The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 67

by Shoshana Zuboff


  32. Michael Jensen, “Eclipse of the Public Corporation,” Harvard Business Review, September–October, 1989.

  33. Michael C. Jensen, “Value Maximization, Stakeholder Theory, and the Corporate Objective Function,” Business Ethics Quarterly 12, no. 2 (2002): 235–56.

  34. Thomas I. Palley, “Financialization: What It Is and Why It Matters” (white paper, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 2007), http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_525.pdf; Jon Hanson and Ronald Chen, “The Illusion of Law: The Legitimating Schemas of Modern Policy and Corporate Law,” Michigan Law Review 103, no. 1 (2004): 1–149; Henry Hansmann and Reinier Kraakman, “The End of History for Corporate Law” (working paper, Discussion Paper Series, Harvard Law School’s John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business, 2000), http://lsr.nellco.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1068&context=harvard_olin.

  35. Davis, “The Twilight of the Berle and Means Corporation,” 1131.

  36. Gerald F. Davis, “After the Corporation,” Politics & Society 41, no. 2 (2013): 41.

  37. Juta Kawalerowicz and Michael Biggs, “Anarchy in the UK: Economic Deprivation, Social Disorganization, and Political Grievances in the London Riot of 2011,” Social Forces 94, no. 2 (2015): 673–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sov052.

  38. Paul Lewis et al., “Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder,” London School of Economics and Political Science, 2011, 17, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/46297.

  39. Saskia Sassen, “Why Riot Now? Malaise Among Britain’s Urban Poor Is Nothing New. So Why Did It Finally Tip into Widespread, Terrifying Violence?” Daily Beast, August 15, 2011, http://www.donestech.net/ca/why_riot_now_by_saskia_sassen_newsweek.

  40. Lewis et al., “Reading the Riots,” 25.

  41. In addition to Lewis et al., “Reading the Riots,” see also Kawalerowicz and Biggs, “Anarchy in the UK”; James Treadwell et al., “Shopocalypse Now: Consumer Culture and the English Riots of 2011,” British Journal of Criminology 53, no. 1 (2013): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azs054; Tom Slater, “From ‘Criminality’ to Marginality: Rioting Against a Broken State,” Human Geography 4, no. 3 (2011): 106–15.

  42. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). Piketty integrated years of income data to conclude that income inequality in the US and the UK has reached levels not seen since the nineteenth century. The top decile of US wage earners steadily increased its share of national income from 35 percent in the 1980s to over 46 percent in 2010. The bulk of this increase comes from the top 1 percent, whose share rose from 9 percent to 20 percent, about half of which went to the 0.1 percent. Piketty calculates that 60–70 percent of the top 0.1 percent of the income hierarchy is composed of managers who have succeeded in obtaining “historically unprecedented” compensation thanks to new value-maximizing incentive structures.

  43. On the general theme of the salience of democratically oriented social, political, and economic institutions in the mitigation of economic outcomes, see Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s monumental Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012). It is also the focus of Robert Reich’s work on inequality and regressive economic policy: Robert B. Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future (New York: Vintage, 2011). See also Michael Stolleis, History of Social Law in Germany (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), www.springer.com/us/book/9783642384530; Mark Hendrickson, American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Swank, “The Political Sources of Labor Market Dualism in Postindustrial Democracies, 1975–2011”; Emin Dinlersoz and Jeremy Greenwood, “The Rise and Fall of Unions in the U.S.” (NBER working paper, US Census Bureau, 2012), http://www.nber.org/papers/w18079; Basak Kus, “Financialization and Income Inequality in OECD Nations: 1995–2007,” Economic and Social Review 43, no. 4 (2012): 477–95; Viki Nellas and Elisabetta Olivieri, “The Change of Job Opportunities: The Role of Computerization and Institutions” (Quaderni DSE working paper, University of Bologna & Bank of Italy, 2012), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1983214; Gough, Dani, and de Haan, “European Welfare States”; Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Ferge, “The Changed Welfare Paradigm”; Jacoby, Modern Manors; Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country; J. Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Post–World War II Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for Eastern Europe Today, ed. Rudiger Dornbusch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity; Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal”; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1930).

  By 2014, a Standard and Poor’s report concluded that income inequality impedes economic growth and destabilizes the social fabric, a fact that Henry Ford had long ago acknowledged with his five-dollar day. See “How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening US Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide,” S&P Capital IQ, Global Credit Portal Report, August 5, 2014, https://www.globalcreditportal.com/ratingsdirect/renderArticle.do?articleId=1351366&SctArtId=255732&from=CM&nsl_code=LIME&sourceObjectId=8741033&sourceRevId=1&fee_ind=N&exp_date=20240804-19:41:13.

  44. Tcherneva, “Reorienting Fiscal Policy: A Bottom-Up Approach,” 57. See also Francisco Rodriguez and Arjun Jayadev, “The Declining Labor Share of Income,” Journal of Globalization and Development 3, no. 2 (2013): 1–18; Oliver Giovannoni, “What Do We Know About the Labor Share and the Profit Share? Part III: Measures and Structural Factors” (working paper, Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, 2014), http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/what-do-we-know-about-the-labor-share-and-the-profit-share-part-3-measures-and-structural-factors; Dirk Antonczyk, Thomas DeLeire, and Bernd Fitzenberger, “Polarization and Rising Wage Inequality: Comparing the U.S. and Germany” (IZA discussion papers, Institute for the Study of Labor, March 2010), https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp4842.html; Duane Swank, “The Political Sources of Labor Market Dualism in Postindustrial Democracies, 1975–2001,” conference paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, 2013; 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; Viki Nellas and Elisabetta Olivieri, “The Change of Job Opportunities: The Role of Computerization and Institutions” (Quaderni DSE working paper, University of Bologna & Bank of Italy, 2012), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1983214; Gough, Dani, and de Haan, “European Welfare States: Explanations and Lessons for Developing Countries.”

  45. Jonathan D. Ostry, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” Finance & Development 53, no. 2 (2016): 38–41; as another U.S. economist concluded, “The Great Recession of 2008 finally stripped away the illusion of economic expansion, revealing instead the bare bones of financial capitalism’s achievements: income stagnation since the mid-1970s for the majority pitted against immense concentrations of wealth for a tiny minority.” See Josh Bivens, “In 2013, Workers’ Share of Income in the Corporate Sector Fell to Its Lowest Point Since 1950,” Economic Policy Institute (blog), September 4, 2014, http://www.epi.org/publication/2013-workers-share-income-corporate-sector.

  Studies of financial deepening—liberalization, financialization—in both developed and less developed economies have shown that it is linked to new instabilities, including bankruptcies, bank failures, extreme asset volatility, and recession in the real sectors of the economy. See, for example, Malcolm Sawyer, “Financial Development, Financialisation and Economic Growth” (working paper, Financialisation, Economy, Society &
Sustainable Development Project, 2014), http://fessud.eu/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/Financialisation-and-growth-Sawyer-working-paper-21.pdf. See also William A. Galston, “The New Challenge to Market Democracies: The Political and Social Costs of Economic Stagnation” (research report, Brookings Institution, 2014), http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/10/new-challenge-market-democracies; Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); James K. Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ronald Dore, “Financialization of the Global Economy,” Industrial and Corporate Change 17, no. 6 (2008): 1097–1112; Philip Arestis and Howard Stein, “An Institutional Perspective to Finance and Development as an Alternative to Financial Liberalisation,” International Review of Applied Economics 19, no. 4 (2005): 381–98; Asil Demirguc-Kunt and Enrica Detragiache, “The Determinants of Banking Crises in Developing and Developed Countries,” Staff Papers—International Monetary Fund 45, no. 1 (1998): 81–109.

  46. Emanuele Ferragina, Mark Tomlinson, and Robert Walker, “Poverty, Participation and Choice,” JRF, May 28, 2013, https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/poverty-participation-and-choice.

  47. Helen Kersley et al., “Raising the Benchmark: The Role of Public Services in Tackling the Squeeze on Pay,” New Economics Foundation, https://www.unison.org.uk/content/uploads/2013/12/On-line-Catalogue219732.pdf.

  48. Sally Gainsbury and Sarah Neville, “Austerity’s £18bn Impact on Local Services,” Financial Times, July 19, 2015, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/5fcbd0c4-2948-11e5-8db8-c033edba8a6e.html?ftcamp=crm/email/2015719/nbe/InTodaysFT/product#axzz3gRAfXkt4.

  49. Carmen DeNavas-Walt and Bernadette D. Proctor, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2014,” US Census Bureau, September 2015, http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/demo/p60-249.pdf; Thomas Gabe, “Poverty in the United States: 2013,” Congressional Research Service, September 25, 2014, http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/1329.

  50. Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Mark Nord, and Anita Singh, “Household Food Security in the United States in 2012” (economic research report, US Department of Agriculture, September 2013), https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45129/39937_err-155.pdf?v=42199.

  51. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 334–35. See also Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).

  52. Nicholas Confessore, “The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election,” New York Times, October 10, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/2016-presidential-election-super-pac-donors.html.

  53. Historian Nancy MacLean and journalist Jane Mayer document hidden operations of radical-right ideologues and their billionaire backers who command unlimited funds for the purposes of political and public manipulation, relying on clandestine networks of think tanks, donor organizations, and media outlets to skillfully exploit citizen unrest and drive it toward extremist views. See Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017); Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Anchor, 2017).

  54. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 571.

  55. Milan Zafirovski, “‘Neo-Feudalism’ in America? Conservatism in Relation to European Feudalism,” International Review of Sociology 17, no. 3 (2007): 393–427, https://doi.org/10.1080/03906700701574323; Alain Supiot, “The Public-Private Relation in the Context of Today’s Refeudalization,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 11, no. 1 (2013): 129–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/icon/mos050; Daniel J. H. Greenwood, “Neofeudalism: The Surprising Foundations of Corporate Constitutional Rights,” University of Illinois Law Review 163 (2017).

  56. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 237–70.

  57. For a poignant and powerful exploration of these themes, see Carol Graham, Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); David G. Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, “Unhappiness and Pain in Modern America: A Review Essay, and Further Evidence, on Carol Graham’s ‘Happiness for All?’” (NBER working paper, November 2017).

  58. See Tim Newburn et al., “David Cameron, the Queen and the Rioters’ Sense of Injustice,” Guardian, December 5, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/05/cameron-queen-injustice-english-rioters.

  59. Slater, “From ‘Criminality’ to Marginality.”

  60. Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (New York: Harper Collins, 2012); Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). See also Andrew Gavin Marshall, “World of Resistance Report: Davos Class Jittery amid Growing Warnings of Global Unrest,” Occupy.com, July 4, 2014, http://www.occupy.com/article/world-resistance-report-davos-class-jittery-amid-growing-warnings-global-unrest.

  61. Todd Gitlin, “Occupy’s Predicament: The Moment and the Prospects for the Movement,” British Journal of Sociology 64, no. 1 (2013): 3–25, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12001.

  62. Anthony Barnett, “The Long and Quick of Revolution,” Open Democracy, February 2, 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/anthony-barnett/long-and-quick-of-revolution.

  63. Peter Wells and Paul Nieuwenhuis, “Transition Failure: Understanding Continuity in the Automotive Industry,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 79, no. 9 (2012): 1681–92, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2012.06.008.

  64. Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 172–73.

  65. Bobbie Johnson, “Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, Says Facebook Founder,” Guardian, January 10, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy.

  66. See Charlene Li, “Close Encounter with Facebook Beacon,” Forrester, November 23, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071123023712/http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/11/close-encounter.html.

  67. Peter Linzer, “Contract as Evil,” Hastings Law Journal 66 (2015): 971; Paul M. Schwartz, “Internet Privacy and the State,” Connecticut Law Review 32 (1999): 815–59; Daniel J. Solove, “Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 7 (2013): 1880–1904.

  68. Yannis Bakos, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, and David R. Trossen, “Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? Consumer Attention to Standard-Form Contracts,” Journal of Legal Studies 43, no. 1 (2014): 1–35, https://doi.org/10.1086/674424; Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, “A Psychological Account of Consent to Fine Print,” Iowa Law Review 99 (2014): 1745; Thomas J. Maronick, “Do Consumers Read Terms of Service Agreements When Installing Software? A Two-Study Empirical Analysis,” International Journal of Business and Social Research 4, no. 6 (2014): 137–45; Mark A. Lemley, “Terms of Use,” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2006), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=917926; Nili Steinfeld, “‘I Agree to the Terms and Conditions’: (How) Do Users Read Privacy Policies Online? An Eye-Tracking Experiment,” Computers in Human Behavior 55 (2016): 992–1000, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.09.038; Victoria C. Plaut and Robert P. Bartlett, “Blind Consent? A Social Psychological Investigation of Non-readership of Click-Through Agreements,” Law and Human Behavior, June 16, 2011, 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-011-9288-y.

  69. Ewa Luger, Stuart Moran, and Tom Rodden, “Consent for All: Revealing the Hidden Complexity of Terms and Conditions,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’13 (New York: ACM, 2013), 2687–96, https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2481371.

  70. Debra Cassens We
iss, “Chief Justice Roberts Admits He Doesn’t Read the Computer Fine Print,” ABA Journal, October 20, 2010, http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/chief_justice_roberts_admits_he_doesnt_read_the_computer_fine_print.

  71. Margaret Jane Radin, Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 14.

  72. Radin, Boilerplate, 16–17.

  73. Nancy S. Kim, Wrap Contracts: Foundations and Ramifications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 50–69.

  74. Jon Leibowitz, “Introductory Remarks at the FTC Privacy Roundtable,” FTC, December 7, 2009, http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/leibowitz/091207.pdf.

  75. Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, “The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies,” Journal of Policy for the Information Society, 4, no. 3 (2008), http://hdl.handle.net/1811/72839.

  76. Kim, Wrap Contracts, 70–72.

  77. For an example of this rhetoric, see Tom Hayes, “America Needs a Department of ‘Creative Destruction,’” Huffington Post, October 27, 2011, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayes/america-needs-a-departmen_b_1033573.html.

  78. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 68.

  79. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 83.

  80. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 412 (italics mine).

  81. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 83.

  82. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

  83. Tom Worden, “Spain’s Economic Woes Force a Change in Traditional Holiday Habits,” Guardian, August 8, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/08/spain-debt-crisis-economy-august-economy.

 

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