occasionally leap glistening from the water in pursuit of a fresh bite of flesh. Eventually, companies began to explain these violations as the necessary quid pro quo for “free” internet services. Privacy, they said, was the price one must pay for the abundant rewards of information, connection, and other digital goods when, where, and how you want them. These explanations distracted us from the sea change that would rewrite the rules of capitalism and the digital world.
In retrospect, we can see that the many discordant challenges to users’ expectations were actually tiny peepholes into a rapidly emerging institutional form that was learning to exploit second-modernity needs and the established norms of “growth through exclusion” as the means to an utterly novel market project. Over time, the shark revealed itself as a rapidly multiplying, systemic, internally consistent new variant of information capitalism that had set its sights on domination. An unprecedented formulation of capitalism was elbowing its way into history: surveillance capitalism.
This new market form is a unique logic of accumulation in which surveillance is a foundational mechanism in the transformation of investment into profit. Its rapid rise, institutional elaboration, and significant expansion challenged the tentative promise of the inversion and its advocacy-oriented values. More generally, the rise of surveillance capitalism betrayed the hopes and expectations of many “netizens” who cherished the emancipatory promise of the networked milieu.82
Surveillance capitalism commandeered the wonders of the digital world to meet our needs for effective life, promising the magic of unlimited information and a thousand ways to anticipate our needs and ease the complexities of our harried lives. We welcomed it into our hearts and homes with our own rituals of hospitality. As we shall explore in detail throughout the coming chapters, thanks to surveillance capitalism the resources for effective life that we seek in the digital realm now come encumbered with a new breed of menace. Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. In the absence of a decisive societal response that constrains or outlaws this logic of accumulation, surveillance capitalism appears poised to become the dominant form of capitalism in our time.
How did this happen? It is a question that we shall return to throughout this book as we accumulate new insights and answers. For now we can recognize that over the centuries we have imagined threat in the form of state power. This left us wholly unprepared to defend ourselves from new companies with imaginative names run by young geniuses that seemed able to provide us with exactly what we yearn for at little or no cost. This new regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation. On this road, terms whose meanings we take to be positive or at least banal—“the open internet,” “interoperability,” and “connectivity”—have been quietly harnessed to a market process in which individuals are definitively cast as the means to others’ market ends.
Surveillance capitalism has taken root so quickly that, with the exception of a courageous cadre of legal scholars and technology-savvy activists, it has cunningly managed to evade our understanding and agreement. As we will discuss in more depth in Chapter 4, surveillance capitalism is inconceivable outside the digital milieu, but neoliberal ideology a
nd policy also provided the habitat in which surveillance capitalism could flourish. This ideology and its practical implementation bends second-modernity individuals to the draconian quid pro quo at the heart of surveillance capitalism’s logic of accumulation, in which information and connection are ransomed for the lucrative behavioral data that fund its immense growth and profits. Any effort to interrupt or dismantle surveillance capitalism will have to contend with this larger institutional landscape that protects and sustains its operations.
History offers no control groups, and we cannot say whether with different leadership, more time, or other altered circumstances Apple might have perceived, elaborated, and institutionalized the jewel in its crown as Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan had done in another era. Nor is that opportunity forever lost—far from it. We may yet see the founding of a new synthesis for a third modernity in which a genuine inversion and its social compact are institutionalized as principles of a new rational digital capitalism aligned with a society of individuals and supported by democratic institutions. The fact that Schumpeter reckoned the time line for such institutionalization in decades or even centuries lingers as a critical commentary on our larger story.
These developments are all the more dangerous because they cannot be reduced to known harms—monopoly, privacy—and therefore do not easily yield to known forms of combat. The new harms we face entail challenges to the sanctity of the individual, and chief among these challenges I count the elemental rights that bear on individual sovereignty, including the right to the future tense and the right to sanctuary. Each of these rights invokes claims to individual agency and personal autonomy as essential prerequisites to freedom of will and to the very concept of democratic order.
Right now, however, the extreme asymmetries of knowledge and power that have accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogate these elemental rights as our lives are unilaterally rendered as data, expropriated, and repurposed in new forms of social control, all of it in the service of others’ interests and in the absence of our awareness or means of combat. We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action—this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society—that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future. And while the work of these inventions awaits us, this mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.
On August 9, 2011, events ricocheted between two wildly different visions of a third modernity. One was based on the digital promise of democratized information in the context of individualized economic and social relations. The other reflected the harsh truths of mass exclusion and elite rule. But the lessons of that day had not yet been fully tallied when fresh answers—or, more modestly, the tenuous glimmers of answers as fragile as a newborn’s translucent skin—rose to the surface of the world’s attention gliding on scented ribbons of Spanish lavender and vanilla.
VII. For a Human Future
In the wee hours of August 9, 2011, eighteen-year-old Maria Elena Montes sat on the cool marble floor of her family’s century-old pastry shop in the El Raval section of Barcelona, nursing her cup of sweet café con leche, lulled by the sunrise scuffling of the pigeons in the plaza as she waited for her trays of rum-soaked gypsy cakes to set.
Pasteleria La Dulce occupied a cramped medieval building tucked into a tiny square on one of the few streets that had escaped both the wrecking ball and the influx of yuppie chic. The Montes family took care that the passing decades had no visible effect on their cherished bakery. Each morning they lovingly filled sparkling glass cases with crispy sugar-studded churros, delicate buñuelos fat with vanilla custard, tiny paper ramekins of strawberry flan, buttery mantecados, coiled ensaimadas drenched in powdered sugar, fluffy magdalenas, crunchy pestiños, and Great-Grandmother Montes’s special flaó, a cake made with fresh milk cheese laced with Spanish lavender, fennel, and mint. There were almond and blood-orange tarts prepared, according to Señora Montes, exactly as they had once been served to Queen Isabella. Olive-oil ice cream flavored with anise filled the tubs in the gleaming white freezer along the wall. An old ceiling fan cycled slowly, nudging the perfume of honey and yeast into every corner of the ageless room.
Only one thing had changed. Any other August would have found Maria Elena and her family at their summer cottage nestled into a pine grove near the seaside town of Palafrugell that had been the family’s refuge for generations. In 2011, however, neither the Montes nor their customers and friends would take their August holidays. The economic crisis had ripped through the country like the black plague, shrinking consumption and driving unemployment to 21 percent, the highest in the EU, and to an astonishing 46 percent among people under twenty-four years old. In Catalonia, the region that includes Barcelona, 18 percent of its 7.5 million people had fallen below the poverty line.83 In the summer of 2011, few could afford the simple pleasure of an August spent by the sea or in the mountains.
There was new pressure to sell the building and let the future finally swallow La Dulce. The family could live comfortably on the proceeds of such a sale, even at the bargain rates they would be forced to accept. Business was slow, but Señor Fito Montes refused to lay off any members of a staff that was like an extended family after years of steady employment. Just about everyone they knew said that the end was inevitable and that the Montes should leap at the opportunity for a dignified exit. But the family was determined to make every sacrifice to safeguard Pasteleria La Dulce for the future.
Just three months earlier, Juan Pablo and Maria had made the pilgrimage to Madrid to join thousands of protesters at the Puerta del Sol, where a month-long encampment established Los Indignados, the 15M, as the new voice of a people who had finally been pushed to the breaking point by the economics of contempt. All that was left to say was “Ya. No mas!” Enough already! The convergence of so many citizens in Madrid led to a wave of protests across the nation, and eventually those protests would give way to new political parties, including Podemos. Neighborhood assemblies had begun to convene in many cities, and the Montes had attended such a meeting in El Raval just the night before.
With the evening’s conversations still fresh, they gathered in the apartment above the shop in the early afternoon of August 9 to share their midday meal and discuss the fate of La Dulce, not quite certain what Papa Montes was thinking.
“The bankers may not know it,” Fito Montes reflected, “but the future will need the past. It will need these marble floors and the sweet taste of my gypsy cakes. They treat us like figures in a ledger, like they are reading the number of casualties in a plane crash. They believe the future belongs only to them. But we each have our story. We each have our life. It is up to us to proclaim our right to the future. The future is our home too.”
Maria and Juan Pablo breathed a shared sigh of relief as they outlined their plan. Juan Pablo would withdraw temporarily from his university studies, and Maria Elena would postpone her matriculation. They would work on expanding La Dulce’s sales with new home-delivery and catering options. Everyone would take a pay cut, but no one would have to leave. Everyone would tighten their belts, except the fat buñuelos and their perfect comrades steadfast in neat, delicious rows.
We know how to challenge the inevitable, they said. We’ve survived wars; we’ve survived the Fascists. We’ll survive again. For Fito Montes, his family’s right to anticipate the future as their home demanded continuity for some things that are elusive, beautiful, surprising, mysterious, inexpressible, and immaterial but without which, they all agreed, life would be mechanical and soulless. He was determined, for example, to ensure that another generation of Spanish children would recognize the bouquet of his blood-orange tarts flecked with rose petals and thus be awakened to the mystery of medieval life in the fragrant gardens of the Alhambra.
On August 9 the heat rose steadily in the shady square, and the sun em
ptied the avenues where Huns, Moors, Castilians, and Bourbons had each in their turn marched to triumph. Those silent streets bore little evidence of the historic deliberations in Madrid that would be featured in the New York Times that very day.84 But I imagine the two cities linked by invisible ribbons of scent rising from La Dulce high into the bleached Barcelona sky and drifting slowly south and west to settle along the austere facade of the building that housed the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, where another struggle for the right to the future tense was underway.
The Spanish Data Protection Agency had chosen to champion the claims of ninety ordinary citizens who, like the Montes family, were determined to preserve inherited meaning for a world bent on change at the speed of light.85 In the name of “the right to be forgotten,” the Spaniards had stepped into the bullring brandishing red capes, resolved to master the fiercest bull of all: Google, the juggernaut of surveillance capitalism. When the agency ordered the internet firm to stop indexing the contested links of these ninety individuals, the bull received one of its first and most significant blows.
This official confrontation drew upon the same tenacity, determination, and sentiment that sustained the Montes family and millions of other Spaniards compelled to claw back the future from the self-proclaimed inevitability of indifferent capital. In the assertion of a right to be forgotten, the complexity of human existence, with its thousand million shades of gray, was pitted against surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives that produced the relentless drive to extract and retain information. It was there, in Spain, that the right to the future tense was on the move, insisting that the operations of surveillance capitalism and its digital architecture are not, never were, and never would be inevitable. Instead, the opposition asserted that even Google’s capitalism was made by humans to be unmade and remade by democratic processes, not commercial decree. Google’s was not to be the last word on the human or the digital future.
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