The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 66

by Shoshana Zuboff


  Two Species of Power

  I. A Return to the Unprecedented

  II. Totalitarianism as a New Species of Power

  III. An Opposite Horizon

  IV. The Other-One

  V. Against Freedom

  VI. A Technology of Human Behavior

  VII. Two Utopias

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Big Other and the Rise of Instrumentarian Power

  I. Instrumentarianism as a New Species of Power

  II. A Market Project of Total Certainty

  III. This Century’s Curse

  IV. The China Syndrome

  V. A Fork in the Road

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Utopia of Certainty

  I. Society as the Other-One

  II. Totality Includes Society

  III. Applied Utopistics

  IV. Confluence as Machine Relations

  V. Confluence as Society

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Instrumentarian Collective

  I. The Priests of Instrumentarian Power

  II. When Big Other Eats Society: The Rendition of Social Relations

  III. The Principles of an Instrumentarian Society

  1. Behavior for the Greater Good

  2. Plans Replace Politics

  3. Social Pressure for Harmony

  4. Applied Utopistics

  5. The Death of Individuality

  IV. The Third Modernity of the Hive

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Of Life in the Hive

  I. Our Canaries in the Coal Mine

  II. The Hand and the Glove

  III. Proof of Life

  IV. The Next Human Nature

  V. Homing to the Herd

  VI. No Exit

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Right to Sanctuary

  I. Big Other Outruns Society

  II. Justice at the New Frontier of Power

  III. Every Unicorn Has a Hunter

  CONCLUSION

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A Coup from Above

  I. Freedom and Knowledge

  II. After Reciprocity

  III. The New Collectivism and Its Masters of Radical Indifference

  IV. What Is Surveillance Capitalism?

  V. Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy

  VI. Be the Friction

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. Martin Hilbert, “Technological Information Inequality as an Incessantly Moving Target: The Redistribution of Information and Communication Capacities Between 1986 and 2010,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 65, no. 4 (2013): 821–35, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23020.

  2. By 2014, about twenty years after the invention of the world wide web, an extensive survey by Pew Research found 87 percent of Americans using the internet. Among those, 76 percent regarded it as “a good thing for society” and 90 percent as “a good thing for me.” Indeed, people routinely call 911 when Facebook is down. In less than two decades after the Mosaic browser was released to the public, enabling easy access to the world wide web, a 2010 BBC poll found that 79 percent of people in twenty-six countries considered internet access to be a fundamental human right. Six years later, the United Nations adopted specific language on internet access: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” See Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie, “The web at 25 in the U.S.,” PewResearchCenter, February 27, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/the-web-at-25-in-the-u-s; “911 Calls About Facebook Outage Angers L.A. County Sheriff’s Officials,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-911-calls-about-facebook-outage-angers-la-sheriffs-officials-20140801-htmlstory.html; “Internet Access ‘a Human Right,’” BBC News, March 8, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8548190.stm; “The Promotion, Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet,” United Nations Human Rights Council, June 27, 2016, https://www.article19.org/data/files/Internet_Statement_Adopted.pdf.

  3. João Leal, The Making of Saudade: National Identity and Ethnic Psychology in Portugal (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000), https://run.unl.pt/handle/10362/4386.

  4. Cory D. Kidd et al., “The Aware Home: A Living Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing Research,” in Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings, Integrating Information, Organization, and Architecture, CoBuild ’99 (London: Springer-Verlag, 1999), 191–98, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=645969.674887.

  5. “Global Smart Homes Market 2018 by Evolving Technology, Projections & Estimations, Business Competitors, Cost Structure, Key Companies and Forecast to 2023,” Reuters, February 19, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/brandfeatures/venture-capital/article?id=28096.

  6. Ron Amadeo, “Nest Is Done as a Standalone Alphabet Company, Merges with Google,” Ars Technica, February 7, 2018, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/nest-is-done-as-a-standalone-alphabet-company-merges-with-google; Leo Kelion, “Google-Nest Merger Raises Privacy Issues,” BBC News, February 8, 2018, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42989073.

  7. Kelion, “Google-Nest Merger Raises Privacy Issues.”

  8. Rick Osterloh and Marwan Fawaz, “Nest to Join Forces with Google’s Hardware Team,” Google, February 7, 2018, https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-annoucements/nest-join-forces-googles-hardware-team.

  9. Grant Hernandez, Orlando Arias, Daniel Buentello, and Yier Jin, “Smart Nest Thermostat: A Smart Spy in Your Home,” Black Hat USA, 2014, https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-14/materials/us-14-Jin-Smart-Nest-Thermostat-A-Smart-Spy-In-Your-Home-WP.pdf.

  10. Guido Noto La Diega, “Contracting for the ‘Internet of Things’: Looking into the Nest” (research paper, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, 2016); Robin Kar and Margaret Radin, “Pseudo-Contract & Shared Meaning Analysis” (legal studies research paper, University of Illinois College of Law, November 16, 2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3083129.

  11. Hernandez, Arias, Buentello, and Jin, “Smart Nest Thermostat.”

  12. For a prescient early treatment of these issues, see Langdon Winner, “A Victory for Computer Populism,” Technology Review 94, no. 4 (1991): 66. See also Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Jennifer M. Urban, and Su Li, “Privacy and Modern Advertising: Most US Internet Users Want ‘Do Not Track’ to Stop Collection of Data About Their Online Activities” (BCLT Research Paper, Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, October 8, 2012), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2152135; Joseph Turow et al., “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities That Enable It,” Annenberg School for Communication, September 29, 2009, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1478214; Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Jan Whittington, “Free: Accounting for the Costs of the Internet’s Most Popular Price,” UCLA Law Review 61 (February 28, 2014): 606; Jan Whittington and Chris Hoofnagle, “Unpacking Privacy’s Price,” North Carolina Law Review 90 (January 1, 2011): 1327; Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow, “How Different Are Young Adults from Older Adults When It Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes & Policies?” April 14, 2010, http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/399.

  13. The phrase is from Roberto Mangabeira Unger, “The Dictatorship of No Alternatives,” in What Should the Left Propose? (London: Verso, 2006), 1–11.

  14. Jared Newman, “Google’s Schmidt Roasted for Privacy Comments,” PCWorld, December 11, 2009, http://www.pcworld.com/article/184446/googles_schmidt_roasted_for_privacy_comments.html.

  15. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 1:67.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Roben Farzad, “Apple’s Earnings Power Befuddles Wall Street,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 7, 2011, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-28/apple-s-earnings-power-befuddles-wall-street.

  2. “iTunes Music Store
Sells Over One Million Songs in First Week,” Apple Newsroom, March 9, 2018, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/05/05iTunes-Music-Store-Sells-Over-One-Million-Songs-in-First-Week.

  3. Jeff Sommer, “The Best Investment Since 1926? Apple,” New York Times, September 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/business/apple-investment.html.

  4. See Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin, The Support Economy: How Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (New York: Penguin, 2002), 230.

  5. Henry Ford, “Mass Production,” Encyclopedia Britannica (New York: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1926), 821, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/h?ammem/coolbib:@field(NUMBER+@band(amrlg+lg48)).

  6. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism: 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  7. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964), 275 (italics mine).

  8. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, 266.

  9. Ulrich Beck and Mark Ritter, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1992).

  10. For readers interested in a more detailed analysis of the rise of this phenomenon, I recommend the extended discussion in Zuboff and Maxmin, The Support Economy. See also Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002); Ulrich Beck, “Why ‘Class’ Is Too Soft a Category to Capture the Explosiveness of Social Inequality at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century,” British Journal of Sociology 64, no. 1 (2013): 63–74; Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, “Varieties of Second Modernity: The Cosmopolitan Turn in Social and Political Theory and Research,” British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010): 409–43.

  11. Beck and Ritter, Risk Society.

  12. Talcott Parsons, Social Structure and Personality (New York: Free Press, 1964).

  13. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization.

  14. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 279.

  15. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Ronald F. Inglehart, “Changing Values Among Western Publics from 1970 to 2006,” West European Politics 31, nos. 1–2 (2008): 130–46; Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, “How We Got Here: How Development Leads to Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 88, no. 2 (2012): 48–50; Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000): 19; Mette Halskov Hansen, iChina: The Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society, ed. Rune Svarverud (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2010); Yunxiang Yan, The Individualization of Chinese Society (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009); Arthur Kleinman et al., Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Chang Kyung-Sup and Song Min-Young, “The Stranded Individual Under Compressed Modernity: South Korean Women in Individualization Without Individualism,” British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010); Chang Kyung-Sup, “The Second Modern Condition? Compressed Modernity as Internalized Reflexive Cosmopolitization,” British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010); Munenori Suzuki et al., “Individualizing Japan: Searching for Its Origin in First Modernity,” British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010); Anthony Elliott, Masataka Katagiri, and Atsushi Sawai, “The New Individualism and Contemporary Japan: Theoretical Avenues and the Japanese New Individualist Path,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 42, no. 4 (2012); Mitsunori Ishida et al., “The Individualization of Relationships in Japan,” Soziale Welt 61 (2010): 217–35; David Tyfield and John Urry, “Cosmopolitan China?” Soziale Welt 61 (2010): 277–93.

  16. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization; Ulrich Beck, A God of One’s Own: Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010).

  17. Thomas M. Franck, The Empowered Self: Law and Society in an Age of Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  18. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, xxii.

  19. Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); T. Flew, “Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and Contemporary Neo-Liberalism Debates,” Thesis Eleven 108, no. 1 (2012): 44–65, https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513611421481; Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013); Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (Brooklyn: Verso, 2013); António Ferreira, “The Politics of Austerity as Politics of Law,” Oñati Socio-Legal Series 6, no. 3 (2016): 496–519; David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015); David Jacobs and Lindsey Myers, “Union Strength, Neoliberalism, and Inequality: Contingent Political Analyses of US Income Differences Since 1950,” American Sociological Review 79 (2014): 752–74; Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

  20. Jones, Masters of the Universe, 215. See also Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis.

  21. Mirowski, Dardot and Laval, and Jones provide detailed accounts of these developments.

  22. Friedrich August von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. William Warren Bartley, vol. 1, The Collected Works of Friedrich August Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 14–15.

  23. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 53–67.

  24. Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling, “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure,” Journal of Financial Economics 3, no. 4 (1976): 12.

  25. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis.

  26. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 79.

  27. Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Michael Alan Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939, Studies in Economic History and Policy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987); C. Goldin and R. A. Margo, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-century,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 1 (1992): 1–34; Edwin Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal,” in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed. Theda Skocpol, Margaret Weir, and Ann Shola Orloff (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 81–122.

  28. Ian Gough, Anis Ahmad Dani, and Harjan de Haan, “European Welfare States: Explanations and Lessons for Developing Countries,” in Inclusive States: Social Policies and Structural Inequalities (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008); Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Kenneth Galbraith, Sean Wilentz, and James K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967); Gerald Davis, “The Twilight of the Berle and Means Corporation,” Seattle University Law Review 34, no. 4 (2011): 1121–38; Alfred Dupont Chandler, Essential Alfr
ed Chandler: Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business, ed. Thomas K. McCraw (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1988).

  29. Jones, Masters of the Universe, 217.

  30. See, for example, Vivien A. Schmidt and Mark Thatcher, eds., Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kathleen Thelen, Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Peter Kingstone, The Political Economy of Latin America: Reflections on Neoliberalism and Development (New York: Routledge, 2010); Jeffry Frieden, Manuel Pastor, Jr., and Michael Tomz, Modern Political Economy and Latin America: Theory and Policy (Boulder, CO: Routledge, 2000); Giuliano Bonoli and David Natali, The Politics of the New Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Richard Münch, Inclusion and Exclusion in the Liberal Competition State: The Cult of the Individual (New York: Routledge, 2012), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10589064; Kyung-Sup Chang, Developmental Politics in Transition: The Neoliberal Era and Beyond (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Zsuzsa Ferge, “The Changed Welfare Paradigm: The Individualization of the Social,” Social Policy & Administration 31, no. 1 (1997): 20–44.

  31. Gerald F. Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-shaped America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Davis, “The Twilight of the Berle and Means Corporation”; Özgür Orhangazi, “Financialisation and Capital Accumulation in the Non-financial Corporate Sector: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation on the US Economy: 1973–2003,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 32, no. 6 (2008): 863–86; William Lazonick, “The Financialization of the U.S. Corporation: What Has Been Lost, and How It Can Be Regained,” in The Future of Financial and Securities Markets (Fourth Annual Symposium of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center for Corporations, Law and Society of the Seattle School of Law, London, 2012); Yuri Biondi, “The Governance and Disclosure of the Firm as an Enterprise Entity,” Seattle University Law Review 36, no. 2 (2013): 391–416; Robert Reich, “Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board: The Full List,” US News & World Report, November 7, 2008, http://www.usnews.com/news/campaign-2008/articles/2008/11/07/obamas-transition-economic-advisory-board-the-full-listn; Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 2012).

 

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