The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Read online

  We have stood at this kind of precipice before. “We’ve stumbled along for a while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, but we’ve got to start to make this world over.” It was 1912 when Thomas Edison laid out his vision for a new industrial civilization in a letter to Henry Ford. Edison worried that industrialism’s potential to serve the progress of humanity would be thwarted by the stubborn power of the robber barons and the monopolist economics that ruled their kingdoms. He decried the “wastefulness” and “cruelty” of US capitalism: “Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations between capital and labor, our distribution—all wrong, out of gear.” Both Edison and Ford understood that the modern industrial civilization for which they harbored such hope was careening toward a darkness marked by misery for the many and prosperity for the few.

  Most important for our conversation, Edison and Ford understood that the moral life of industrial civilization would be shaped by the practices of capitalism that rose to dominance in their time. They believed that America, and eventually the world, would have to fashion a new, more rational capitalism in order to avert a future of misery and conflict. Everything, as Edison suggested, would have to be reinvented: new technologies, yes, but these would have to reflect new ways of understanding and fulfilling people’s needs; a new economic model that could turn those new practices into profit; and a new social contract that could sustain it all. A new century had dawned, but the evolution of capitalism, like the churning of civilizations, did not obey the calendar or the clock. It was 1912, and still the nineteenth century refused to relinquish its claim on the twentieth.

  The same can be said of our time. As I write these words, we are nearing the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, but the economic and social contests of the twentieth continue to tear us apart. These contests are the stage upon which surveillance capitalism made its debut and rose to stardom as the author of a new chapter in the long saga of capitalism’s evolution. This is the dramatic context to which we will turn in the opening pages of Part I: the place upon which we must stand in order to evaluate our subject in its rightful context. Surveillance capitalism is not an accident of overzealous technologists, but rather a rogue capitalism that learned to cunningly exploit its historical conditions to ensure and defend its success.

  VI. The Outline, Themes, and Sources of this Book

  This book is intended as an initial mapping of a terra incognita, a first foray that I hope will pave the way for more explorers. The effort to understand surveillance capitalism and its consequences has dictated a path of exploration that crosses many disciplines and historical periods. My aim has been to develop the concepts and frameworks that enable us to see the pattern in what have appeared to be disparate concepts, phenomena, and fragments of rhetoric and practice, as each new point on the map contributes to materializing the puppet master in flesh and bone.

  Many of the points on this map are necessarily drawn from fast-moving currents in turbulent times. In making sense of contemporary developments, my method has been to isolate the deeper pattern in the welter of technological detail and corporate rhetoric. The test of my efficacy will be in how well this map and its concepts illuminate the unprecedented and empower us with a more cogent and comprehensive understanding of the rapid flow of events that boil around us as surveillance capitalism pursues its long game of economic and social domination.

  The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has four parts. Each presents four to five chapters as well as a final chapter intended as a coda that reflects on and conceptualizes the meaning of what has gone before. Part I addresses the foundations of surveillance capitalism: its origins and early elaboration. We begin in Chapter 2 by setting the stage upon which surveillance capitalism made its debut and achieved success. This stage setting is important because I fear that we have contented ourselves for too long with superficial explanations of the rapid rise and general acceptance of the practices associated with surveillance capitalism. For example, we have credited notions such as “convenience” or the fact that many of its services are “free.” Instead, Chapter 2 explores the social conditions that summoned the digital into our everyday lives and enabled surveillance capitalism to root and flourish. I describe the “collision” between the centuries-old historical processes of individualization that shape our experience as self-determining individuals and the harsh social habitat produced by a decades-old regime of neoliberal market economics in which our sense of self-worth and needs for self-determination are routinely thwarted. The pain and frustration of this contradiction are the condition that sent us careening toward the internet for sustenance and ultimately bent us to surveillance capitalism’s draconian quid pro quo.

  Part I moves on to a close examination of surveillance capitalism’s invention and early elaboration at Google, beginning with the discovery and early development of what would become its foundational mechanisms, economic imperatives, and “laws of motion.” For all of Google’s technological prowess and computational talent, the real credit for its success goes to the radical social relations that the company declared as facts, beginning with its disregard for the boundaries of private human experience and the moral integrity of the autonomous individual. Instead, surveillance capitalists asserted their right to invade at will, usurping individual decision rights in favor of unilateral surveillance and the self-authorized extraction of human experience for others’ profit. These invasive claims were nurtured by the absence of law to impede their progress, the mutuality of interests between the fledgling surveillance capitalists and state intelligence agencies, and the tenacity with which the corporation defended its new territories. Eventually, Google codified a tactical playbook on the strength of which its surveillance capitalist operations were successfully institutionalized as the dominant form of information capitalism, drawing new competitors eager to participate in the race for surveillance revenues. On the strength of these achievements, Google and its expanding universe of competitors enjoy extraordinary new asymmetries of knowledge and power, unprecedented in the human story. I argue that the significance of these developments is best understood as the privatization of the division of learning in society, the critical axis of social order in the twenty-first century.

  Part II traces the migration of surveillance capitalism from the online environment to the real world, a consequence of the competition for prediction products that approximate certainty. Here we explore this new reality business, as all aspects of human experience are claimed as raw-material supplies and targeted for rendering into behavioral data. Much of this new work is accomplished under the banner of “personalization,” a camouflage for aggressive extraction operations that mine the intimate depths of everyday life. As competition intensifies, surveillance capitalists learn that extracting human experience is not enough. The most-predictive raw-material supplies come from intervening in our experience to shape our behavior in ways that favor surveillance capitalists’ commercial outcomes. New automated protocols are designed to influence and modify human behavior at scale as the means of production is subordinated to a new and more complex means of behavior modification. We see these new protocols at work in Facebook’s contagion experiments and the Google-incubated augmented reality “game” Pokémon Go. The evidence of our psychic numbing is that only a few decades ago US society denounced mass behavior-modification techniques as unacceptable threats to individual autonomy and the democratic order. Today the same practices meet little resistance or even discussion as they are routinely and pervasively deployed in the march toward surveillance revenues. Finally, I consider surveillance capitalism’s operations as a challenge to the elemental right to the future tense, which accounts for the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future. It is an essential condition of free will and, more poignantly, of the inner resources from which we draw the will to will. I ask and answer the question How did they get away with it? Part II ends with a meditation on our once
and future history. If industrial capitalism dangerously disrupted nature, what havoc might surveillance capitalism wreak on human nature?

  Part III examines the rise of instrumentarian power; its expression in a ubiquitous sensate, networked, computational infrastructure that I call Big Other; and the novel and deeply antidemocratic vision of society and social relations that these produce. I argue that instrumentarianism is an unprecedented species of power that has defied comprehension in part because it has been subjected to the “horseless-carriage” syndrome. Instrumentarian power has been viewed through the old lenses of totalitarianism, obscuring what is different and dangerous. Totalitarianism was a transformation of the state into a project of total possession. Instrumentarianism and its materialization in Big Other signal the transformation of the market into a project of total certainty, an undertaking that is unimaginable outside the digital milieu and the logic of surveillance capitalism. In naming and analyzing instrumentarian power, I explore its intellectual origins in early theoretical physics and its later expression in the work of the radical behaviorist B. F. Skinner.

  Part III follows surveillance capitalism into a second phase change. The first was the migration from the virtual to the real world. The second is a shift of focus from the real world to the social world, as society itself becomes the new object of extraction and control. Just as industrial society was imagined as a well-functioning machine, instrumentarian society is imagined as a human simulation of machine learning systems: a confluent hive mind in which each element learns and operates in concert with every other element. In the model of machine confluence, the “freedom” of each individual machine is subordinated to the knowledge of the system as a whole. Instrumentarian power aims to organize, herd, and tune society to achieve a similar social confluence, in which group pressure and computational certainty replace politics and democracy, extinguishing the felt reality and social function of an individualized existence. The youngest members of our societies already experience many of these destructive dynamics in their attachment to social media, the first global experiment in the human hive. I consider the implications of these developments for a second elemental right: the right to sanctuary. The human need for a space of inviolable refuge has persisted in civilized societies from ancient times but is now under attack as surveillance capital creates a world of “no exit” with profound implications for the human future at this new frontier of power.

  In the final chapter I conclude that surveillance capitalism departs from the history of market capitalism in surprising ways, 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. Surveillance capitalism and its rapidly accumulating instrumentarian 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 the market. As a result, surveillance capitalism is best described as a coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift toward democratic deconsolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies. Only “we the people” can reverse this course, first by naming the unprecedented, then by mobilizing new forms of collaborative action: the crucial friction that reasserts the primacy of a flourishing human future as the foundation of our information civilization. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so.

  My methods combine those of a social scientist inclined toward theory, history, philosophy, and qualitative research with those of an essayist: an unusual but intentional approach. As an essayist, I occasionally draw upon my own experiences. I do this because the tendency toward psychic numbing is increased when we regard the critical issues examined here as just so many abstractions attached to technological and economic forces beyond our reach. We cannot fully reckon with the gravity of surveillance capitalism and its consequences unless we can trace the scars they carve into the flesh of our daily lives.

  As a social scientist, I have been drawn to earlier theorists who encountered the unprecedented in their time. Reading from this perspective, I developed a fresh appreciation for the intellectual courage and pioneering insights of classic texts, in which authors such as Durkheim, Marx, and Weber boldly theorized industrial capitalism and industrial society as it rapidly constructed itself in their midst during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My work here has also been inspired by mid-twentieth-century thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Karl Polanyi, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Stanley Milgram, who struggled to name the unprecedented in their time as they faced the comprehension-defying phenomena of totalitarianism and labored to grasp their trail of consequence for the prospects of humanity. My work has also been deeply informed by the many insights of visionary scholars, technology critics, and committed investigative journalists who have done so much to illuminate key points on the map that emerges here.

  During the last seven years I have focused closely on the top surveillance capitalist firms and their growing ecosystems of customers, consultants, and competitors, all of it informed by the larger context of technology and data science that defines the Silicon Valley zeitgeist. This raises another important distinction. Just as surveillance capitalism is not the same as technology, this new logic of accumulation cannot be reduced to any single company or group of companies. The top five internet companies—Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook—are often regarded as a single entity with similar strategies and interests, but when it comes to surveillance capitalism, this is not the case.

  First, it is necessary to distinguish between capitalism and surveillance capitalism. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, that line is defined in part by the purposes and methods of data collection. When a firm collects behavioral data with permission and solely as a means to product or service improvement, it is committing capitalism but not surveillance capitalism. Each of the top five tech companies practices capitalism, but they are not all pure surveillance capitalists, at least not now.

  For example, Apple has so far drawn a line, pledging to abstain from many of the practices that I locate in the surveillance capitalist regime. Its behavior in this regard is not perfect, the line is sometimes blurred, and Apple might well change or contradict its orientation. Amazon once prided itself on its customer alignment and the virtuous circle between data collection and service improvement. Both firms derive revenues from physical and digital products and therefore experience less financial pressure to chase surveillance revenues than the pure data companies. As we see in Chapter 9, however, Amazon appears to be migrating toward surveillance capitalism, with its new emphasis on “personalized” services and third-party revenues.

  Whether or not a corporation has fully migrated to surveillance capitalism says nothing about other vital issues raised by its operations, from monopolistic and anticompetitive practices in the case of Amazon to pricing, tax strategies, and employment policies at Apple. Nor are there any guarantees for the future. Time will tell if Apple succumbs to surveillance capitalism, holds the line, or perhaps even expands its ambitions to anchor an effective alternative trajectory to a human future aligned with the ideals of individual autonomy and the deepest values of a democratic society.

  One important implication of these distinctions is that even when our societies address capitalist harms produced by the tech companies, such as those related to monopoly or privacy, those actions do not ipso facto interrupt a firm’s commitment to and continued elaboration of surveillance capitalism. For example, calls to break up Google or Facebook on monopoly grounds could easily result in establishing multiple surveillance capitalist firms, though at a diminished scale, and thus clear the way for more surveillance capitalist competitors. Similarly, reducing Google and
Facebook’s duopoly in online advertising does not reduce the reach of surveillance capitalism if online advertising market share is simply spread over five surveillance capitalist firms or fifty, instead of two. Throughout this book I focus on the unprecedented aspects of surveillance capitalist operations that must be contested and interrupted if this market form is to be contained and vanquished.

  My focus in these pages tends toward Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. The aim here is not a comprehensive critique of these companies as such. Instead, I view them as the petri dishes in which the DNA of surveillance capitalism is best examined. As I suggested earlier, my goal is to map a new logic and its operations, not a company or its technologies. I move across the boundaries of these and other companies in order to compile the insights that can flesh out the map, just as earlier observers moved across many examples to grasp the once-new logics of managerial capitalism and mass production. It is also the case that surveillance capitalism was invented in the United States: in Silicon Valley and at Google. This makes it an American invention, which, like mass production, became a global reality. For this reason, much of this text focuses on developments in the US, although the consequences of these developments belong to the world.