The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

An endorsement from Robert B. Reich was all I needed to grab this book.

Surveillance Capitalism. It is a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw data for hidden commercial practices. It is the origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy. It is also a rogue mutation of capitalism under the disguise of technological inevitability that lays the foundational framework of a surveillance society.

Shoshana Zuboff provides a shockingly harrowing glimpse into the surveillance economy we are in, how surveillance capitalism and its rapidly accumulating power exceed the historical norms of capitalist ambitions, claiming dominion over human, societal, and political territories that range far beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm or market; and how we the people can reverse this course, first by identifying the unprecedented, then by mobilizing new forms of collaborative action.

This book has four parts. Part one addresses the origins and early elaboration of surveillance capitalism. Part two traces the migration of surveillance capitalism from virtual to the real world, a consequence of the competition for prediction products that approximate certainty. Part three examines the rise of instrumentarian power; its expression in a ubiquitous sensate, networked, and computational infrastructure. Part four illustrates how surveillance capitalism departs from the history of market capitalism by demanding both unimpeded freedom and total knowledge, abandoning capitalism’s reciprocities with people and society, and imposing a totalizing collectivist vision of life in the hive, with surveillance capitalists and their data priesthood in charge of oversight and control.

I am just going to jump straight into things I like about this book. I liked how Zuboff analyzed the rise of surveillance capitalism, NOT from a technological standpoint, but from a societal and economic standpoint.

Unlike the last few minutes of human history, where each life was foretold in blood and geography, sex and kin, rank and religion, in the second half of the twentieth century, the individualisation story has taken this new turn toward, industrialization modernity and the practice of Henry Ford’s mass production capitalism at its core have produced more wealth than ever. So what’s next?

The wave of second modernity propelled people toward a more intricate, educated, and richly patterned life that could no longer be contained by pre-defined roles or group identity. People now want individualism.

Individualism. The market focus is now shift from the mass to the individual. People now live in a society where Nothing is given. Everything must be reviewed, renegotiated, and reconstructed on the terms that make sense to them: family, religion, sex, gender, morality, community, social connections, and political participation. Consumer’s eagerness to have “what I want, when, where, from whom, and how I want it” made them willing to provide data to companies for customization and convenience, and companies seem to imply that there will be trustworthy relationships of advocacy and reciprocity embedded in an alignment of commercial operations with consumer’s genuine interest. However, is that really the case?

Another thing I like about this book is how Zuboff established the bearings before challenging the claim of technological inevitability. She emphasized that we cannot evaluate the current trajectory of information civilization without a clear appreciation that technology is NOT and never can be a thing in itself, isolated from economics and society. This means that the technological inevitability that firms such as Google and Amazon are claiming does not exist.

As much as firms would like consumers to believe their practices are inevitable expressions of the technologies they employ, search engines don’t have to retain our data, only surveillance capitalism does. In 2009, when the public first became aware that Google maintains our search histories indefinitely, people were furious. However, nowadays, we appear to have accepted it as a technological inevitable reality, when in fact they are meticulously calculated and lavishly funded means to self-dealing commercial ends.

Overall, I believe this book is well researched and written. Although Zuboff seems to repeat “Google bad surveillance bad” a bit too much, the content is pretty solid.