The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

  Skinner imagined technologies that would pervasively institutionalize the viewpoint of the Other-One as they observed, computed, analyzed, and automatically reinforced behavior to accomplish the “vast changes” that he believed were necessary. In this way the laws of human action would finally be illuminated so that behavior could be effectively predicted and shaped, just as other technologies had enabled physics and biology to change the world: “The difference is that the instruments and methods they use are of commensurate complexity. The fact that equally powerful instruments and methods are not available in the field of human behavior is not an explanation; it is only part of the puzzle.”60

  Skinner concluded that the literature of freedom and dignity “stands in the way of further human achievement.”61 He argued that the missing puzzle piece holding back the urgent development of the “instruments and methods” essential for a technology of behavior was the stubborn allegiance to these antique notions among people determined to preserve “due credit” for their actions. The belief in “autonomous man” is a regressive source of resistance to a rational future, an “alternative explanation of behavior” that obstructs the advancement of society.

  The professor believed that humanity desperately needed a plan, and he imagined powerful new instruments that could engineer behavior in every domain. As early as 1953, he anticipated today’s digitally engineered casino environments, whose sophistication in the precise shaping of gamblers’ behavior has made them a testing ground for state security agencies and surveillance capitalists alike:62 “But with proper instrumentation it should be possible to improve upon established practices in all these fields. Thus gambling devices could be ‘improved’—from the point of view of the proprietor—by introducing devices which would pay off on a variable-interval basis, but only when the rate of play is exceptionally high.”63

  Technologies of behavioral engineering would not be restricted to “devices” but would also encompass organizational systems and procedures designed to shape behavior toward specific ends. In 1953 Skinner anticipated innovations such as Michael Jensen’s incentive systems designed to maximize shareholder value and the “choice architectures” of behavioral economics designed to “nudge” behavior along a preferred path: “Schedules of pay in industry, salesmanship, and the professions, and the use of bonuses, incentive wages, and so on, could also be improved from the point of view of generating maximal productivity.”64

  Skinner understood that the engineering of behavior risked violating individual sensibilities and social norms, especially concerns about privacy. In order to allay these anxieties he advised that observation must be unobtrusive, ideally remaining outside the awareness of the organism: “Behavior may also be observed with a minimum of interaction between subject and scientist, and this is the case with which one naturally tries to begin.”65 But there would be challenges. New technologies of behavior would have to continually push the envelope of the public-private divide in order to access all the data relevant to behavioral prediction and control. In this he anticipated today’s rendition frontier as new detection systems plumb the depths of personalities and emotions: “But we are still faced with events which occur at the private level and which are important to the organism without instrumental amplification. How the organism reacts to these events will remain an important question, even though the events may some day be made accessible to everyone.”66

  Such conflicts would be resolved, Skinner reckoned, by the gradual retreat of privacy norms as they fall to the advance of knowledge: “The line between public and private is not fixed.” Like today’s surveillance capitalists, he was confident that the slow drip of technological invention would eventually push privacy to the margins of human experience, where it would join “freedom” and other troublesome illusions. All these would be replaced by the viewpoint of the Other-One embodied in new instruments and methods: “The boundary shifts with every discovery of a technique for making private events public.… The problem of privacy may, therefore, eventually be solved by technical advances.”67

  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. We now turn to this stark contrast, most vividly represented in the distinct conceptions of utopia that attach to each of these two species of power.

  VII. Two Utopias

  In the blood-soaked wake of World War II, both Skinner and the journalist and novelist George Orwell aimed curative, “utopian” novels at the mayhem of modernity’s diminished prospects produced by an incomprehensible scale of violence. Viewed from a distance, Skinner’s Walden Two, published in 1948, and Orwell’s 1984, released the following year, had much in common. Each elaborated a complete conception of a distinct logic of power, each imagined a society defined by the full flourishing of that power, and each was utopian from the point of view of the form of power that it described.68 However, their public reception could not have been more different: Walden Two was dismissed as a dystopian nightmare and ignored by the general public for more than a decade.69 Orwell’s 1984 was immediately canonized as a dystopian masterpiece and the distillation of the twentieth century’s worst nightmares.

  The two utopias have often been confused with each other in their content and aims: Time magazine’s 1971 cover story on Skinner described Walden Two as raising “the specter of a 1984 Orwellian society that might really come to pass.” The great historian and literary critic Lewis Mumford once described Walden Two as a “totalitarian utopia” and a depiction of “hell,” but in fact these characterizations are a persistent and, as we shall see, dangerous confusion. Although both books have been described as depictions of totalitarianism, the forms of power that each describes are profoundly different. In most respects, they are precise opposites.

  Meyer’s prescription for modernity was founded on the scientific objectification of human experience and its reduction to observable measurable behavior. If we take that as our benchmark here, then Orwell’s utopia is the “before” case; it precedes Meyer as a nightmare of the prescientific compulsion to dominate the soul. Skinner’s utopia is “after” Meyer’s reimagining of modernity, as channeled from the great physicist, Planck. Walden Two is built on Meyer’s scientific viewpoint of observation, the Other-One, and represents the full flower of Meyer’s hope for a scientifically induced global harmony of organisms in which freedom is necessarily forfeit to knowledge. Orwell laid bare the disease, and Skinner asserted the antidote.

  The totalitarian power elaborated in 1984 is something wholly unprecedented, concocted in the twentieth century from the collision of industrialism and despair, a form utterly new to the human story. Orwell did more than simply fictionalize and extrapolate the totalitarian project. He sounded an alert by drawing a terrifying line of consequence from the recent German past and persistent Soviet present to an imagined but all-too-possible future. His genius was to craft a story that embodied totalitarianism’s essence: the ruthless insistence upon the absolute possession of each individual human being, not as a distant other known only by its behavior, but rather from the inside out.

  Big Brother’s vigilance is not restricted to the grand continents of armies and statecraft or the observable flows of bodies and crowds. 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. “We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission,” the cunning henchman O’Brien tells the rebellious Winston:

  We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back.… When finally you surrender to
us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.… We bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him.70

  Ultimately, as every reader knows, Winston’s stubborn soul is successfully “engineered.” Orwell’s chilling final passages fulfill the life of that dry seed planted at the turn of the century in Italy’s impoverished soil and nourished by war, deprivation, and humiliation to flower in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the apocalypse of Stalin’s Russia, finally to bear fruit in Orwell’s imagination: a testament for all time to what Mussolini had called the “ferocious totalitarian will” and the souls on which it feeds. Winston basks in serene elation, “his soul white as snow.… He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”71

  In contrast, Walden Two was not intended as a warning but rather as the antidote to totalitarianism and, more broadly, a practical recipe for the challenges of rebuilding Western societies after the war. Skinner understood his utopia as a methodological cure for the nightmare of crushed souls, a cure that, he insisted, was superior to any of the conventional political, economic, or spiritual remedies on offer. He scoffed at the notion that “democracy” held the solution because it is a political system that merely perpetrates the illusion of freedom while impeding the dominion of science. The promise of the “free market” as the curative for postwar society was an equally empty dream, he believed, because it rewards destructive competitiveness between people and classes. Skinner also rejected existentialism’s new humanism, seeing it as a breeding ground for passivity, and he regarded religion as the worst cure of all, enshrining ignorance and crippling the advance of science.

  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.” It is the future of Meyer’s dreams, in which Frazier, the founder-leader of the fictional Walden Two and Skinner’s outspoken avatar, describes that ideal community as a “superorganism” that can be shaped and controlled “as smoothly and efficiently as champion football teams.”72

  Skinner’s utopia was meant to illustrate the possibility of a successful social order that transcends the use of force and rejects the need to dominate human souls. The Walden Two community equally disdains the practices of democratic politics and representative government. Its laws are derived from a science of human behavior, specifically Skinner’s own radical behaviorism, founded on the physicist’s ideal of the Other-One. His utopia was a vehicle for other ambitions as well, intended to illustrate the behavioral solutions that are essential for improvement in every domain of modern life: the nuclear threat, pollution, population control, urban growth, economic equality, crime, education, health care, the development of the individual, effective leisure. It aimed to cultivate “the good life,” for which all the ideals of a liberal society—freedom, autonomy, privacy, a people’s right to self-rule—must be forfeit.

  Walden Two’s fictional format provided the cover that Skinner needed to extrapolate from Meyer’s methodological principles of otherness and his own research on animal behavior to a utopian community in which behavior has replaced the human spirit as the locus of control. Frazier laments that people “have been kept in their places,” not just by external forces, “but much more subtly by a system of beliefs implanted within their skins. It’s sometimes an almost hopeless task to take the shackles off their souls, but it can be done.… You can’t in the long run enforce anything. We don’t use force! All we need is adequate behavioral engineering.”73

  These two utopias reflect two distinct species of power, and each novel was intent on rescuing the future from the twentieth-century nightmare of the soul. Orwell was able to draw on the recent past, but Skinner imagined a future that he would not live long enough to enjoy. If surveillance capitalism and its instrumentarian power continue to flourish, then it is we who may see the Walden Two vision realized, as freedom falls to others’ knowledge—but now in the service of others’ wealth and power.

  Skinner’s vision is brought to life in the relentless pursuit of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives and the ubiquitous digital apparatus that surveillance capitalism creates and harnesses to its novel aims. 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.

  Until the rise of surveillance capitalism, the prospect of instrumentarian power was relegated to a gauzy world of dream and delusion. This new species of power follows the logic of Planck, Meyer, and Skinner in the forfeit of freedom for knowledge, but those scientists each failed to anticipate the actual terms of this surrender. The knowledge that now displaces our freedom is proprietary. The knowledge is theirs, but the lost freedom belongs solely to us.

  With this origin story in hand, Chapter 13 turns to a close examination of instrumentarian power as it inscribes a sharp new asymmetry on the human community: the knowledge to which we sacrifice our freedom is constructed to advance surveillance capitalists’ commercial interests, not our own. This is a stark departure from the technical origins of the apparatus in MacKay’s principles of telemetry, which traded animals’ freedom for the sake of scientific knowledge intended to benefit the animals themselves. Instead, 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  BIG OTHER AND THE RISE OF INSTRUMENTARIAN POWER

  He was their servant (some say he was blind),

  Who moved among their faces and their things:

  Their feeling gathered in him like a wind

  And sang. They cried “It is a God that sings.”

  —W. H. AUDEN

  SONNETS FROM CHINA, VII

  I. Instrumentarianism as a New Species of Power

  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.

  Instrumentarian power cultivates an unusual “way of knowing” that combines the “formal indifference” of the neoliberal worldview with the observational perspective of radical behaviorism (see Figure 4 here). 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 that yields the obverse of an intimate violent political religion and bears an utterly different signature of havoc: the remote and abstracted contempt of impenetrably complex systems and the interests that author them, carrying individuals on a fast-moving current to the fulfillment of others’ ends. What passes for social relations and economic exchange now occurs across the medium of this robotized veil of abstraction.

  Instrumentarianism’s radical indifferenc
e 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 encodes the viewpoint of the Other-One as a global presence. There is no brother here of any kind, big or little, evil or good; there are no family ties, however grim. There is no relationship between Big Other and its otherized objects, just as there was no relationship between B. F. Skinner’s “scientists and subjects.” There is no domination of the soul that displaces all intimacy and attachment with terror—far better to let a multitude of relationships bloom. 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.

  In this new regime, objectification is the moral milieu in which our lives unfold. Although Big Other can mimic intimacy through the tireless devotion of the One Voice—Amazon-Alexa’s chirpy service, Google Assistant’s reminders and endless information—do not mistake these soothing sounds for anything other than the exploitation of your needs. 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.