Professor Shoshana Zuboff's monumental 692 page, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (1), is a chilling and essential revelation. Zuboff describes the creation of a digital iron cage which could imprison us all.

"The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide."(2) The breakneck pace of change has exceeded our ability to assess dangers and raise defenses. We are engulfed in a society-wide reconfiguration of power, and although few realize what is happening, we must refight the battle to be free. But how do you resist a complex danger that is mostly unrecognized and advancing with extreme rapidity?

In this and a following part 2 article, I briefly summarize Zuboff’s description of surveillance capitalism, it’s undergirding ideas, its impacts in real life, how we might we relate to it, and share my personal reaction.

WHAT IS SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM?

Don't get hung up on the phrase "surveillance capitalism" Zuboff uses to describe this monumental global change. She says that when exceptions were allowed to liberty the door was opened to create surveillance capitalism:

What 9/11 did was to produce socially negative consequences that hitherto were the stuff of repressive regimes and dystopian novels… The suspension of normal conditions is justified with reference to the 'war on terrorism.' Critical to our story is the fact that this state of exception favored Google's growth and the successful elaboration of its surveillance-based logic of accumulation.…The elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency to produce a unique historical deformity: surveillance exceptionalism….The 9/11 attacks transformed the government's interest in Google, as practices that just hours earlier were careening toward legislative action were quickly recast as mission–critical necessities. Both institutions [US government and Google] craved certainty, and were determined to fulfill that craving in their respective domains at any price. These elective affinities sustained surveillance exceptionalism and contributed to the fertile habitat in which the surveillance capitalism mutation would be nurtured to prosperity.(3)

The CIA was embedded in silicon valley before the September 11, 2001 Al-Qeada attacks (4), but it was especially the following "war on terror" that created a fusion of government and private interests. Zuboff calls the result “instrumentarianism.”

Surveillance capitalism births a new species of power that I call instrumentarianism. Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behavior toward others' ends.(5)

The source of this power? "Data exhaust."

Google exploits information that is a by–product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product.(6)

Zuboff's charts help us understand.(7) The model works similarly for Google, Facebook, and other social media/Big Tech corporations. First, there are users. The user enters data in a search or posts something on Facebook. I wanted batteries, I searched for batteries, I selected a product, charged my credit card, and it soon arrived at my door. What is not to like?

But every single move is logged. Every sweep of the mouse across the screen, every product image loaded, every search term entered, previous purchases, unfinished purchases—every fragment of user interaction generating seemingly useless data, actually creates “data exhaust,” or “behavioral surplus.” "Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system."(8) The free calculator app you downloaded generates income for its designers by selling your location data—something totally unrelated to your use of the program.

But this is not limited to your phone or computer. Remember the Roomba? Buried in the click-wrap you agreed to, that innocent little robot-vacuum bumping around on the floor was sending mapping data from your house back to the mothership.(9) Or, you may recall the "Sleep Number Bed." In the set-up agreement that you probably didn’t read, you consented to send audio data from your bedroom back to the owning corporation.(10) “Smart” technology is a euphemism for capturing data from the corners of lived experience for rendering as behavioral data.(11) Every user interaction generates "UPI": User Profile Information.(12) “Machine intelligence” (i.e. Artificial Intelligence or AI) operations convert data into “algorithmic products designed to predict the behavior of its users.”(13)

Google discovered people's privacy was less valuable to them than the bets corporations want to make on our future behavior.(14) Predictions about our behavior are Google's products, sold to its actual customers, but not to us. We are the means to others' ends.(15)

The result? The creation of two electronic texts:

We are the authors of the first text. This public-facing text is familiar and celebrated for the universal information and connection it brings to our fingertips… the first text, full of promise, actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text.… This one is hidden from our view.… It becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text. It automatically feeds on our experience as we engage in the normal and necessary routines of social participation.(16)

The first text is what I type in, what I enter as my search question, my post, my comment. The second text is a shadow text generated by faceless algorithms run by faceless corporations which know more about me than I know about me—a text intended to exploit me and to which I have no access.

Zuboff describes how this has come to be:

Google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in much the same way that a century ago General Motors invented and perfected managerial capitalism…. Surveillance capitalism quickly spread to Facebook and later to Microsoft. Evidence suggests that Amazon has veered in this direction, and it is a constant challenge to Apple, both as an external threat and as a source of internal debate and conflict…. Surveillance capitalism is like an invasive species in a landscape free of natural predators.(17)

This is actually a privacy mining operation:

If Google is a search company, why is it investing in smart-home devices, wearables, and self-driving cars? If Facebook is a social network why is it developing drones and augmented reality?… activities that appear to be varied and even scattershot across a random selection of industries and projects are actually all the same activity guided by the same aim: behavioral surplus capture.…(18)

We think we are up against a form or Orwell’s Big Brother, but according to Zuboff, we are facing something new, a “Big Other”:

It [Big Other] is the sensate, computational, connected puppet that renders, monitors, computes, and modifies human behavior. Big Other combines these functions of knowing and doing to achieve a pervasive and unprecedented means of behavioral modification. Surveillance Capitalism's economic logic is directed through Big Other's vast capabilities to produce instrumentarian power, replacing the engineering of souls with the engineering of behavior.(19)

And so, we are up against not simply state-level power, but an invasive, corporate, mercantile machine—an impersonal, morally-indifferent, digital succubus, collecting every possible scrap of data about us, in order to predict and then modify our behavior, and direct it to Big Other’s preferred ends.

UNDERGIRDING IDEAS OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM

How did Big Other come to be? Its ideological foundations trace back to BF Skinner, father of behaviorism and operant conditioning. Skinner insisted man is merely one organism among many. Shaped by his surroundings, man's freedom, Skinner claimed, is an illusion. Skinner’s student, Richard Herrnstein, stated, "Any action regarded as an expression of free will is simply one for which the vortex of stimuli that produced it cannot yet be adequately specified."(20)

"The surrender of the individual to manipulation by the planners,” writes Zuboff, “clears the way for a safe and prosperous future built on the forfeit of freedom for knowledge."(21) Skinner published this summation of his viewpoint:

What is being abolished is autonomous man—the inner man, the homunculus, the possessing demon, the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity. His abolition has long been overdue…. He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes… And it must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the human species. To man qua man we readily say good riddance. Only by dispossessing him can we turn… From the inferred to the observed, from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable.(22)

The Bible, of course, is foremost in the literatures of freedom and dignity. The ideas and the thinkers are atheistic and Utopianist. Zuboff traces Skinner’s materialist thinking onward through expected Google and Facebook names like Eric Schmidt, Sundar Pachai, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg. These are the faces behind Big Other, well on its way to fulfilling Zuckerberg's aspiration that Facebook "would know every book, film, and song a person had ever consumed."(23)

According to Zuboff,

Instead of the typical assurances, that machines can be designed to be more like human beings, and therefore less threatening, Schmidt and Thrun argue just the opposite: it is necessary for people to become more machine–like…. In this human hive, individual freedom is forfeit to collective knowledge and action. Nonharmonious elements are preemptively targeted with high doses of tuning, herding, and conditioning, including the full seductive force of social persuasion and influence.(24)

BF Skinner's ideas reach completion in Alex Pentland.(25) Pentland, data scientist and darling of the World Economic Forum(26), is a leading voice in the application of such ideas to actual users. "It is time that we dropped the fiction of individuals as a unit of rationality,” Pentland says, “and recognize that our rationality is largely determined by the surrounding social fabric…."(27) And so, we become the subjects of "a new collectivism, owned and operated by surveillance capital"(28) in which "tuning replaces private governance and public politics," and in which "individuality is merely vestigial."(29)

Next: Part two addresses surveillance capitalism in real life, how we should relate to it, and suggestions for action.

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Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.

NOTES

1. 2019, Hachette Books.

2. Ibid., p. 4.

3. Ibid., p. 115, italics original.

4. Ibid., p. 116.

5. Ibid., p. 8.

6. Ibid., p. 68.

7. Ibid., pp. 70, 97.

8. Ibid., p. 69.

9. Ibid., p. 234.

10. Ibid., p. 235.

11. Ibid., p. 237.