The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

  The American Revolution is the outstanding example of how the reciprocities of consumption contributed to the rise of democracy. Historian T. H. Breen argues in his pathbreaking study The Marketplace of Revolution that it was the violation of these reciprocities that set the Revolution into motion, uniting disparate provincial strangers into a radical new patriotic force. Breen explains that American colonists had come to depend upon the “empire of goods” imported from England and that this dependency instilled the sense of a reciprocal social contract: “For ordinary people, the palpable experience of participating in an expanding Anglo-American consumer market” intensified their sense of a “genuine partnership” with England.16 Eventually, the British Parliament famously misjudged the rights and obligations of this partnership, imposing a series of taxes that turned imported goods such as cloth and tea into “symbols of imperial oppression.” Breen describes the originality of a political movement born in the shared experience of consumption, the outrage at the violation of essential producer-consumer interdependencies, and the determination to make “goods speak to power.”

  The translation of consumer expectations into democratic revolution occurred in three waves, beginning in 1765, when the Stamp Act triggered popular protests, riots, and organized resistance finally expressed in the “nonimportation movement” (today we would call it a consumer boycott). As Breen tells it, the details of the Stamp Act were less important than the colonists’ realization that England did not perceive them as political or economic equals bound in mutually beneficial reciprocities: “By compromising the Americans’ ability to purchase the goods they desired, Parliament had revealed an intention to treat the colonists like second-class subjects,” levying a heavy price “on the pursuit of material happiness.”17 The Stamp Act was experienced as a violation of the colonists’ rights not only as subjects of the empire but also as consumers of the empire: it was the first translation of consumers’ economic power into political power, a “radically new form of politics” in which the most ordinary members of colonial society experienced “an exhilarating surge of empowerment.”18 Parliament withdrew the Stamp Act before the nonimportation movement could effectively spread across the colonies, and it appeared that the principle of “no taxation without representation” had prevailed.

  When the Townshend Acts were passed just two years later, in 1767, this time imposing taxes on a range of imported goods, a new wave of outrage mobilized people in every colony. Detailed nonimportation agreements turned consumer sacrifice into the front line of political resistance. The shared experience of violated expectations cut across regional, religious, and cultural differences, providing a new basis for social solidarity.19 By 1770, the Townshend Acts were also repealed, and once again it seemed that a full-blown rebellion would be avoided.

  The 1773 Tea Act plunged the colonies into a new phase of resistance that shifted the political focus from nonimportation, which depended upon merchants holding the line, to nonconsumption, which demanded the participation of all individuals in the unique solidarity of their shared status as “customers.” It was in this context that Samuel Adams proclaimed that the cause of liberty “depended on the ability of the American people to free themselves from ‘the Baubles of Britain.’”20

  British goods had so thoroughly come to symbolize dependency and oppression that when the tiny impoverished community of Harvard, Massachusetts, gathered to discuss the merchant vessels arriving in Boston Harbor loaded with chests of tea, they deemed it “a matter of as interesting and important a nature when viewed in all its Consequences not only to this Town and Province, but to America in general, and that for ages and generations to come, as ever came under the deliberation of this Town.”21

  A year later, in 1774, the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia and produced a “grand scheme” to abolish trade with England. “It brought to fruition a brilliantly original strategy of consumer resistance to political oppression,” Breen writes, “one that had invited Americans to think of themselves as Americans even before they entertained a thought of independence.”22

  In early-nineteenth-century Britain, as Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson have shown, the rise of democracy was inextricably bound to industrial capitalism’s dependency on the “masses” and their contribution to the prosperity necessitated by the new organization of production.23 The rise of volume production and its wage-earning labor force established British workers’ economic power and led to a growing appreciation of their political legitimacy and power. This produced a new sense of interdependence between ordinary people and elites.

  Acemoglu and Robinson conclude that the “dynamic positive feedback” between “inclusive economic institutions” (i.e., industrial firms defined by employment reciprocities) and political institutions was critical to Britain’s substantial and nonviolent democratic reforms. Inclusive economic institutions, they argue, “level the playing field,” especially when it comes to the fight for power, making it more difficult for elites to “crush the masses” rather than accede to their demands. Reciprocities in employment produced and sustained reciprocities in politics: “Clamping down on popular demands and undertaking a coup against inclusive political institutions would… destroy… [economic] gains, and the elites opposing greater democratization and greater inclusiveness might find themselves among those losing their fortunes from this destruction.”24 In sharp contrast to the pragmatic concessions of Britain’s early industrial capitalists, surveillance capitalists’ extreme structural independence from people breeds exclusion rather than inclusion and lays the foundation for the unique approach that we have called “radical indifference.”

  III. The New Collectivism and Its Masters of Radical Indifference

  The accumulation of freedom and knowledge combines with the lack of organic reciprocities with people to shape a third unusual feature of surveillance capitalism: a collectivist orientation that diverges from the long-standing values of market capitalism and market democracy, while also sharply departing from surveillance capitalism’s origins in the neoliberal worldview. For the sake of its own commercial success, surveillance capitalism aims us toward the hive collective. This privatized instrumentarian social order is a new form of collectivism in which it is the market, not the state, which concentrates both knowledge and freedom within its domain.

  This collectivist orientation is an unexpected development in light of surveillance capitalism’s origins in a neoliberal creed conceived sixty years ago as a reaction to the collectivist totalitarian nightmares of the mid-twentieth century. Later, with the demise of the fascist and socialist threats, neoliberal ideology cunningly succeeded in redefining the modern democratic state as a fresh source of collectivism to be resisted by any and all means. Indeed, the evisceration of the double movement has been prosecuted in the name of defeating the supposed collectivist hazards of “too much democracy.”25 Now the hive emulates the “termite state,” which even the democracy-despising Hayek derided as incompatible with human freedom.

  The convergence of freedom and knowledge transforms surveillance capitalists into society’s self-appointed masters. From their high perch in the division of learning, a privileged priesthood of “tuners” rules the connected hive, cultivating it as a source of continuous raw-material supply. Just as early-twentieth-century managers were once taught the “administrative point of view” as the mode of knowledge required for the hierarchical complexities of the new large-scale corporation, today’s high priests practice the applied arts of radical indifference, a fundamentally asocial mode of knowledge. With the application of radical indifference, content is judged by its volume, range, and depth of surplus as measured by the “anonymous” equivalence of clicks, likes, and dwell times, despite the obvious fact that its profoundly dissimilar meanings originate in distinct human situations.

  Radical indifference is a response to economic imperatives, and only occasionally do we catch an unobstructed view of its strict application a
s a managerial discipline. One such occasion was a 2016 internal Facebook memo acquired by BuzzFeed in 2018. Written by one of the company’s long-standing and most influential executives, Andrew Bosworth, it provided a window into radical indifference as an applied discipline. “We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly,” Bosworth began. He went on to explain how equivalence wins out over equality in the worldview of “an organism among organisms” that is essential to the march toward totality and thus the growth of surveillance revenues:

  We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide. So we connect more people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that… anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.… That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in.… The best products don’t win. The ones everyone uses win… make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here.26

  As Bosworth makes clear, from the viewpoint of radical indifference the positives and negatives must be viewed as equivalent, despite their distinct moral meanings and human consequences. From this perspective the only rational objective is the pursuit of products that snare “everyone,” not “the best products.”

  A significant result of the systematic application of radical indifference is that the public-facing “first text” is vulnerable to corruption with content that would normally be perceived as repugnant: lies, systematic disinformation, fraud, violence, hate speech, and so on. As long as content contributes to “growth tactics,” Facebook “wins.” This vulnerability can be an explosive problem on the demand side, the user side, but it breaks through the fortifications of radical indifference only when it threatens to interrupt the flow of surplus into the second “shadow” text: the one that is for them but not for us. The norm is that information corruption is not catalogued as problematic unless it poses an existential threat to supply operations—Bosworth’s imperative of connection—either because it might trigger user disengagement or because it might attract regulatory scrutiny. This means that any efforts toward “content moderation” are best understood as defensive measures, not as acts of public responsibility.

  So far, the greatest challenge to radical indifference has come from Facebook and Google’s overreaching ambitions to supplant professional journalism on the internet. Both corporations inserted themselves between publishers and their populations, subjecting journalistic “content” to the same categories of equivalence that dominate surveillance capitalism’s other landscapes. In a formal sense, professional journalism is the precise opposite of radical indifference. The journalist’s job is to produce news and analysis that separate truth from falsehood. This rejection of equivalence defines journalism’s raison d’être as well as its organic reciprocities with its readers. Under surveillance capitalism, though, these reciprocities are erased. A consequential example was Facebook’s decision to standardize the presentation of its News Feed content so that “all news stories looked roughly the same as each other… whether they were investigations in The Washington Post, gossip in the New York Post, or flat-out lies in the Denver Guardian, an entirely bogus newspaper.”27 This expression of equivalence without equality made Facebook’s first text exceptionally vulnerable to corruption from what would come to be called “fake news.”

  This is the context in which Facebook and Google became the focus of international attention following the discovery of organized political disinformation campaigns and profit-driven “fake news” stories during the 2016 US presidential election and the UK Brexit vote earlier that year. Economists Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow, who have studied these phenomena in detail, define “fake news” as “distorted signals uncorrelated with the truth” that impose “private and social costs by making it more difficult… to infer the true state of the world.…” They found that in the lead-up to the 2016 US election there were 760 million instances of a user reading these intentionally orchestrated lies online, or about three such stories for each adult American.28

  As radical indifference would predict, however, “fake news” and other forms of information corruption have been perennial features of Google and Facebook’s online environments. There are countless examples of disinformation that survived and even thrived because it fulfilled economic imperatives, and I point out just a few. In 2007 a prominent financial analyst worried that the subprime mortgage bust would harm Google’s lucrative ad business. It seems a strange observation until you learn that in the years prior to the Great Recession, Google eagerly welcomed shady subprime lenders into its behavioral futures markets, anxious to net the lion’s share of the $200 million in monthly revenue that mortgage lenders were spending on online advertising.29 A 2011 Consumer Watchdog report on Google’s advertising practices leading up to and during the Great Recession concluded that “Google has been a prominent beneficiary of the national home loan and foreclosure crisis… by accepting deceptive advertising from fraudulent operators who falsely promise unwary consumers that they can solve their mortgage and credit problems.” Despite these increasingly public facts, Google continued to serve its fraudulent business customers until 2011, when the US Treasury Department finally required the company to suspend advertising relationships with “more than 500 internet advertisers associated with the 85 alleged online mortgage fraud schemes and related deceptive advertising.”30

  Only a few months earlier, the Department of Justice had fined Google $500 million, “one of the largest financial forfeiture penalties in history,” for accepting ads from online Canadian pharmacies that encouraged Google’s US users to illegally import controlled drugs, despite repeated warnings. As the US Deputy Attorney General told the press, “The Department of Justice will continue to hold accountable companies who in their bid for profits violate federal law and put at risk the health and safety of American consumers.”31

  Information corruption has also been a continuous feature of the Facebook environment. The turmoil associated with the 2016 US and UK political disinformation campaigns on Facebook was a well-known problem that had disfigured elections and social discourse in Indonesia, the Philippines, Columbia, Germany, Spain, Italy, Chad, Uganda, Finland, Sweden, Holland, Estonia, and the Ukraine. Scholars and political analysts had called attention to the harmful consequences of online disinformation for years.32 One political analyst in the Philippines worried in 2017 that it might be too late to fix the problem: “We already saw the warning signs of this years ago.… Voices that were lurking in the shadows are now at the center of the public discourse.”33

  The guiding principles of radical indifference are reflected in the operations of Facebook’s hidden low-wage labor force charged with limiting the perversion of the first text. Nowhere is surveillance capitalism’s outsized influence over the division of learning in society more concretely displayed than in this outcast function of “content moderation,” and nowhere is the nexus of economic imperatives and the division of learning more vividly exposed than in the daily banalities of these rationalized work flows where the world’s horrors and hate are assigned to life or death at a pace and volume that leave just moments to point thumbs up or down. It is only thanks to the determined reporting of a handful of investigative journalists and research scholars that we even have a glimpse of these highly secretive procedures, which now spread across a range of call centers, boutique firms, and “micro-labor” sites around the world. As one account notes, “Facebook and Pinterest, along with Twitter, Reddit, and Google, all declined to provide copies of their past or
current internal moderation policy guidelines.”34

  Among the few reports that have managed to assess Facebook’s operations, the theme is consistent. This secret workforce—some estimates reckon at least 100,000 “content moderators,” and others calculate the number to be much higher—operates at a distance from the corporation’s core functions, applying a combination of human judgment and machine learning tools.35 Sometimes referred to as “janitors,” they review queues of content that users have flagged as problematic. Although some general rules apply across the board, such as eliminating pornography and images of child abuse, a detailed rulebook aims to reject as little content as possible in the context of a local assessment of the minimum threshold of user tolerance. The larger point of the exercise is to find the point of equilibrium between the ability to pull users and their surplus into the site and the risk of repelling them. This is a calculation of radical indifference that has nothing to do with assessing the truthfulness of content or respecting reciprocities with users.36 This tension helps to explain why disinformation is not a priority. One investigative report quotes a Facebook insider: “They absolutely have the tools to shut down fake news.…”37