SINCE the financial crash of 2008, and during the decade of austerity and upheaval that followed, the search has been on for a new Karl Marx, a thinker who can see our current system, and its crises of money, technology and work, as a vast and interconnected whole.
I am not sure that a measured business professor from Harvard University called Shoshana Zuboff would want to be seen as a modern version of the polemicist of poster or biopic fame. But she might not mind being the author of a book that many would hand to Marx as an essential catch-up, should he unaccountably reincarnate some 130 years after his death.
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Her book is called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and over nearly 700 pages it painstakingly outlines the economic form we are living under, mostly in the West, but increasingly globally. Sitting with a coffee and a cake in London, Zuboff muses on how she decided on her title. “The way that we are an information society is completely different from what we imagined when the internet first presented itself and we thought it was going to be empowering and democratising. Instead, it’s an actual challenge to democracy, a controlling power.”
Surveillance capitalism, as typified by Google, Facebook and Twitter, makes profits by seducing us onto various platforms, and monitoring our behaviour. That information is sold to advertisers, who target us ever more precisely with products and services. This much we think we know.
“This relentless new form of capitalism will stop at nothing to gather data on all human behaviour”
But Zuboff’s challenge to this thinking is deep – and threefold. First, she wants to alert us to how relentless this form of capitalism is. Industrial capitalism works by generating surpluses. Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, however, generates its surpluses from human behaviour, public and private, and the more it understands about us the better it can sell its predictions about our desires and next moves. This surplus was created accidentally, but has now become a secret resource – as much about subtle coercion as about making money.
Second, she emphasises that it doesn’t need to be this way. When “aware homes” were first mooted in 2000, it was assumed that the data they gathered on health, fitness, security and the like would be in a “closed loop” under the control of the people generating that data, says Zuboff.
Fast forward to 2017, when two academics at the University of London analysed a thermostat made by Nest, by then part of the empire that included Google. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected devices, including cars, ovens and beds. To keep the data private and stop the predictions made from it being sold on by Google to third parties, the researchers concluded that a consumer would have to study a minimum of 1000 privacy, end-user and terms-of-service contracts. The original, single closed loop of the aware home would never keep information-hungry firms like Google at bay.
Originally, Google’s founders weren’t keen to rely on advertising for income, knowing that it would corrupt the search process, she says. But in 2001, the dot-com financial crisis in Silicon Valley pushed some in the industry in a wholly new direction, towards something that could only be successful if done secretly: surveillance’s one-way mirror.
That secrecy undermined human rights, which is Zuboff’s third passion. She is determined to alert us to the need to assert those rights against this slippery, pervasive new regime. But when it seems so natural to communicate with friends and family via our digital devices, what could shock us out of our complacency?
Perhaps a close inspection of the words Zuboff has coined and the power structures she has defined. Let us start with “instrumented”. For her, this describes an ever-growing list of ways our freedom to act is being measured out of existence.
Zuboff quotes the case of , a “connected vehicle intelligence company” that can remotely switch off the engines of vehicles, based on its monitoring of how poorly the driver performed on previous drives. It can measure if their eyes are on the road or looking at friends.
We are in a strange world, where familiar politics are upside down. In place of totalitarianism, there is another coinage, “instrumentarianism”. She uses this word to describe the logic of, and power that comes from, recording and anticipating human behaviour, when the elites of surveillance capitalism quietly harvest the raw material of human actions and steadily shape our sense of the future without us realising it.
The weird thing, Zuboff writes in her book, is how this is beginning to unite the political cultures of East and West, of democracy, dictatorship and one-party states. We tut at China’s Social Credit System, which lets the state use all manner of technosurveillance to reward and punish its citizens, while the Western version seems to be heading in the same direction.
Towards the end of the book, Zuboff lays the blame for this at the feet of some of Silicon Valley’s odder cultural assumptions. “Inside these organisations, there’s a milieu of absolutism and intense hierarchy,” she says. “They determine the standards. They translate the greater good into behavioural requirements. I refer to them as a priesthood. They have a conceit that goes with their unique knowledge. For them, computation replaces politics.”
“It kills me that the only way my children will experience sanctuary is by hiding from an unimpeded power”
And there’s the rub. How can we possibly resist this Matrix of subtle prediction and control? Especially when it might prove to be the ultimate form of capitalism, with the power to reshape humans as never before?
In the book, she warns that as industrial capitalism flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, so “an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity”.
She ends her book with a plea for the importance of her version of “sanctuary”, a free and unmonitored zone where all humans feel they can “shape their intentions as they see fit”. A place that is anathema to the modern merchants of surveillance and prediction.
How is this sanctuary created? Drawing directly from Marx, Zuboff goes back to the trade unionists and reformers who moderated the harsh edges of 19th and 20th-century industrial capitalism. But she still believes that “the marriage of democracy and the market can again produce relatively stable and prosperous and inclusive forms of living”.
Recently, she has been asking Apple – whose business model is much less focused on surveillance than that of its competitors – to forge “an alternative path towards the digital future, reuniting capitalism with the people it should serve”.
And she respects renegades like Edward Snowden who want to protect our digital activity from the gaze of states or corporations. “Encryption may be an option – if democracy fails us,” she says. But you can tell how worried Zuboff really is by the way she ends our interview. “It kills me to think the only way my children will experience sanctuary – when you clear a space for the experience of your own will – is by hiding from an unimpeded power. The idea that we have to hide in our own lives is intolerable.”
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