The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

  These new architectures feed on our fellow feeling to exploit and ultimately to suffocate the individually sensed inwardness that is the wellspring of personal autonomy and moral judgment, the first-person voice, the will to will, and the sense of an inalienable right to the future tense. That we vibrate to one another should be a life-enhancing fact, but this third modernity amplifies our mutual vibration to an excruciating pitch. In the milieu of total instrumentation, it is less that we resonate to one another’s presence and more that we drown in its inescapability.

  Instrumentarianism reimagines society as a hive to be monitored and tuned for guaranteed outcomes, but this tells us nothing of the lived experience of its members. What are the consequences of life lived in the hive, where one is perceived as an “other” to the surveillance capitalists, designers, and tuners who impose their instruments and methods? How and when do we each become an organism among organisms to ourselves and to one another, and with what result? The answers to these questions are not all guesswork. We can begin by asking our children. Without knowing it, we sent the least formed and most vulnerable among us to scout the hive and settle its wilderness. Now their messages are filtering in from the frontier.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  OF LIFE IN THE HIVE

  All grew so fast his life was overgrown,

  Till he forgot what all had once been made for:

  He gathered into crowds but was alone…

  —W. H. AUDEN

  SONNETS FROM CHINA, VIII

  I. Our Canaries in the Coal Mine

  “I felt so lonely… I could not sleep well without sharing or connecting to others,” a Chinese girl recalled. “Emptiness,” an Argentine boy moaned. “Emptiness overwhelms me.” A Ugandan teenager muttered, “I felt like there was a problem with me,” and an American college student whimpered, “I went into absolute panic mode.” These are but a few of the lamentations plucked from one thousand student participants in an international study of media use that spanned ten countries and five continents. They had been asked to abstain from all digital media for a mere twenty-four hours, and the experience released a planet-wide gnashing of teeth and tearing of flesh that even the study’s directors found disquieting.1 Capping the collective cri de coeur, a Slovakian university student reflected, “Maybe it is unhealthy that I can’t be without knowing what people are saying and feeling, where they are, and what’s happening.”

  The students’ accounts are a message in a bottle for the rest of us, narrating the mental and emotional milieu of life in an instrumentarian society with its architectures of behavioral control, social pressure, and asymmetrical power. Most significantly, our children are harbingers of the emotional toll of the viewpoint of the Other-One as young people find themselves immersed in a hive life, where the other is an “it” to me, and I experience myself as the “it” that others see. These messages offer a glimpse of the instrumentarian future, like the scenes revealed by Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. So shaken was Scrooge by his glimpse of bitter destiny that he devoted the remainder of his life to altering its course. What will we do?

  The question hangs over this chapter. Pentland celebrates Facebook as the perfect milieu for effective social pressure and tuning. In the sections that follow, we explore the mechanisms that Pentland admires. Why is it so difficult for young people to unplug? What are the consequences of that attachment for them and for all of us? Facebook has learned to bite hard on the psychological needs of young people, creating new challenges for the developmental processes that build individual identity and personal autonomy. The effects of these challenges are already evident in a parade of studies that document the emotional toll of social media on young people. As we shall see, the hive and its larger architecture of Big Other plunge us into an intolerable world of “no exit.”

  The international “unplug” study helps to set the stage, for it reveals a range of emotional anguish summarized in six categories: addiction, failure to unplug, boredom, confusion, distress, and isolation. The students’ sudden disconnection from the network produced the kinds of cravings, depression, and anxiety that are characteristic of clinically diagnosed addictions. The result was that a majority in every country admitted that they could not last out the day unplugged. Their angst was compounded by the same Faustian pact with which we are all too familiar, as they discovered that nearly all daily logistical, communicative, and informational requirements were dependent upon their connected devices: “Meeting with friends became difficult or impossible, finding the way to a destination without an online map or access to the internet became a problem, and simply organizing an evening at home became a challenge.” Worse yet, the students found it impossible to imagine even casual social participation without social media, especially Facebook: “Increasingly no young person who wants a social life can afford not to be active on the site, and being active on the site means living one’s life on the site.”

  Business and tech analysts cite “network effects” as a structural source of Facebook’s dominance in social media, but those effects initially derived from the demand characteristics of adolescents and emerging adults, reflecting the peer orientation of their age and stage. Indeed, Facebook’s early advantage in this work arose in no small measure from the simple fact that its founders and original designers were themselves adolescents and emerging adults. They designed practices for an imagined universe of adolescent users and college students, and those practices were later institutionalized for the rest of us, reducing the social world to a tally of “friends” who are not friends and “likes” that provide a continuous ticker tape of one’s value on the social market, stoking the anxieties of pre-adulthood and anticipating the mesmerizing social disciplines of the hive.2

  The researchers concluded that their global study of students had “ripped back the curtain” on the loneliness and acute disorientation that overwhelm young people when faced with disconnection from social media. It wasn’t simply that they didn’t know what to do with themselves but rather that “they had problems articulating what they were feeling or even who they were if they couldn’t connect.” The students felt as though “they had lost part of themselves.”3

  These feelings of disorientation and isolation suggest a psychological dependency on the “others,” and additional studies only deepen our understanding of how “Generation Z,” the demographic cohort born in and after 1996—the first group of digital natives, with no memory of life before the rise of surveillance capitalism—relies on a range of social media for psychological sustenance as they bounce between four or five platforms more or less simultaneously. Consider first the older cohorts. A 2012 survey concluded that emerging adults devote more time to using media than any other daily activity, spending nearly twelve hours each day with media of some form.4 By 2018 Pew Research reported that nearly 40 percent of young people ages 18–29 report being online “almost constantly,” as do 36 percent of those ages 30–49. Generation Z intensifies the trend: 95 percent use smartphones, and 45 percent of teens say they are online “on a near-constant basis.”5 If that is how you spend your days and nights, then the findings of a 2016 study are all too logical, as 42 percent of teenage respondents said that social media affects how people see them, having adopted what the researchers call an outside-looking-in approach to how they express themselves. Their dependency penetrates deeply into their sense of well-being, affecting how they feel about themselves (42 percent) and their happiness (37 percent).6

  In a subsequent elaboration on the psychological consequences of experiencing oneself from the “outside looking in,” a 2017 survey of young British women ages 11–21 suggests that the social principles of instrumentarian society, so enthusiastically elaborated by Pentland and endorsed by surveillance capitalist leaders, appear to be working effectively.7 Thirty-five percent of the women said that their biggest worry online was comparing themselves and their lives with others as they are drawn into “constant comparisons with often ide
alized versions of the lives, and bodies, of others.”8

  A director of the project observed that even the youngest girls in this cohort feel pressured to create a “personal brand,” the ultimate in self-objectification, as they seek reassurance “in the form of likes and shares.” When the Guardian tried to explore girls’ reflections on these survey findings, the responses eloquently betray the plight of the organism among organisms. “I do feel I need to be perfect and compare myself to others all the time,” says one. “You see other people’s lives and what they are doing… you… see their ‘perfect’ lives and it makes you think yours isn’t,” says another.9

  In light of these findings, one UK medical specialist comments on the young people in her practice: “People are growing up to want to be influencers and that is now a job role.… I am not sure if parents are fully aware of the pressure people face.…”10 Indeed, only 12 percent of respondents in that 2017 survey reckoned that their parents understood these pressures. The reports confirm that social pressure is well institutionalized as the means of online social influence, but contrary to Pentland’s belief that “class” divisions would disappear, life in the hive produces new cleavages and forms of stratification: not only tune or be tuned but also pressure or be pressured.

  Nothing summarizes young life in the hive better than the insights of Facebook’s own North American marketing director, Michelle Klein, who told an audience in 2016 that while the average adult checks his or her phone 30 times a day, the average millennial, she enthusiastically reported, checks more than 157 times daily. Generation Z, we now know, exceeds this pace. Klein described Facebook’s engineering feat: “a sensory experience of communication that helps us connect to others, without having to look away,” noting with satisfaction that this condition is a boon to marketers. She underscored the design characteristics that produce this mesmerizing effect: design is narrative, engrossing, immediate, expressive, immersive, adaptive, and dynamic.11

  If you are over the age of thirty, you know that Klein is not describing your adolescence, or that of your parents, and certainly not that of your grandparents. Adolescence and emerging adulthood in the hive are a human first, meticulously crafted by the science of behavioral engineering; institutionalized in the vast and complex architectures of computer-mediated means of behavior modification; overseen by Big Other; directed toward economies of scale, scope, and action in the capture of behavioral surplus; and funded by the surveillance capital that accrues from unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power. Our children endeavor to come of age in a hive that is owned and operated by the applied utopianists of surveillance capitalism and is continuously monitored and shaped by the gathering force of instrumentarian power. Is this the life that we want for the most open, pliable, eager, self-conscious, and promising members of our society?

  II. The Hand and the Glove

  The magnetic pull that social media exerts on young people drives them toward more automatic and less voluntary behavior. For too many, that behavior shades into the territory of genuine compulsion. What is it that mesmerizes the youngest among us, lashing them to this mediated world despite the stress and disquiet that they encounter there?

  The answer lies in a combination of behavioral science and high-stakes design that is precision-tooled to bite hard on the felt needs of this age and stage: a perfectly fitted hand and glove. Social media is designed to engage and hold people of all ages, but it is principally molded to the psychological structure of adolescence and emerging adulthood, when one is naturally oriented toward the “others,” especially toward the rewards of group recognition, acceptance, belonging, and inclusion. For many, this close tailoring, combined with the practical dependencies of social participation, turns social media into a toxic milieu. Not only does this milieu extract a heavy psychological toll, but it also threatens the course of human development for today’s young and the generations that follow, all spirits of a Christmas Yet to Come.

  The hand-and-glove relationship of technology addiction was not invented at Facebook, but rather it was pioneered, tested, and perfected with outstanding success in the gaming industry, another setting where addiction is formally recognized as a boundless source of profit. Skinner had anticipated the relevance of his methods to the casino environment, which executives and engineers have transformed into as vivid an illustration as one can muster of the startling power of behavioral engineering and its ability to exploit individual inclinations and transform them into closed loops of obsession and compulsion.

  No one has mapped the casino terrain more insightfully than MIT social anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll in her fascinating examination of machine gambling in Las Vegas, Addiction by Design. Most interesting for us is her account of the symbiotic design principles of a new generation of slot machines calculated to manipulate the psychological orientation of players so that first they never have to look away, and eventually they become incapable of doing so. Schüll learned that addictive players seek neither entertainment nor the mythical jackpot of cash. Instead, they chase what Harvard Medical School addiction researcher Howard Shaffer calls “the capacity of the drug or gamble to shift subjective experience,” pursuing an experiential state that Schüll calls the “machine zone,” a state of self-forgetting in which one is carried along by an irresistible momentum that feels like one is “played by the machine.”12 The machine zone achieves a sense of complete immersion that recalls Klein’s description of Facebook’s design principles—engrossing, immersive, immediate—and is associated with a loss of self-awareness, automatic behavior, and a total rhythmic absorption carried along on a wave of compulsion. Eventually, every aspect of casino machine design was geared to echo, enhance, and intensify the hunger for that subjective shift, but always in ways that elude the player’s awareness.

  Schüll describes the multi-decade learning curve as gaming executives gradually came to appreciate that a new generation of computer-based slot machines could trigger and amplify the compulsion to chase the zone, as well as extend the time that each player spends in the zone. These innovations drive up revenues with the sheer volume of extended play as each machine is transformed into a “personalized reward device.”13 The idea, as the casinos came to understand it, is to avoid anything that distracts, diverts, or interrupts the player’s fusion with the machine; consoles “mold to the player’s natural posture,” eliminating the distance between the player’s body and frictionless touch screens: “Every feature of a slot machine—its mathematical structure, visual graphics, sound dynamics, seating and screen ergonomics—is calibrated to increase a gambler’s ‘time on device’ and to encourage ‘play to extinction.’”14 The aim is a kind of crazed machine sex, an intimate closed-loop architecture of obsession, loss of self, and auto-gratification. The key, one casino executive says in words that are all too familiar, “is figuring out how to leverage technology to act on customers’ preferences [while making] it as invisible—or what I call auto-magic—as possible.”15

  The psychological hazards of the hand-glove fit have spread far beyond the casino pits where players seek the machine zone: they define the raw heart of Facebook’s success. The corporation brings more capital, information, and science to this parasitic symbiosis than the gaming industry could ever muster. Its achievements, pursued in the name of surveillance revenues, have produced a prototype of instrumentarian society and its social principles, especially for the youngest among us. There is much that we can grasp about the lived experience of the hive in the challenges faced by the young people whose fate it is to come of age in this novel social milieu in which the forces of capital are dedicated to the production of compulsion. Facebook’s marketing director openly boasts that its precision tools craft a medium in which users “never have to look away,” but the corporation has been far more circumspect about the design practices that eventually make users, especially young users, incapable of looking away.

  There are some chinks in the armor. For example, in 2
017 Napster cofounder and one-time Facebook president Sean Parker frankly admitted that Facebook was designed to consume the maximum possible amount of users’ time and consciousness. The idea was to send you “a little dopamine hit every once in a while”—a.k.a. “variable reinforcement—in the form of ‘likes’ and comments. The goal was to keep users glued to the hive, chasing those hits while leaving a stream of raw materials in their wake.”16

  Shaffer, the addiction researcher, has identified five elements that characterize this state of compulsion: frequency of use, duration of action, potency, route of administration, and player attributes. We already know quite a bit about the high frequency and long duration of young people’s engagement in social media. What we need to understand is something of (1) the psychological attributes that draw them to social media in the first place (the hand), (2) the design practices that ratchet up potency in order to transform inclinations into unquenchable need (the glove), and (3) the mental and emotional consequences of Facebook’s ever-more-exquisite ability to enmesh young people in chasing their own kind of zone.

  Consider the final moments of a 2017 Washington Post profile on a thirteen-year-old girl, part of a series chronicling “what it’s like to grow up in the age of likes, lols, and longing.” It is the girl’s birthday, and only one question will decide her happiness: do her friends like her enough to post pictures of her on their pages in appreciation of the occasion? “She scrolls, she waits. For that little notification box to appear.”17 Regardless of your age, who among us does not feel a painful blast of recognition? Adolescence has always been a time when acceptance, inclusion, and recognition from the “others” can feel like matters of life and death, and social media has not been required to make it so. Is adolescence really any different today than in any other era? The answer is yes… and no.