The dark logic of the new economy
Shoshana Zuboff she is a long-time social scholar. In unsuspecting times si is busy the impact of new computing and knowledge tools on the capitalist economic model and on society as a whole. His first work on intelligent machines dates back to 1988. In that study he focused on the impact of office automation in workplaces that he already identified as epochale and destructiveo of all assets historically determined. This is what actually happened in the years following the publication of libro, not only in the workplace, but in all corners of social and economic lifea.
These transformations have been so impactful and profound thatand scholars more sensitive to social genetics they are talking about a real change in the capitalist mode of production, to use an expression coined by Marx purpose define a system historical of organization of human relationships at all levels.
A systematic reviewso Israeli Yuval Noah Harari, one of the most brilliant minds of our time, spoke of a transformation of capitalism in dataism, namely in a control model of the means of production and resources based on the collection, processing and use of data, la new raw material of human development.
Those who have directly observed the capitalist model in its most genuine expression - such as the scholars of the Frankfurt school, part of the European diaspora in America - had already described the model of reification and social control operated, for example, by the cultural industry which brought thereto dialectic ofenlightenment to its extreme point. But today he tells us the Zuboff the technology, or rather its current form modeled in Silicon Valley, has taken us beyond the same reification described by Critical Theory, it has led us to surveillance capitalism. Individuals, as in Huxley's worst nightmares, are bodies capable of being squeezed, unknowingly e through mechanisms alien to them, of their essence and their privacy to feed a well-defined purpose: today to control their choices and their orientations as consumers of goods and services and tomorrow who sto what else. Once the model is up and running it becomes spontaneously universal.
Zuboff in an intervention on "Financial Times" well illustrated his thoughts and his theory on surveillance capitalism. We are pleased to offer the Italian translation of this speech.
Il model of surveillance
Recently Mark Zuckerberg was attacked by Roger McNamee, a former collaborator of his. McNamee, who had already criticized the CEO of Facebook, strongly blamed Zuckerberg and his company for the incessant appropriation of user data with increasingly illicit and destructive methods. McNamee wrote: “To power its artificial intelligence and algorithms, Facebook harvested data wherever it could find it. In a short time, Facebook managed to spy on everyone, including the ppeople who don't use Facebook. These operations - ha added - they were honed to manipulate users into practices that ultimately benefited bad guys subjects who had the intent for sneak in in consciousness public and deface political discourse.
McNamee recently released a book titled zucked. Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, whose title is already a plan of the work. The book had a strong echo, was reviewed and discussed by all the major media in the world and has been featured for weeks in the New York Times bestseller Lat a hunt.
McNamee's analysis implement, But, una underestimation of scale. It is true that the Russian government e that the plutocrat Robert Mercer, master of the defunct Cambridge Analytica e great donor to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, they learned a manipulate the complex secret machine that Facebook has built; the fact is, however, that the Facebook method e the model of digital device that he built does not begin and end with Facebook. This model is a elemento key di a new economic logic that I call “capitalism of surveillance".
He's a model che goes beyond Facebook
These practices were invented by Google, picked up by Facebook, engulfed Silicon Valley, and have since spread to every economic sector. It would be a serious mistake to assume that this is a Facebook-only phenomenon. If we regulate Facebook, we break it and demand a change of leadership, capitalism dher surveillance not it will fail in the blink of an eye. Instead, she will quickly fill that void, with a new cast of actors and ao newo adaptation of film script.
I started studying the passagethru digital in 1978, focusing onthe theme of jobs. When my first book was published, In the Age of the Smart Machine, in the 1988, I understood that the path to the digital future would be full of conflicts especially on who had access to new knowledge, come on keysse the authority to decide and on who had the power to enforce that authority. By now, these dilemmas unsolvedti they went well beyond the workplace to flood every aspect of our lives. Information and communication technologies are today more widespread than electricity, reaching 3 billion people in the world. their presence permeates all of daily life of people, mediating almost any form of social participation.
It soon became clear to me that surveillance capitalism departed from many rules and practices that they had defined il capitalism classic and in particular the history of democracy and market economies. Something astonishing and unprecedented had emerged whose consequences would shape the moral and political environment of XNUMXst century society and the very values of our information civilization.
The invention of Google
Surveillance capitalism was invented after the dot.com bubble burst, when a new company, named Google, sought to increase ad revenue using its exclusive access to a source of largely ignored data, namely the "log" left by thee researchhe and from users' online browsing. Google discovered that this data could be analyzed based on predictive models that would provide decisive cluesvon users' interests. And it went further: to these users they couldIn fact, be addressed degthem targeted advertisements to influence their behavior as consumers. Google could thus have reused the “excess” behavioral data, compared to the normal research activity, and develop new methods to aggressively procure new sources of accesso to them.
According to its own scientists, Google's new methods were popular for their ability to find data that users had chosen to keep private and to infer extensive personal information that they were not state suppliede directly. These operations have been designed to bypass the user's awareness and, therefore, eliminate any possible "friction". In other words, right from the start, Google's breakthrough was based on a one-way mirror: surveillance. The new methods were invented, applied and kept in strict secrecy from 2001 to 2004. Only when Google went public in 2004 did the world learn that based on these new methodologies, Google's revenue had increased by 3.590%.
The historical turning point
This shift in the use of excess behavioral data has been a historic turning point. Google had found a resource revolutionary at no cost that could have been diverted from mere service improvement towards a powerful purpose commercial. The surveillance capitalism model soon extended to Facebook to become the default model for capital accumulation in Silicon Valley. Was rationalized as a quid pro quo to access the free services, but is no longer limited to that context as, once upon a time, happened with mass production which, for example, was limited to Model T production of Ford. Today, it has expanded into a diverse range of industries, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, and more. Capitalism is literally shedding its skin before our eyes.
Perhaps the best example striking of this change must be sought in the birthplace of modern mass production, althe Ford Motor Company. A hundred years ago, the pioneers of the capitalsmodern industrial mo like Henry Ford developed a new model, shaping the mass consumption of industrial goods. Ford realized that farmers and shopkeepers also wanted cars at a price they could afford. In his world, customers and workers were linked in a cycle of production and sales that combined cheap goods with wages calibrated on the consumption of goods.
In November 2018, Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford, has indicated a new paradigm for automakers. He has declared to an interviewer: “The point I want to develop is this: in the future we're going to have a flood of data coming from vehicles, from users of these vehicles, from cities talking about these vehicles e dathe samethe competitors. My guess is that today we have 100 million people sitting in a blue-oval Ford vehicle. This is an opportunity unique to monetize thiso state of affairs against a competitor (e.g. Tesla) which might have, say, 120 or 200 vehicles on the road. Compare a moment the scale of two subjects: which one would you like to get the data from?”
Once customers were reinvented as data sources, it was easy for Hackett to imagine the next step where real-time data from cars is combined, for example. with Ford's financing data. In fact, he said: “We already know… what people do… we know where they work; we know if they are married. We know how long they've been living in their home." And he concludes: ”This is the lever huge that we have with the data”. As a comment, asays an industry analyst, "Ford could make a fortune monetizing the data. They won't need engineers, factories or dealers to make itrlo. It's almost pure profit."
If "smart" becomes the lock pick of surveillance capitalism
And this il IT world; in which we live. Un world where every product or service that begins with the word “smart” or “personalised”, every device or vehicle connected to the Internet, every “digital assistant” it is a supply chain interface to the unobstructed flow of behavioral data. We know that capitalism evolves by subsuming things that are outside the dynamics of the market to transform them into market products, for sale and for purchase. Surveillance capitalism extends this model by declaring human experience private un something that can be elaborated and modeled to build behavioral predictions for production andthe exchange. In this logic, surveillance capitalism appropriates our behaviors and absorbs all the meaning that there in our bodies, in our brains and in our hearts. You are not neither "the product", six the abandoned carcass. The product" are the excess data ripped from your life.
In these new supply chains we can find le tracks who you share withamo la our life, the secrets that i our children share with their toys, conversations at lunch, decibel levels in the living room and exclamation marks following a Facebook post, once written with innocence and candor.
Nothing is exempt from being smart, from bottles of “vodka smart" to Internet-connected rectal thermometers, as products and services from each industry compete for surveillance revenues. Queste information are “suckede" laid down by the our daily life in ways designed to makeci ignore what is happening. In the United States, respiratory machines used by people suffering from asthma they secretly funnel data to the insuredre who is sleeping in the meantime, often to allow the company to withhold payment for care. Some mobile phone apps record the our position every two seconds to sell it to third parties. As of July 2017, the autonomous vacuum cleaner iRobot Roomba, it did news when the CEO of the company, Colin Angle, has spoken to Reuters of its business strategy based onthe collection and processing of data for the “smart home”. If thehe saystor what the stock price is grown up very very much after his proposal to share free floor plans of clients' homes, meantime mapped by the new capabilities of tracking of the cleaning robot.
At some point, the surveillance capitalists found out is behavior change: and digitally mediated real-time interventions push consumers in the direction desired by those capitalists. A scientistiato of the data mi has explained is: “We can design the context around a particular behavior and force the change in thatlla direction... We are learning a write the music, and then let's cmay the music make them dance”. There is no shortage are so many. AND il place where Pokémon Go players they go to eat, drink and buy, that is, those hangouts who pay to play in behavioral futures markets. È the ruthless expropriation of excess data from Facebook profiles for detailed “psychological insights” that, according to a 2017 internal company report, allow advertisers to pinpoint the exact moment a teen needs to “an injection of trust".
The asymmetries of knowledge
Surveillance capitalists produce profoundly undemocratic asymmetries of knowledge and they benefit from a growth of their power that comes from knowledge. They know everything about us, while their operations are designed to be unknowable gives part No.stra. They predict our future and shape our behavior, but it fyear to meet goals of others and for financial gain.
This power to know and change human behavior is unprecedented. Often confused with "totalitarianism" and feared like Big Brother, it is a new species of modern power that I call "instrumentarianism (instrumentarianism)”. Instrumental power can understand and change the behavior of individuals, groups and populations in the service of surveillance capital. The Cambridge Analytica scandal has revealed how, with the right know-how, these methods of instrumental power canoNo. do pivot to political goals. But not there we are wrong, the tactic employed by Cambridge Analytica was part of many and daily routine operations of capitalism in its action for influence behavior of people.
Dit had to be another cosa
It wasn't supposed to be like this. In 2000, some computer scientists and some engineers have worked to a project called Aware Home. They envisioned the “house-man symbiosis” in which animate and inanimate processes would be captured by a network of “context-sensitive sensors” installed in aa home and by computers worn by its inhabitants. The system was designed as a simple closed loop controlled entirely by the occupants. Verified that by “constantly monitoring the occupants' locations and activities”…and also intercepting the medical conditions of its inhabitants,” the team concluded that “there is a clear need to give the occupiers knowledge and control over the distribution of this information.” . All information had to be stored on the wearing computersti occupants to ensure the privacy of an individual's information.
Fast forward to 2017 when two University of London scholars published a detailed analysis of a single “smart home” device, the Google-owned Nest Thermostat. One of them decided to enter the ecosystem of connected devices and apps, accepting the terms of service for sharing data from third parties. Buying a single Nest thermostat means you need to subscribe to nearly a thousand so-called “clauses“. If the customer refuses to accept Nest's provisions, the terms del post-sales service, the functionality and safety of the thermostat are compromised and no longer supported by updates intended to ensure the reliability and security of the device.
Surveillance capitalists want us to believe that their trajectory into the digital future is inevitable. But it's not. Today we may regret the innocence of Aware Home but, like a message in a bottle from the past, it tells us something important. Once we were the subjects of our life, today we are its objects. Aware Home bears witness to what we have lost and what we need to find again: il righto di know e di decide who should knowre our lives and our future. Such rights have been and remain the only possible basis for human freedom and for a democratic society that works well.
The role of Apple
At the end of October 2018 Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, in front of the European Parliament, criticized the “data industrial complex”, with its “personal data stocks” serving only tod “enrich the companies that collect them”. He stressed that "qhis is surveillance from the possibility of knowing each other better than we can know ourselvessi… This crisis is real. It is not something imagined, nor exaggerated either fuck. And those of us who believe in the potential of technology for the good of society need not shy away from this reality".
Unsurprisingly, some are quite scethink about the sincerity of Cook's commitment to “not let your guard down on this issue“. They see one Sorta marketing campaign aimed at distancing the company from thein the area ofshadow where it fell il technology sector. Others, they quoted Apple's inconsistencies over the past decade: I'iPhone that use the Google search, user data storage suchinese servers, la lack of transparency su many practices and systems of protectionand data collected collected from Apple and many other contradictions. Tim Bradshaw and Mehreen Khan, of Financial Times, they note that it is easier for Apple have a position forte privacy policy when the revenues of the company depend on the sale of its devices, not on targeted advertising.
The privacy paradox
These are all well-founded criticisms, but for many, Cook's position instills a strong sense of hope, the perception that someone in the industry has finally the courage to speak. In 46 of the top 48 opinion polls conducted in the United States and Europe between 2008 and 2017, there were substantial majorities in favor of measures to improve privacy and control of theusers on personal data. The first surveys were less meaningful, because many respondents did not understand how or what personal information was collected. A major 2009 survey found that when people are Learn about the ways companies collectlgono data for targeted online ads, the 73% rejects such use of data for advertising purposes. A 2015 survey found that 91% of respondents disagree that collecting personal information "without their knowledge" is a fair trade-off for a price discount.
Tech companies usually dismiss these findings, emphasizing current user behavior and the spectacular results this state produces di things like justification for the status quo. Recall the infamous 2009 sack from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt:“If you have nothing to hide, you don't have to worry. If not want not let it be known, do not do it“. Experts define the gap between The attitudes and i behaviors “the paradox of privacy“, but in reality it is not a paradox. It is the consequence due athe pitched battle between supply and demand, expressed in the difference between what capitalism of surveillance dictates to us and what we really want.
Today's historic gap between supply and demand is a call to action for business leaders who have the foresight and conviction to go against the tide. Resisting surveillance capitalism is not simply “the right thing to do”. Almost everyone who is connected to the Internet they call for an alternative path to the digital future, which meets our needs without compromising our privacy, and without usurping our decisions and diminishing our autonomy. Given the forces at play, the person with the best chance of forging an alternative needs considerable commercial and political clout behind him. This could be the context in which Tim Cook enters the scene.
A 2017 study of stock market returns concluded that Apple ha generated the tallest yield for investors di any other American company in 20° and 21 ° century. Self Tim Cook really wants to act consistently with his words in Brussels, Apple should lead the way an alternative path to the digital future, riunbyifying capitalism with the people it is supposed to serve. Cook said that i alleged privacy-versus-profit or privacy-versus-innovation conflicts are thesis wrong. In fact, the historical pattern suggests that the'current disjunctione between supply and demand opens up an opportunity very important for a leap in qualityor development of capitalism.
The fight for un capitalism of the people
In the past awe have we have already faced similar situations and we have already been on the edge of the precipice. "We are went a bit' groping, looking for to manage a new order with ancient ways, but we have to start shape this IT world; new". It was 1912 when Thomas Edison set out his vision for a new industrial civilization in a letter to Henry Ford. Edison feared the potential of industrialism to serve the progress of humanity could be hindered by the power of the robber barons e by monopolists is allora ruledNo. the economy. He criticized the status quo characterized by the "waste" and "cruelty" of capitalism American. Both Edison and Ford understood that modern industrial civilization, for which they fed many hopee, it was hurtling towards a future marked by misery for the many and prosperity solo for few. They also understood what the moral life of industrial civilization would be too shaped by the practices of capitalism wild.
Everything should be reinvented: new technologies, yes, but these should reflect new ways to meet people's needs; a new economic model that could transform into economic resources these new practices; and a new social contract that could underpin everything the system. Citizens, consumers, managers, workers, legislators, lawyers, scholars, journalists, managers and public officials, who have undertaken this endeavor, they have entered unfamiliar territory.
Our time calls for this kind of creative leap into the unknown it can bend the trajectory of the digital future towards people. Without a creative and courageous response, surveillance capitalism will continue to fill this void. If surveillance capitalism is to be disrupted, tamed, even outlawed, we will need new laws, regulations, and forms of collective action tailored to its specific mechanisms. For these reasons and a thousand more, I ask Tim Cook and other business leaders to carve a new road home. They won't be alone. Those of us who live in the space between home and exile don't they will subtract. The fight for a human future belongs to all of us.
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Shoshana Zuboff is Professor Emerita al Charles Edward Wilson Institute at Harvard Business School. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power was released on January 31 by Profile Books
