Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and author of The capitalism of surveillance (Luiss University Press) is a celebrity that goes beyond academia and the intellectual elite. Surveillance capitalism is now being talked about on prime-time talk shows.
In this short essay, which we publish in the Italian translation, Zukoff explains with rare clarity how this form of extractive capitalism was born and developed, almost invisible to the masses who are happy to benefit from his services.
The protagonists of surveillance capitalism there are three: those who practice it without worrying about the general consequences for their own benefit and those of the shareholders, the public who are content to donate their personal data for a couple of candies and finally the legislators who look the other way out of fear to make unpopular choices.
THANK YOU JACK DORSEY
These days Jack Dorsey has resigned from the leadership of Twitter. Thanks to him, Twitter has not entered the ranks of the lionesses of the new economy who practice surveillance capitalism. In fact, many, especially on Wall Street, wonder how such a paradox as Twitter can exist.
That is, that of a social media which, being among the most authoritative with its 250 million active users, has such meager revenues and profits. Simple: because Twitter did the right thing from a general interest point of view: it stayed out of the lucrative practices of surveillance capitalism.
If you stay inside your capitalization can reach a trillion, if you stay outside it can hardly exceed 1/20th of that figure. So surveillance capitalism multiplies the “natural” value of a free web service 20 times.
But what is this type of capitalism and how did it come about? Zuboff explains it well, who has been studying the phenomenon of the digital economy for 20 years. Here is his essay
THE NEW EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRY
Facebook is not just any company. It has risen to trillion-dollar status in just one decade thanks to the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism – an economic system built on covert extraction and manipulation of people's data – which aspires to connect the whole world. Facebook and other major surveillance capitalist entities now control information flows and communications infrastructure around the world.
These infrastructures are essential to a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces without being governed in any way by public law. The result has been a hidden revolution in the way information is produced, circulated and processed. A cascade of revelations from 2016 to today, confirmed by the documentation and personal testimony of the whistle-blower Frances Haugen, bears witness to the consequences of this revolution.
The liberal democracies of the world now face the tragedy of the "uncommon", i.e. the information spaces that people assume as public that are instead closely tied to private commercial interests aimed at the pursuit of maximum profit.
NO WAY OUT?
The Internet as a self-regulating market has proved to be a failed experiment. Surveillance capitalism leaves a trail of social devastation: the destruction of privacy, the intensification of social inequality, the tightening of public discourse with defactualized information, the demolition of social norms and the weakening of democratic institutions.
These social damages are not accidental. These effects are strictly connected to the stage of progress of economic operations. Each damage paves the way for the next and depends on what preceded it.
There is no escaping the automatic systems that watch over us, whether we are shopping, driving or walking in the park. All avenues of economic and social participation now pass through the territory of profit-maximizing surveillance capitalism, a condition heightened during nearly two years of a global pandemic.
Will Facebook's digital violence finally awaken the commitment to take back the "uncommon"? Will we address the long-ignored fundamental questions of an information civilization? How should we organize and govern the information and communication spaces of the digital century in a way that supports and advances democratic values and principles?
IT ALL BEGAN WITH GOOGLE
Facebook as we know it today is modeled on an offshoot of Google. Mark Zuckerberg's startup didn't invent surveillance capitalism. It was Google who did it. In 2000, when only 25% of the world's information was stored digitally, Google was a small start-up with a great search product, but little revenue.
In 2001, in the midst of the dot-com crisis, Google leaders came up with a series of inventions that would transform the advertising industry. Their team began combining the massive streams of data and personal information with advanced computational analysis to predict where an advertisement might get the most click-through.
The forecasts were initially calculated by analyzing the traces that users had unknowingly left on the company's servers as they browsed or searched Google pages. Google scientists have learned to extract predictive metadata from this "data stock" and use it to analyze likely patterns of future behavior.
THE PREDICTIVE MODEL
Prediction was the first imperative driving the second imperative: data mining. Lucrative forecasts required data flows on an almost unimaginable scale. Little did users suspect that their data was being secretly harvested from every nook and cranny of the internet and, later, by apps, smartphones, internet-connected devices, cameras and sensors. User ignorance was the crux of the project's success. Each new product was a means to achieve greater "engagement," a euphemism used to disguise illicit mining operations.
When asked "What is Google?" co-founder Larry Page answered in 2001, according to a detailed account by Douglas Edwards (Google's first brand manager) in his book I'm Feeling Lucky: “Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate massive amounts of data. Everything that has ever been seen or experienced will become searchable. All of life will be searchable."
Instead of charging users for the search service, Google survived by turning its search engine into a sophisticated surveillance tool for capturing personal data. Company executives have worked to keep these operations secret, hidden from users, regulators and competitors. Page opposed anything that could "stir the privacy pot and endanger our ability to collect data," Edwards wrote.
THE BIRTH OF A NEW ECONOMIC BUILDING
Large-scale mining operations were the keystone of the new economic edifice and replaced other purposes, starting with the quality of information, because in the logic of surveillance capitalism, the integrity of information has no connection with revenues.
This is the economic context in which disinformation has emerged. In 2017, Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, acknowledged the role of Google's algorithmic ranking operations in spreading misleading information.
"There's a line that we really can't cross," she said. “It is very difficult for us to understand the truth. A company with the mission to organize and make accessible all the world's information using the most sophisticated algorithms cannot distinguish correct information from incorrect information”.
FACEBOOK, THE FIRST FOLLOWER
Mark Zuckerberg began his entrepreneurial career in 2003 while a student at Harvard. His website, Facemash, invited visitors to rate the sex appeal of other students. The site caused outrage among peers and was shut down. Then came TheFacebook in 2004 and Facebook in 2005, when Zuckerberg acquired the first professional investors.
The number of Facebook users grew rapidly; his income does not. Like Google a few years earlier, Zuckerberg couldn't turn popularity into revenue and profit.
It went from one gaffe to another and the constant violations of user privacy provoked strong public reactions, petitions and class-action lawsuits.
Zuckerberg seemed to understand that the answer to his problems was to extract personal data without consent and sell it to advertisers, but the complexity of the logic of this eluded him.
So he turned to Google for answers.
In March 2008, Zuckerberg brought over Google's head of global online advertising, Sheryl Sandberg, to Facebook as his second-in-command. Sandberg joined Google in 2001 and played a key role in revolutionizing surveillance capitalism. She led the building of Google's advertising engine, AdWords, and its own AdSense program, which together accounted for the majority of the company's $16,6 billion in 2007 revenue.
HERE COMES SHERYL SANDBERG
Already a multimillionaire at Google, the moment she was approached by Zuckerberg, Sandberg realized Facebook's immense opportunities for mining rich predictive data. “We have better information than anyone else. We know the gender, the age, the location, and it's real data as opposed to the things other people infer," said Sandberg, according to David Kirkpatrick, author of the book The Facebook Effect.
The company had "better data" and "real data" because it had a front-row seat to what Page had called "your whole life."
With new privacy policies in late 2009, Facebook pioneered the surveillance economy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation had noted that the new “Everyone” setting would remove all options for limiting the visibility of personal data, instead treating it as publicly available information.
TechCrunch summed up the company's strategy well: “Facebook is forcing users to choose new privacy options to promote the 'Everyone' update and to rid itself of any potential future data abuse. In partial exoneration of the company, it can be argued that users have voluntarily made the choice to share their information with everyone.
Weeks later, Zuckerberg defended these moves in a TechCrunch interview. “A lot of companies would have been trapped by customs and their heritage,” he boasted. "But we decided that these would be the new social norms here and now, and we went down this road."
Zuckerberg "literally went down this road" because there were no laws that prevented him from joining Google in the total destruction of privacy. If lawmakers wanted to sanction him as a ruthless profit maximizer ready to use his social network against society, then 2009-2010 would have been a good time.
AN OVERWHELMING ECONOMIC ORDER
Facebook was the first follower of Google, but not the last. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are private surveillance empires, each with distinct business models. Google and Facebook are pure surveillance-capitalist companies. The others have various lines of business which include data, services, software and physical products. As of 2021, these five American tech giants represent five of the six largest publicly traded companies by market capitalization.
As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, surveillance capitalism is the dominant economic institution of our time. In the absence of balancing laws, this system successfully mediates nearly every aspect of people's relationship with digital information. The promise of the dividend that surveillance brings has come to bring the surveillance economy into the "normal" economy, into insurance, retail, banking and finance, agriculture, auto manufacturing, education, healthcare healthcare and many other sectors. Today all apps and software, no matter how benign they appear, are designed to maximize data collection.
Historically, large concentrations of corporate power have caused economic damage. But when personal data is the raw material and predictions of people's behavior are the product, then the harms are social rather than economic. The difficulty is that these new mishaps are usually seen as separate, even unrelated problems, making them difficult to fix. Instead, each new stage of damage creates the conditions for the next stage of damage.
THE ASYMMETRIC EXTRACTION
It all starts with extraction. An economic order founded on the large-scale secret extraction of personal data presupposes the destruction of privacy as an essential condition of its commercial operations. With privacy out of the way, illicitly obtained personal data becomes the assets of private corporations, where they are understood as corporate assets to be used at will.
The social effect is a new form of inequality reflected in the colossal asymmetry between what these companies know about us and what we know about them. The size of this knowledge gap emerges in a leaked 2018 paper from Facebook, which described its AI hub, which gobbles trillions of behavioral data every day and produces six million behavioral predictions every second.
Subsequently, this personal data is used as targeting algorithms, designed to maximize extraction and targeted at their unsuspecting sources to increase their engagement. Targeting mechanisms change real life, sometimes with serious consequences. For example, Facebook's files portray a Zuckerberg using his algorithms to enforce or block the behavior of billions of people. Anger is either rewarded or ignored. News becomes more trustworthy or more rambling. Publishers flourish or wither. Political discourse becomes more radical or more moderate. People live or die.
THE FINAL DAMAGE
Occasionally the fog clears to reveal the ultimate damage: the growing power of tech giants who want to use their control over information infrastructures to compete with democratically elected lawmakers for dominance of society.
Early in the pandemic, for example, Apple and Google refused to adapt their operating systems to accommodate contact tracing apps developed by public health authorities and backed by elected officials. In February, Facebook shut down several of its pages in Australia as a sign of its unwillingness to negotiate a payment for content and news usage with the Australian Parliament.
That is why, when it comes to the triumph of the surveillance capitalist revolution, it is the legislators of every liberal democracy, especially in the United States, who bear the greatest responsibility. They have allowed private capital to rule our information spaces for two decades of spectacular growth, without enacting laws to regulate it.
Fifty years ago the conservative economist Milton Friedman exhorted American leaders to "engage in activities aimed at increasing profits always with the obvious assumption of respecting the rules of the game, that is to say the obligation to engage in an open and free competition, without deception and without fraud.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Democratic societies plagued by economic inequality, climate crisis, social exclusion, racism, health emergencies and weakened institutions have a long road to recovery. We can't solve all our problems at once, but we won't solve any of them, ever, if we don't reclaim the sanctity of information integrity and reliable communication. The abdication of our information and communication spaces in favor of surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every democracy, because it stands in the way of solutions to all other crises.
Neither Google, nor Facebook, nor any other business player in this new economic order has set out to destroy society, any more than the fossil fuel industry has set out to destroy the earth. But like global warming, the tech giants and their fellow travelers have treated the destructive effects of their actions on people and society as collateral damage – the unfortunate but inevitable byproduct of perfectly legal business deals that have produced some of the world's wealthiest corporations. and powerful in the history of capitalism.
THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION OF DEMOCRACY
Where is all this taking us? Democracy is the only institutional order that opposes authoritarianism and is the legitimate power to change the course of history. If the ideal of self-government is to survive the digital century, then all solutions point to one path: a democratic counter-revolution. Instead of the usual lists of remedies, lawmakers should proceed with a clear understanding of the adversary: that they are faced with a single set of economic causes and social harms.
We cannot get rid of the subsequent social harms unless we outlaw the underlying economic causes. This means that we need to move beyond the current focus on downstream issues such as content moderation and illegal content control.
These “remedies” treat only the symptoms without questioning the illegitimacy of the personal data mining that fuels private control over society's information spaces. Similarly, structural solutions like “breaking up” the tech giants may be valuable in some cases, but they won't touch the underlying economic operations of surveillance capitalism.
Rather, the discussion about the regulation of big technologies should focus on the bedrock of the surveillance economy: the covert extraction of personal data from areas of life once called "private." Remedies that focus on regulating data mining are content-neutral and do not alter it. They do not threaten freedom of expression. Instead, they free social discourse and information flows from the "artificial selection" of profit-maximizing business operations that favor the corruption of information rather than its integrity. They restore the sanctity of social communication and individual expression.
THE INITIATIVE OF LEGISLATORS
No covert mining means no illegitimate gathering and concentration of knowledge on people. No concentration of knowledge means no targeting algorithms. No targeting means that corporations can no longer control and curate information flows and social discourse or shape personal behavior to further their interests. Regulating mining would eliminate the surveillance dividend and with it the financial interest in surveillance.
As liberal democracies have begun to engage with the challenges of regulating today's privately owned information spaces, the truth is that we need lawmakers ready to engage in a once-a-century exploration of very fundamental issues such as following: how should we structure and govern information, connection and communication in a democratic digital century? What new bills of rights, legislative frameworks and institutions are needed to ensure that the collection and use of data serve the real needs of individuals and society? What measures will protect citizens from irresponsible power over information, whether exercised by private companies or governments?
Liberal democracies should take the lead because they have the power and legitimacy to do so. But they should know that their allies and collaborators are people fighting against a dystopian future.
Facebook may change its name or its leaders, but it won't voluntarily change its economy.
Will the call to "regulate Facebook" dissuade lawmakers from grappling with something deeper? Or will it induce a greater sense of urgency? Will we finally be able to reject the old answers and free ourselves to ask the new questions, starting with this one: What needs to be done to ensure that democracy survives surveillance capitalism?
From: Shoshana Zuboff, You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation, The New York Times, November 12, 2021
