The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 5
If there was anxiety, it reflected the necessity of living up to the requirements of one’s roles. One was expected to suppress any sense of self that spilled over the edges of the given social role, even at considerable psychic cost. Socialization and adaptation were the materials of a psychology and sociology that regarded the nuclear family as the “factory” for the “production of personalities” ready-made for conformity to the social norms of mass society.12 Those “factories” also produced a great deal of pain: the feminine mystique, closeted homosexuals, church-going atheists, and back-alley abortions. Eventually, though, they even produced people like you and me.
When I set out on the open road, there were few answers, nothing to emulate, no compass to follow except for the values and dreams that I carried inside me. I was not alone; the road was filled with so many others on the same kind of journey. The first modernity birthed us, but we brought a new mentality to life: a “second modernity.”13 What began as a modern migration from traditional lifeways bloomed into a new society of people born to a sense of psychological individuality, with its double-edged birthright of liberation and necessity. We experience both the right and the requirement to choose our own lives. No longer content to be anonymous members of the mass, we feel our entitlement to self-determination, an obvious truth to us that would have been an impossible act of hubris for Sophie and Max. This mentality is an extraordinary achievement of the human spirit, even as it can be a life sentence to uncertainty, anxiety, and stress.
Since the second half of the twentieth century, the individualization story has taken this new turn toward a “second modernity.” Industrialization modernity and the practices of mass production capitalism at its core produced more wealth than had ever been imagined possible. Where democratic politics, distributional policies, access to education and health care, and strong civil society institutions complemented that wealth, a new “society of individuals” first began to emerge. Hundreds of millions of people gained access to experiences that had once been the preserve of a tiny elite: university education, travel, improved life expectancy, disposable income, rising standards of living, broad access to consumer goods, varied communication and information flows, and specialized, intellectually demanding work.
The hierarchical social compact and mass society of the first modernity promised predictable rewards, but their very success was the knife that cut us loose and sent us tumbling onto the shores of the second modernity, propelling us toward more-intricate and richly patterned lives. Education and knowledge work increased mastery of language and thought, the tools with which we create personal meaning and form our own opinions. Communication, information, consumption, and travel stimulated individual self-consciousness and imaginative capabilities, informing perspectives, values, and attitudes in ways that could no longer be contained by predefined roles or group identity. Improved health and longer life spans provided the time for a self-life to deepen and mature, fortifying the legitimacy of personal identity over and against a priori social norms.
Even when we revert to traditional roles, these are choices now rather than absolute truths imposed at birth. As the great clinician of identity, Erik Erikson, once described it, “The patient of today suffers most under the problem of what he should believe and who he should—or… might—be or become; while the patient of early psychoanalysis suffered most under inhibitions which prevented him from being what and who he thought he knew he was.”14 This new mentality has been most pronounced in wealthier countries, but research shows significant pluralities of second-modernity individuals in nearly every region of the world.15
The first modernity suppressed the growth and expression of self in favor of collective solutions, but by the second modernity, the self is all we have. The new sense of psychological sovereignty broke upon the world long before the internet appeared to amplify its claims. We learn through trial and error how to stitch together our lives. Nothing is given. Everything must be reviewed, renegotiated, and reconstructed on the terms that make sense to us: family, religion, sex, gender, morality, marriage, community, love, nature, social connections, political participation, career, food…
Indeed, it was this new mentality and its demands that summoned the internet and the burgeoning information apparatus into our everyday lives. The burdens of life without a fixed destiny turned us toward the empowering information-rich resources of the new digital milieu as it offered new ways to amplify our voices and forge our own chosen patterns of connection. So profound is this phenomenon that one can say without exaggeration that the individual as the author of his or her own life is the protagonist of our age, whether we experience this fact as emancipation or affliction.16
Western modernity had formed around a canon of principles and laws that confer inviolable individual rights and acknowledge the sanctity of each individual life.17 However, it was not until the second modernity that felt experience began to catch up with formal law. This felt truth has been expressed in new demands to make actual in everyday life what is already established in law.18
In spite of its liberating potential, the second modernity was slated to become a hard place to live, and our conditions of existence today reflect this trouble. Some of the challenges of the second modernity arise from the inevitable costs associated with the creation and sustenance of one’s own life, but second-modernity instability is also the result of institutionalized shifts in economic and social policies and practices associated with the neoliberal paradigm and its rise to dominance. This far-reaching paradigm has been aimed at containing, rechanneling, and reversing the secular wave of second-modernity claims to self-determination and the habitats in which those claims can thrive. We live in this collision between a centuries-old story of modernization and a decades-old story of economic violence that thwarts our pursuit of effective life.
There is a rich and compelling literature that documents this turning point in economic history, and my aim here is simply to call attention to some of the themes in this larger narrative that are vital to our understanding of the collision: the condition of existence that summoned both the Apple “miracle” and surveillance capitalism’s subsequent gestation and growth.19
III. The Neoliberal Habitat
The mid-1970s saw the postwar economic order under siege from stagnation, inflation, and sharply reduced growth, most markedly in the US and the UK. There were also new pressures on the political order as second-modernity individuals—especially students, young workers, African Americans, women, Latinos, and other marginalized groups—mobilized around demands for equal rights, voice, and participation. In the US the Vietnam War was a focal point of social unrest, and the corruption exposed by the Watergate scandal triggered public insistence on political reform. In the UK inflation had strained industrial relations beyond the breaking point. In both countries the specter of apparently intractable economic decay combined with vocal new demands on the democratic social compact produced confusion, anxiety, and desperation among elected officials ill-equipped to judge why once-reliable Keynesian policies had failed to reverse the course.
Neoliberal economists had been waiting in the wings for this opportunity, and their ideas flowed into the “policy vacuum” that now bedeviled both governments.20 Led by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, fresh from his 1974 Nobel Prize, and his American counterpart Milton Friedman, who received the Nobel two years later, they had honed their radical free-market economic theory, political ideology, and pragmatic agenda throughout the postwar period at the fringe of their profession, under the shadow of Keynesian domination, and now their time had come.21
The free-market creed originated in Europe as a sweeping defense against the threat of totalitarian and communist collectivist ideologies. It aimed to revive acceptance of a self-regulating market as a natural force of such complexity and perfection that it demanded radical freedom from all forms of state oversight. Hayek explained the necessity of absolute individual and collective submission to the
exacting disciplines of the market as an unknowable “extended order” that supersedes the legitimate political authority vested in the state: “Modern economics explains how such an extended order… constitutes an information-gathering process… that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess, or control.…”22 Hayek and his ideological brethren insisted on a capitalism stripped down to its raw core, unimpeded by any other force and impervious to any external authority. Inequality of wealth and rights was accepted and even celebrated as a necessary feature of a successful market system and as a force for progress.23 Hayek’s ideology provided the intellectual superstructure and legitimation for a new theory of the firm that became another crucial antecedent to the surveillance capitalist corporation: its structure, moral content, and relationship to society.
The new conception was operationalized by economists Michael Jensen and William Meckling. Leaning heavily on Hayek’s work, the two scholars took an ax to the pro-social principles of the twentieth-century corporation, an ax that became known as the “shareholder value movement.” In 1976 Jensen and Meckling published a landmark article in which they reinterpreted the manager as a sort of parasite feeding off the host of ownership: unavoidable, perhaps, but nonetheless an obstacle to shareholder wealth. They boldly argued that structural disconnect between owners and managers “can result in the value of the firm being substantially lower than it otherwise could be.”24 If managers suboptimized the value of the firm to its owners in favor of their own preferences and comfort, it was only rational for them to do so. The solution, these economists argued, was to assert the market’s signal of value, the share price, as the basis for a new incentive structure intended to finally and decisively align managerial behavior with owners’ interests. Managers who failed to bend to the ineffable signals of Hayek’s “extended order” would quickly become prey to the “barbarians at the gate” in a new and vicious hunt for unrealized market value.
In the “crisis of democracy” zeitgeist, the neoliberal vision and its reversion to market metrics was deeply attractive to politicians and policy makers, both as the means to evade political ownership of tough economic choices and because it promised to impose a new kind of order where disorder was feared.25 The absolute authority of market forces would be enshrined as the ultimate source of imperative control, displacing democratic contest and deliberation with an ideology of atomized individuals sentenced to perpetual competition for scarce resources. The disciplines of competitive markets promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects too preoccupied with survival to complain.
As the old collectivist enemies had receded, new ones took their place: state regulation and oversight, social legislation and welfare policies, labor unions and the institutions of collective bargaining, and the principles of democratic politics. Indeed, all these were to be replaced by the market’s version of truth, and competition would be the solution to growth. The new aims would be achieved through supply-side reforms, including deregulation, privatization, and lower taxes.
Thirty-five years before Hayek and Friedman’s ascendance, the great historian Karl Polanyi wrote eloquently on the rise of the market economy. Polanyi’s studies led him to conclude that the operations of a self-regulating market are profoundly destructive when allowed to run free of countervailing laws and policies. He described the double movement: “a network of measures and policies… integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land, and money.”26
The double movement, Polanyi argued, supports the market form while tethering it to society: balancing, moderating, and mitigating its destructive excesses. Polanyi observed that such countermeasures emerged spontaneously in every European society during the second half of the nineteenth century. Each constructed legislative, regulatory, and institutional solutions to oversee contested new arenas such as workers’ compensation, factory inspection, municipal trading, public utilities, food safety, child labor, and public safety.
In the US the double movement was achieved through decades of social contest that harnessed industrial production, however imperfectly, to society’s needs. It appeared in the trust busting, civil society, and legislative reforms of the Progressive Era. Later it was elaborated in the legislative, juridical, social, and tax initiatives of the New Deal and the institutionalization of Keynesian economics during the post–World War II era: labor market, tax, and social welfare policies that ultimately increased economic and social equality.27 The double movement was further developed in the legislative initiatives of the Great Society, especially civil rights law and landmark environmental legislation. Many scholars credit such countermeasures with the success of market democracy in the US and Europe, a political economics that proved far more adaptive in its ability to produce reciprocities of demand and supply than either leftist theorists or even Polanyi had imagined, and by mid-century the large corporation appeared to be a deeply rooted and durable modern social institution.28
The double movement was scheduled for demolition under the neoliberal flag, and implementation began immediately. In 1976, the same year that Jensen and Meckling published their pathbreaking analysis, President Jimmy Carter initiated the first significant efforts to radically align the corporation with Wall Street’s market metrics, targeting the airline, transportation, and financial sectors with a bold program of deregulation. What began as a “ripple” turned into “a tidal wave that washed away controls from large segments of the economy in the last two decades of the twentieth century.”29 The implementation that began with Carter would define the Reagan and Thatcher eras, virtually every subsequent US presidency, and much of the rest of the world, as the new fiscal and social policies spread to Europe and other regions in varying degrees.30
Thus began the disaggregation and diminishment of the US public firm.31 The public corporation as a social institution was reinterpreted as a costly error, and its long-standing reciprocities with customers and employees were recast as destructive violations of market efficiency. Financial carrots and sticks persuaded executives to dismember and shrink their companies, and the logic of capitalism shifted from the profitable production of goods and services to increasingly exotic forms of financial speculation. The disciplines imposed by the new market operations stripped capitalism down to its raw core, and by 1989 Jensen confidently proclaimed the “eclipse of the public corporation.”32
By the turn of the century, as the foundational mechanisms of surveillance capitalism were just beginning to take shape, “shareholder value maximization” was widely accepted as the “objective function” of the firm.33 These principles, culled from a once-extremist philosophy, were canonized as standard practice across commercial, financial, and legal domains.34 By 2000, US public corporations employed fewer than half as many Americans as they did in 1970.35 In 2009 there were only half as many public firms as in 1997. The public corporation had become “unnecessary for production, unsuited for stable employment and the provision of social welfare services, and incapable of proving a reliable long-term return on investment.”36 In this process the cult of the “entrepreneur” would rise to near-mythic prominence as the perfect union of ownership and management, replacing the rich existential possibilities of the second modernity with a single glorified template of audacity, competitive cunning, dominance, and wealth.
IV. The Instability of the Second Modernity
On August 9, 2011, around the same time that cheers erupted in Apple’s conference room, 16,000 police officers flooded the streets of London, determined to quell “the most widespread and prolonged breakdown of order in London’s history since the Gordon riot of 1780.”37 The rioting had begun four nights earlier when a peaceful vigil triggered by the police shooting of a young man suddenly turned violent. In the days that followed, the number of rioters swelled as looting and arson spread to twenty-two of London’s thirty-two boroughs and other major cities across Britain
.38 Over four days of street action, thousands of people caused property damage of over $50 million, and 3,000 people were arrested.
Even as Apple’s ascension appeared to ratify the claims of second-modernity individuals, the streets of London told the grim legacy of a three-decade experiment in economic growth through exclusion. One week after the rioting, an article by sociologist Saskia Sassen in the Daily Beast observed that “if there’s one underlying condition, it has to do with the unemployment and bitter poverty among people who desire to be part of the middle class and who are keenly aware of the sharp inequality between themselves and their country’s wealthy elite. These are in many ways social revolutions with a small ‘r,’ protests against social conditions that have become unbearable.”39
What were the social conditions that had become so unbearable? Many analysts agreed that the tragedy of Britain’s riots was set into motion by neoliberalism’s successful transformation of society: a program that was most comprehensively executed in the UK and the US. Indeed, research from the London School of Economics based on interviews with 270 people who had participated in the rioting reported on the predominant theme of inequality: “no job, no money.”40 The terms of reference in nearly every study sound the same drumbeat: lack of opportunity, lack of access to education, marginalization, deprivation, grievance, hopelessness.41 And although the London riots differed substantially from other protests that preceded and followed, most notably the Indignados movement that began with a large-scale public mobilization in Madrid in May 2011 and the Occupy movement that would emerge on September 17 in Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park, they shared a point of origin in the themes of economic inequality and exclusion.42