The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Read online

  In studying the surveillance capitalist practices of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other corporations, I have paid close attention to interviews, patents, earnings calls, speeches, conferences, videos, and company programs and policies. In addition, between 2012 and 2015 I interviewed 52 data scientists from 19 different companies with a combined 586 years of experience in high-technology corporations and startups, primarily in Silicon Valley. These interviews were conducted as I developed my “ground truth” understanding of surveillance capitalism and its material infrastructure. Early on I approached a small number of highly respected data scientists, senior software developers, and specialists in the “internet of things.” My interview sample grew as scientists introduced me to their colleagues. The interviews, sometimes over many hours, were conducted with the promise of confidentiality and anonymity, but my gratitude toward them is personal, and I publicly declare it here.

  Finally, throughout this book you will read excerpts from W. H. Auden’s Sonnets from China, along with the entirety of Sonnet XVIII. This cycle of Auden’s poems is dear to me, a poignant exploration of humanity’s mythic history, the perennial struggle against violence and domination, and the transcendent power of the human spirit and its relentless claim on the future.

  PART I

  THE FOUNDATIONS OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM

  CHAPTER TWO

  AUGUST 9, 2011: SETTING THE STAGE FOR SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM

  The dangers and the punishments grew greater,

  And the way back by angels was defended

  Against the poet and the legislator.

  —W. H. AUDEN

  SONNETS FROM CHINA, II

  On August 9, 2011, three events separated by thousands of miles captured the bountiful prospects and gathering dangers of our emerging information civilization. First, Silicon Valley pioneer Apple promised a digital dream of new solutions to old economic and social problems, and finally surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world’s most highly capitalized corporation. Second, a fatal police shooting in London sparked extensive rioting across the city, engulfing the country in a wave of violent protests. A decade of explosive digital growth had failed to mitigate the punishing austerity of neoliberal economics and the extreme inequality that it produced. Too many people had come to feel excluded from the future, embracing rage and violence as their only remedies. Third, Spanish citizens asserted their rights to a human future when they challenged Google by demanding “the right to be forgotten.” This milestone alerted the world to how quickly the cherished dreams of a more just and democratic digital future were shading into nightmare, and it foreshadowed a global political contest over the fusion of digital capabilities and capitalist ambitions. We relive that August day every day as in some ancient fable, doomed to retrace this looping path until the soul of our information civilization is finally shaped by democratic action, private power, ignorance, or drift.

  I. The Apple Hack

  Apple thundered onto the music scene in the midst of a pitched battle between demand and supply. On one side were young people whose enthusiasm for Napster and other forms of music file sharing expressed a new quality of demand: consumption my way, what I want, when I want it, where I want it. On the other side were music-industry executives who chose to instill fear and to crush that demand by hunting down and prosecuting some of Napster’s most-ardent users. Apple bridged the divide with a commercially and legally viable solution that aligned the company with the changing needs of individuals while working with industry incumbents. Napster hacked the music industry, but Apple appeared to have hacked capitalism.

  It is easy to forget just how dramatic Apple’s hack really was. The company’s profits soared largely on the strength of its iPod/iTunes/iPhone sales. Bloomberg Businessweek described Wall Street analysts as “befuddled” by this mysterious Apple “miracle.” As one gushed, “We can’t even model out some of the possibilities.… It’s like a religion.”1 Even today the figures are staggering: three days after the launch of the Windows-compatible iTunes platform in October 2003, listeners downloaded a million copies of the free iTunes software and paid for a million songs, prompting Steve Jobs to announce, “In less than one week we’ve broken every record and become the largest online music company in the world.”2 Within a month there were five million downloads, then ten million three months later, then twenty-five million three months after that. Four and a half years later, in January 2007, that number rose to two billion, and six years later, in 2013, it was 25 billion. In 2008 Apple surpassed Walmart as the world’s largest music retailer. iPod sales were similarly spectacular, exploding from 1 million units per month after the music store’s launch to 100 million less than four years later, when Apple subsumed the iPod’s functions in its revolutionary iPhone, which drove another step-function of growth. A 2017 study of stock market returns concluded that Apple had generated more profit for investors than any other US company in the previous century.3

  One hundred years before the iPod, mass production provided the gateway to a new era when it revealed a parallel universe of economic value hidden in new and still poorly understood mass consumers who wanted goods, but at a price they could afford. Henry Ford reduced the price of an automobile by 60 percent with a revolutionary industrial logic that combined high volume and low unit cost. He called it “mass production,” summarized in his famous maxim “You can have any color car you want so long as it’s black.”

  Later, GM’s Alfred Sloan expounded on that principle: “By the time we have a product to show them [consumers], we are necessarily committed to selling that product because of the tremendous investment involved in bringing it to market.”4 The music industry’s business model was built on telling its consumers what they would buy, just like Ford and Sloan. Executives invested in the production and distribution of CDs, and it was the CD that customers would have to purchase.

  Henry Ford was among the first to strike gold by tapping into the new mass consumption with the Model T. As in the case of the iPod, Ford’s Model T factory was pressed to meet the immediate explosion of demand. Mass production could be applied to anything, and it was. It changed the framework of production as it diffused throughout the economy and around the world, and it established the dominance of a new mass-production capitalism as the basis for wealth creation in the twentieth century.

  The iPod/iTunes innovations flipped this century-old industrial logic, leveraging the new capabilities of digital technologies to invert the consumption experience. Apple rewrote the relationship between listeners and their music with a distinct commercial logic that, while familiar to us now, was also experienced as revolutionary when first introduced.

  The Apple inversion depended on a few key elements. Digitalization made it possible to rescue valued assets—in this case, songs—from the institutional spaces in which they were trapped. The costly institutional procedures that Sloan had described were eliminated in favor of a direct route to listeners. In the case of the CD, for example, Apple bypassed the physical production of the product along with its packaging, inventory, storage, marketing, transportation, distribution, and physical retailing. The combination of the iTunes platform and the iPod device made it possible for listeners to continuously reconfigure their songs at will. No two iPods were the same, and an iPod one week was different from the same iPod another week, as listeners decided and re-decided the dynamic pattern. It was an excruciating development for the music industry and its satellites—retailers, marketers, etc.—but it was exactly what the new listeners wanted.

  How should we understand this success? Apple’s “miracle” is typically credited to its design and marketing genius. Consumers’ eagerness to have “what I want, when, where, and how I want it” is taken as evidence of the demand for “convenience” and sometimes even written off as narcissism or petulance. In my view, these explanations pale against the unprecedented magnitude of Apple’s accomplishments. We have contented ourselves for too long with superficial explanatio
ns of Apple’s unprecedented fusion of capitalism and the digital rather than digging deeper into the historical forces that summoned this new form to life.

  Just as Ford tapped into a new mass consumption, Apple was among the first to experience explosive commercial success by tapping into a new society of individuals and their demand for individualized consumption. The inversion implied a larger story of a commercial reformation in which the digital era finally offered the tools to shift the focus of consumption from the mass to the individual, liberating and reconfiguring capitalism’s operations and assets. It promised something utterly new, urgently necessary, and operationally impossible outside the networked spaces of the digital. Its implicit promise of an advocacy-oriented alignment with our new needs and values was a confirmation of our inner sense of dignity and worth, ratifying the feeling that we matter. In offering consumers respite from an institutional world that was indifferent to their individual needs, it opened the door to the possibility of a new rational capitalism able to reunite supply and demand by connecting us to what we really want in exactly the ways that we choose.

  As I shall argue in the coming chapters, the same historical conditions that sent the iPod on its wild ride summoned the emancipatory promise of the internet into our everyday lives as we sought remedies for inequality and exclusion. Of most significance for our story, these same conditions would provide important shelter for surveillance capitalism’s ability to root and flourish. More precisely, the Apple miracle and surveillance capitalism each owes its success to the destructive collision of two opposing historical forces. One vector belongs to the longer history of modernization and the centuries-long societal shift from the mass to the individual. The opposing vector belongs to the decades-long elaboration and implementation of the neoliberal economic paradigm: its political economics, its transformation of society, and especially its aim to reverse, subdue, impede, and even destroy the individual urge toward psychological self-determination and moral agency. The next sections briefly sketch the basic contours of this collision, establishing terms of reference that we will return to throughout the coming chapters as we explore surveillance capitalism’s rapid rise to dominance.

  II. The Two Modernities

  Capitalism evolves in response to the needs of people in a time and place. Henry Ford was clear on this point: “Mass production begins in the perception of a public need.”5 At a time when the Detroit automobile manufacturers were preoccupied with luxury vehicles, Ford stood alone in his recognition of a nation of newly modernizing individuals—farmers, wage earners, and shopkeepers—who had little and wanted much, but at a price they could afford. Their “demand” issued from the same conditions of existence that summoned Ford and his men as they discovered the transformational power of a new logic of standardized, high-volume, low-unit-cost production. Ford’s famous “five-dollar day” was emblematic of a systemic logic of reciprocity. In paying assembly-line workers higher wages than anyone had yet imagined, he recognized that the whole enterprise of mass production rested upon a thriving population of mass consumers.

  Although the market form and its bosses had many failings and produced many violent facts, its populations of newly modernizing individuals were valued as the necessary sources of customers and employees. It depended upon its communities in ways that would eventually lead to a range of institutionalized reciprocities. On the outside the drama of access to affordable goods and services was bound by democratic measures and methods of oversight that asserted and protected the rights and safety of workers and consumers. On the inside were durable employment systems, career ladders, and steady increases in wages and benefits.6 Indeed, considered from the vantage point of the last forty years, during which this market form was systematically deconstructed, its reciprocity with the social order, however vexed and imperfect, appears to have been one of its most-salient features.

  The implication is that new market forms are most productive when they are shaped by an allegiance to the actual demands and mentalities of people. The great sociologist Emile Durkheim made this point at the dawn of the twentieth century, and his insight will be a touchstone for us throughout this book. Observing the dramatic upheavals of industrialization in his time—factories, specialization, the complex division of labor—Durkheim understood that although economists could describe these developments, they could not grasp their cause. He argued that these sweeping changes were “caused” by the changing needs of people and that economists were (and remain) systematically blind to these social facts:

  The division of labor appears to us otherwise than it does to economists. For them, it essentially consists in greater production. For us, this greater productivity is only a necessary consequence, a repercussion of the phenomenon. If we specialize, it is not to produce more, but it is to enable us to live in the new conditions of existence that have been made for us.7

  The sociologist identified the perennial human quest to live effectively in our “conditions of existence” as the invisible causal power that summons the division of labor, technologies, work organization, capitalism, and ultimately civilization itself. Each is forged in the same crucible of human need that is produced by what Durkheim called the always intensifying “violence of the struggle” for effective life: “If work becomes more divided,” it is because the “struggle for existence is more acute.”8 The rationality of capitalism reflects this alignment, however imperfect, with the needs that people experience as they try to live their lives effectively, struggling with the conditions of existence that they encounter in their time and place.

  When we look through this lens, we can see that those eager customers for Ford’s incredible Model T and the new consumers of iPods and iPhones are expressions of the conditions of existence that characterized their era. In fact, each is the fruit of distinct phases of a centuries-long process known as “individualization” that is the human signature of the modern era. Ford’s mass consumers were members of what has been called the “first modernity,”9 but the new conditions of the “second modernity” produced a new kind of individual for whom the Apple inversion, and the many digital innovations that followed, would become essential. This second modernity summoned the likes of Google and Facebook into our lives, and, in an unexpected twist, helped to enable the surveillance capitalism that would follow.

  What are these modernities and how do they matter to our story? The advent of the individual as the locus of moral agency and choice initially occurred in the West, where the conditions for this emergence first took hold. First let’s establish that the concept of “individualization” should not be confused with the neoliberal ideology of “individualism” that shifts all responsibility for success or failure to a mythical, atomized, isolated individual, doomed to a life of perpetual competition and disconnected from relationships, community, and society. Neither does it refer to the psychological process of “individuation” that is associated with the lifelong exploration of self-development. Instead, individualization is a consequence of long-term processes of modernization.10

  Until the last few minutes of human history, each life was foretold in blood and geography, sex and kin, rank and religion. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s son. The sense of the human being as an individual emerged gradually over centuries, clawed from this ancient vise. Around two hundred years ago, we embarked upon the first modern road where life was no longer handed down one generation to the next according to the traditions of village and clan. This “first modernity” marks the time when life became “individualized” for great numbers of people as they separated from traditional norms, meanings, and rules.11 That meant each life became an open-ended reality to be discovered rather than a certainty to be enacted. Even where the traditional world remains intact for many people today, it can no longer be experienced as the only possible story.

  I often think about the courage of my great-grandparents. What mixture of sadness, terror, and exhilaration did they feel when in 1908,
determined to escape the torments of the Cossacks in their tiny village outside of Kiev, they packed their five children, including my four-year-old grandfather Max, and all their belongings into a wagon and pointed the horses toward a steamer bound for America? Like millions of other pioneers of this first modernity, they escaped a still-feudal world and found themselves improvising a profoundly new kind of life. Max would later marry Sophie and build a family far from the rhythms of the villages that birthed them. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado captured the exhilaration and daring of these first-modernity individuals in his famous song: “Traveler, there is no road; the road is made as you go.” This is what “search” has meant: a journey of exploration and self-creation, not an instant swipe to already composed answers.

  Still, the new industrial society retained many of the hierarchical motifs of the older feudal world in its patterns of affiliation based on class, race, occupation, religion, ethnicity, sex, and the leviathans of mass society: its corporations, workplaces, unions, churches, political parties, civic groups, and school systems. This new world order of the mass and its bureaucratic logic of concentration, centralization, standardization, and administration still provided solid anchors, guidelines, and goals for each life.

  Compared to their parents and all the generations before, Sophie and Max had to make things up on their own, but not everything. Sophie knew she would raise the family. Max knew he would earn their living. You adapted to what the world had on offer, and you followed the rules. Nor did anyone ask your opinion or listen if you spoke. You were expected to do what you were supposed to do, and little by little you made your way. You raised a nice family, and eventually you’d have a house, car, washing machine, and refrigerator. Mass production pioneers like Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan had found a way to get you these things at a price you could afford.