Surveillance Capitalism: the Rise of a New Regime of Technocratic Power?
Book Review
‘With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.’
Shoshana Zuboff
Professor Shoshana Zuboff, the author of the widely acclaimed The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, has said that digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. With the rapid rise of data collection for commercial gain, Zuboff says that: ‘The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information.’ People are reduced to being less than products because they are rendered into being a mere ‘input’ for the creation of the real product which is the data. Predictions about peoples’ futures are sold to the highest bidder so that these futures can be profited from or altered to favour better commercial gains. Zuboff considers surveillance capitalism to be, at its core, parasitic and self-referential – a parasite that feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience. Surveillance capitalism is the latest incarnation in behaviour modification as Professor Zuboff describes how it is as a ‘coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.’ Zuboff goes on to say that surveillance capitalism is an invasive (and pervasive) digital architecture of behaviour modification that is driven by economic imperatives – that is, based on the profit gained from people’s private data. Machinic code and smart algorithms now manage how humans can navigate their increasingly technologized environments.
The term the technologists use for ways to structure and direct action to elicit a desired behaviour or outcome is choice architecture. This architecture is now almost all digitally based, and supplies ‘digital nudges’ to steer individual choice/action into desired routes. These ‘digital nudges’ are becoming endemic through all our devices and online environments. Most of the time, people do not suspect that they are being nudged into specific behaviours that ultimately favour specific groups. As a chief data scientist at a leading Silicon Valley company stated: ‘Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behavior … We want to figure out the construction of changing a person’s behavior, and then we want to change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions.’ Behaviour modification techniques have been in use for time immemorial, first used as forms of social bonding and/or ostracization. This later became integrated into state-sponsored methods as part of social governance – such as within the classrooms, the prisons, the psychiatric wards, etc. Now these methods have jumped from closed spaces into the open space – and into our machinic apparatus of choice architecture.
Already the tentacles of surveillance capitalism have infiltrated or gained ‘incursion’ into the interior processes of the human body. As Professor Zuboff writes:
Surveillance capital wants more than my body’s coordinates in time and space. Now it violates the inner sanctum as machines and their algorithms decide the meaning of my breath and my eyes, my jaw muscles, the hitch in my voice, and the exclamation points that I offered in my innocence and hope.
The trend now is deep machine-learning to the point where machines will not only learn data – such as from the ‘inner sanctum’ of the human body – to program themselves but will now use this information to program other machines also. Zuboff quotes Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, who says that he expects everyone to be tracked and monitored as continuous monitoring will become the norm. This continuous monitoring also includes ‘emotion scanning’ that has our devices (computer, TV, phone) tracking our facial expressions to gauge our emotional reactions. From this data, which is sold on to various companies, product target advertising is generated for our specific customized profile. As a person moves through the digital infrastructure that now surrounds their lives, their actions, emotions, and the biometrics collected from linked devices and wearables, are all archived, analysed, and used to assess and predict their behaviour and outcomes. Inner life is now open for a machinic incursion for data collection.
Professor Shoshana Zuboff goes on to describe how a new species of power has emerged, which can be referred to as instrumentarianism. The definition she gives for this is: ‘the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behavior for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization, and control.’ It is a technical mode for establishing predictive outcomes through the modification and tweaking of behaviour. That is, ensuring as much certainty and as little uncertainty as possible. And since human beings are known for their spontaneity and uncertainty, it can be said that this structure of power is anti-human by its very nature. It is a force of pervasive, almost non-visible, power that works through the automated medium of a computational architecture that is constituted by our increasingly ‘smart’ networked devices and digitally coordinated spaces. It is sly because it aims to operate unnoticed, managing us through the background of our lives. Its operational agenda is to tune society into desired forms of social organization and to achieve a high degree of computational certainty and predictability.
This form of ‘instrumentarian power’ increasingly ‘fills the void, substituting machines for social relations, which amounts to the substitution of certainty for society.’ This emerging, and increasingly pervasive, strategy aims for the automation of society through herding and conditioning people into preselected behaviours. Incongruous elements within this asymmetrical landscape – a.k.a. anomalies – will be targeted and selected for re-coding: ‘Nonharmonious elements are preemptively targeted with high doses of tuning, herding, and conditioning, including the full seductive force of social persuasion and influence. We march in certainty, like the smart machines.’
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism describes in realistic detail, and with a myriad of examples, how our human real life will be transformed into a rendered life (an executed program) where social interaction will be a mediated, and permitted, act. What we are seeing here is the new model of collectivism based upon a machinic milieu where self-authorship is an act of rebellion. Welcome to the Machine.
All quotes taken from: Zuboff, Shoshana, (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books
Note: This book review was written at the request of the editor of the ‘Paradigm Explorer’
Kingsley L. Dennis, July 2023