All grew so fast his life was overgrown,
Till he forgot what all had once been made for:
He gathered into crowds but was alone...— W.H Auden
We are in times of rapid change in almost all aspects of modern life. Google was founded 20 years ago, the first iPhone was released just 13 years ago, and Instagram launched only 9 years ago—yet these tools and services have already revolutionized the daily lives of billions of people.
Despite this widespread adoption, it feels like we're still in the infant stages, psychologically, of understanding whats going on. It seems weird to say, but I don't think anyone, even Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk can grasp the long-term consequences of this technological transformation and how we will be changed by this new digital landscape.
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Soshanna Zuboff explores the business models and economics that have taken over the tech industry. These novel and effective forms of revenue generation have spurred the rapid innovation we've become so accustomed to over the past 20 years. The unsettling aspect of this business model, which Zuboff refers to as 'Surveillance Capitalism', is that it relies largely on subtlety and misdirection in order to be effective.
Zuboff takes a very aggressive stance in opposition to these tactics. In general she is extremely critical of the entire industry. It was of those books that appears to be composed entirely of facts and empirical evidence...but by the end you have a clear understanding of the author's opinions, fears, and biases.
The book is quite long, and for a number of reasons it took me about 6 months to finish it. One reason is that it's dense, content-wise; Zuboff wastes no sentence on superfluity, she relentlessly drives home her ideas with example after example. In the odd moment where she does try to exercise some artistic flair, it's hilarious. Like an AI trying to imitate a freshman English major:
But the lessons of that day had not yet been fully tallied when fresh answers—or, more modestly, the tenuous glimmers of answers as fragile as a newborn's translucent skin—rose to the surface of the world's attention gliding on scented ribbons of Spanish lavender and vanilla
— Zuboff, p. 135
No amount of context could make that paragraph any less weird. Similarly, on the subject of inequality:
This is existential toothpaste that, once liberated, cannot be squeezed back into the tube. Like a detonation's rippling sound waves of destruction, the reverberations of pain and anger that have come to define our era arise from this poisonous collision between inequality's facts and inequality's feelings
— Zuboff, p. 108
Honestly, adding the term 'existential toothpaste' to my vocabulary made reading this 700 page book worth it.
But in all seriousness, I'm torn over how I feel about the novel. On the one hand, I appreciate the immense amount of work and research that went in to compiling this book. It's also a relatively new field of study—Zuboff coined the term "surveillance capitalism". So I get why you'd want your theories to be supported by a strong body of work.
But...I also think it was too long and not focused enough. For example, the chapters (plural!) on behaviorism and it's academic history were pretty unnecessary.
More importantly, a lot of Zuboff's claims were too extreme and verged on fear-mongering. Her writing was melodramatic and I found myself rolling my eyes at many of the drawn conclusions. I think the tone could've been dialed down a notch on the "end-is-nigh" meter. Maybe I'm just an optimist.
Data for Fun and Profit
The primary thesis of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is that our privacy is being stolen from us by tech companies in our digitally connected society and that it's possible to prevent this if we act now. This mass data theft has been facilitated via the internet and the technologies it's built on. Tech companies made the decision to "ask forgiveness, not permission" when building the systems and services that support their business models. Why wait for a slow, bureaucratic government to decide what is allowed, if what is possible is immensely profitable?
In the last 10 years, surveillance capitalism has begun to overtake consumer industries and dominate capital markets. Zuboff provides a plethora of examples that illustrate this point. Every company is a now software company—meaning that software has become a vital need for every industry fighting to stay relevant and profitable in the digital world. Zuboff believes that, in our unsustainable capitalistic society which values growth above all else, there is no chance for a company to simply "sell a product" anymore:
The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product or service as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying. Where you might least expect it, products of every sort are remade by the new economic requirements of connection and rendition. Each is reimagined as a gateway to the new apparatus, praised for being "smart" while traditional alternatives are reviled for remaining "dumb."
— Zuboff, p. 565
"Smart" devices are capable of sensing, recording, and understanding their surroundings. Some of this data is used to make the device (or product, service etc.) more effective via feedback loops and the ability to 'learn' user's habits. But what makes digital data acquisition so valuable is that it's not a consumable resource. Data can be infinitely copied and reused by whomever has access in order to extract more value from it. This is the "behavioural surplus" that Zuboff refers to; surveillance capitalism is only concerned with extracting this data and either selling it as raw material, or transforming it through analysis and selling behavioral insights.
Some of the examples provided were actually astounding to me. It was surprising to see the extent to which this motive has pervaded different industries...like the vacuum industry:
Nothing is exempt, as products and services from every sector join devices like the Nest thermostat in the competition for surveillance revenues. For example, in July 2017 iRobot's autonomous vacuum cleaner, Roomba, made headlines when the company's CEO, Colin Angle, told Reuters about its data-based business strategy for the smart home, starting with a new revenue stream derived from selling floor plans of customers' homes scraped from the machine's new mapping capabilities. Angle indicated that iRobot could reach a deal to sell its maps to Google, Amazon, or Apple
— Zuboff, p. 555
Perhaps the most unsettling example (as if spying vacuums weren't enough) of surveillance capitalism's reach is Internet Service Providers. Zuboff spends a fair amount of time looking at how ISPs in the United States have been given the right to track your internet usage, sell your data to third-parties, and serve personalized ads to you, all without explicit user content. This was a reversal of an Obama-era legislation that Trump signed in 2017, after years of lobbying and pressure from the major telecom networks. Network carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast all want to profit off the exorbitant amounts of data they collect on their users, in the same way that Google and Facebook are able to.
This is a fundamentally flawed idea. Google is a free service we can choose not to use, but ISPs are paid to provide internet. Not only that, but internet service is not exactly a competitive marketplace—there is an extremely high cost of entry.
But now, the laws have been changed so that U.S citizens are paying ISPs to sell their private information to advertising companies.
The reversal meant that although federal laws protected the privacy of a telephone call, the same information transmitted by internet immediately enters the ISPs' surplus supply chains. This roust finally signaled the end of the myth of "free." The Faustian pact that had been sold to the world's internet users posed surveillance as the bitter price of free services such as Google's Search and Facebook's social network. This obfuscation is no longer tenable, as every consumer who pays his or her monthly telecom bill now also purchases the privilege of a remote and abstract but nevertheless rapacious digital strip search
— Zuboff, p. 414
This is like if you had to tell your municipal utility providers how you were using the water and electricity you consumed. And then they get to sell that information about you. It's ludicrous, but this is essentially how internet service works in the United States now.
Buy One Get None
A common misconception is that these practices should be expected, and tolerated, since these internet services are free. Sites like Google, Facebook, Youtube, and many others are really expensive to operate and maintain. They need to make money somehow, and using user data to serve targeted ads is the primary way they do. However, as evidenced above by the expensive vacuum cleaner which also spies on your home, this is certainly not the case.
Even after we pay these companies for their products and services, they still "unilaterally claim human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data" to put it in Zuboff's terms. Unrestrained access to our data is granted through our acceptance of "terms of service" and "end user license agreements": Faustian bargains we must agree to in order to share our cat photos and look at spongebob memes.
Having said that, I think It's worth pointing out that the "surveillance" in surveillance capitalism is not like traditional surveillance. You, as an individual, do not matter to these companies. Your writing, actions, and beliefs are not recorded for human consumption—they are fed into machines as fuel for algorithms and machine learning. Your reaction to your grandmother's passing on Facebook is just a bunch of bytes in a database somewhere. As Zuboff writes, the products of surveillance capitalism "manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behavior". I think it's important to keep in mind, as we tend to anthropomorphize these giant tech companies when we claim they "spy" on us.
As a Result
Zuboff insists that these business models aren't necessary components of our digital society, and this marketplace for personal data is unethical and undemocratic. While I agree that we must act to regulate these practices and prevent the unsolicited capture of our digital information, I don't agree with her proposal that this future we've found ourselves in was avoidable.
Key to our conversation is this fact: surveillance capitalism was invented by a specific group of human beings in a specific time and place. It is not an inherent result of digital technology, nor is it a necessary expression of information capitalism. It was intentionally constructed at a moment in history, in much the same way that the engineers and tinkerers at the Ford Motor Company invented mass production in the Detroit of 1913.
— Zuboff, p. 208
I feel that claiming things could have turned out differently is a pretty baseless statement to make. It's impossible to prove or deny, so debating these hypothetical outcomes is a waste of time.
In my opinion, any large scale changes to society and human behaviour are actually statistical certainties, once you've factored out the randomness of the natural world. In other words, societal and technological progress follows a set course for the most part. We just don't know what it is in advance. Following the advent of the internet, digital entertainment and social networking were natural extensions. As a result, huge amounts of digital user data was created. It's value wasn't invented, it was discovered.
This may seem like nihilistic fatalism, but I'm talking about all of humanity, not individuals. Each and every one of us still has plenty of agency to screw things up, at least in our own lives. :)
Zuboff never really backs up the claim that things could've turned out differently. She doesn't even spend much time discussing alternative business models or other ways of spurring rapid innovation. Just because these business practices were "intentionally constructed at a moment in history" doesn't mean it was preventable. No one blames the specific gust of wind on the specific day that knocks over an old, rickety fence...the fence was going to fall over eventually. The important thing is to learn from the fences that fall around us, the old ways of doing things, and the assumptions that can't be made anymore. We must figure out how to build a new, better fence, now that we know how strong the wind is.