{"id":442,"date":"2022-09-14T01:41:33","date_gmt":"2022-09-13T22:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/?page_id=442"},"modified":"2022-09-20T15:02:49","modified_gmt":"2022-09-20T12:02:49","slug":"surveillance-capitalism-is-an-assault-on-human-autonomy-shoshana-zuboff","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/?page_id=442","title":{"rendered":"Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy | Joanna Kavenna"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Shoshana Zuboff: \u2018Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy\u2019
Joanna Kavenna
What began as advertising is now a threat to freedom and democracy argues the author and scholar. Time to wake up — and fight for a different digital future<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Defending privacy \u2026 Shoshana Zuboff analyses the digital era in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Photograph: David Levene\/The Guardian
Fri 4 Oct 2019 11.00 BST
It\u2019s a beautiful day on Hampstead Heath, the last weekend of summer \u2013 parliament is still prorogued. In a festival tent at the HowtheLightGetsIn festival, Professor Shoshana Zuboff is talking about her recent book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Zuboff stands on a low stage, making eye-contact with her
audience. She spies someone who seems unconvinced, invites them to raise their concerns.
\u201cWhen this book was published in January, I left home for three weeks on the road,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m still going.\u201d
The audience laughs. Because The Age of Surveillance Capitalism \u2013 a 700-plus page sociological analysis of the digital era \u2013 has become an epoch-defining international bestseller, drawing comparisons to revolutionary works such as Rachel Carson\u2019s Silent Spring. Naomi Klein has urged everyone to read it \u201cas an act of digital self-defence\u201d.
It describes how global tech companies such as Google and Facebook persuaded us to give up our privacy for the sake of convenience; how personal information (\u201cdata\u201d) gathered by these companies has been used by others not only to predict our behaviour but also to influence and modify it; and how this has had disastrous consequences for democracy and freedom. This is the \u201csurveillance capitalism\u201d of the title, which Zuboff defines as a \u201cnew economic order\u201d and \u201can expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above\u201d.
\u2026
Her work on the themes of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism began as far back as the late 1970s. She was a postgraduate at Harvard, writing a doctorate on the Industrial Revolution. To earn money, she became an organisational change consultant, working in offices that were \u201ccomputerising\u201d for the first time. \u201cThey were expecting immediate productivity, growth, efficiency. But it was chaos, disaster. Crazy stuff was happening. People were saying \u2018My work is floating in space!\u2019\u201d
In 1978, Zuboff was working at the Washington Post, with linotypists who were converting to cold type. \u201cOne day I had just finished the graveyard shift, and I wandered into the National Gallery of Art, where I saw these hulking, dirty, dark entities in the pit of a bright white amphitheatre.\u201d It was the Voltri-Bolton series by David Smith \u2013 an American sculptor who in the
1960s created sculptures from old factory machinery and debris. \u201cI realised then the process of computerisation would be the next industrial revolution, and it would change everything \u2013 including how we think, and feel and how we create meaning. I had a notebook, and I started writing. This has been the agenda for my intellectual life since then.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Inspiration \u2026 David Smith\u2019s Voltri-Bolton X, and Voltri Bolton IX. Photograph: NYT
This led to Zuboff\u2019s first book In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) \u2013 a startlingly prophetic analysis of how information technology would transform working lives. Long before the emergence of the internet, Zuboff argued that everything that could be translated into information would be \u2013 exchanges, events, objects \u2013 and that data streams would be used wherever possible for surveillance and control. It was followed by The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2002), co-authored with her husband, James Maxmin, a former CEO of companies including Laura Ashley and a Distinguished Scholar at MIT, who died in 2016.
On the strength of her first book, Zuboff became one of the first tenured women at Harvard Business School. She later became one of the youngest professors to receive an endowed chair.
With her husband, Zuboff went to live in rural Maine; they raised their children, farmed deer. In 2009, their home was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The family escaped, but lost all their possessions — books, research materials, passports. \u201cOne odd thing: when the house
burned, that old notebook from DC survived.\u201d Not long after this, Zuboff began to write Surveillance Capitalism.
It is the story of the digital revolution, and how the early utopian prospects of the web darkened into \u201ca rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history\u201d. Gmail was launched in 2004; Google subsequently admitted
that it has scanned private correspondence for personal information. In the same year, Facebook was founded, its business model also based on the capture of and access to personal information.
The metaphor Zuboff uses is one of conquest: \u201cWith so little left that could be commodified, the last virgin territory was private human experience.\u201d In 1986, 1% of the world\u2019s information was digitised. In 2013, it was 98%.
Surveillance capitalists sell certainty to business customers who would like to know with certainty what we do
It is a movement founded on predictive algorithms, mathematical calculations of human behaviour. Surveillance capitalists \u201csell certainty to business customers who would like to know with certainty what we do. Targeted adverts, yes, but also businesses want to know whether to
sell us a mortgage, insurance, what to charge us, do we drive safely? They want to know the maximum they can extract from us in an exchange. They want to know how we will behave in order to know how to best intervene in our behaviour.\u201d The best way to make your predictions desirable to customers is to ensure they come true: \u201cto tune and herd and shape and push us in the direction that creates the highest probability of their business success\u201d. There\u2019s no way \u201cto dress this up as anything but behavioural modification\u201d. In 2012 and 2013, Facebook conducted \u201cmassive-scale contagion experiments\u201d to see if they could \u201caffect real-world emotions and behaviour, in ways that bypassed user awareness\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are crux points in the lives of societies and individuals. A revelation in a gallery. A cataclysmic fire, and a salvaged notebook. Zuboff argues that we are now at one more crux point: \u201cThe age of surveillance capitalism is a titanic struggle between capital and each one of us. It is a direct intervention into free will, an assault on human autonomy.\u201d It is the capture of our intimate personal details, even of our faces. \u201cThey have no right to my face, to take it when I walk down the street.\u201d
Such violations threaten our freedom, Zuboff says. \u201cWhen we think about free will, philosophers talk about closing the gap between present and future. We make ourselves a promise: I\u2019ll do something with that future moment \u2013 go to a meeting, make a phone call. If we are treated as a
mass of \u2018users\u2019, to be herded and coaxed, then this promise becomes meaningless. I am a distinctive human. I have an indelible crucible of power within me\u2026 I should decide if my face becomes data, my home, my car, my voice becomes data. It should be my choice.\u201d
\u2026
When I ask how deliberate this all was, if Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were just a bunch of happy tech-utopians who accidentally opened Pandora\u2019s box, she smiles wryly.
\u201cThis was world-historical wealth creation.\u201d Surveillance capitalists have \u201cmany strategies to protect themselves from the law. Lobbying, political capture, other economic methods that we associate with cartelisation.\u201d They have also claimed that the internet is a new reality with different protocols; \u201cLarry Page has said how could Google follow any law that came into being
before the internet? This is propaganda.\u201d In her talk at the festival, Zuboff dismisses another proposition, that these are innovative companies that occasionally make mistakes. \u201cYes, like Google Nest [Google\u2019s home security system]: \u2018Oh we\u2019re so sorry, we put a microphone in the Nest surveillance system and we forgot! We forgot to put it in the schematic.\u201d (This story broke in February, and Google described its failure to put the microphone on tech specs as \u201can error\u201d.)
I felt I was up against the clock of social amnesia, psychic numbing \u2013 people were losing their sense of astonishment What about Zuckerberg\u2019s claims that \u201cprivacy is no longer a social norm\u201d, or the advice of Eric Schmidt (Google CEO, 2001-2011): \u201cIf you have something that you don\u2019t want anyone to
know, maybe you shouldn\u2019t be doing it in the first place?\u201d Zuboff has, of course, heard this line a thousand times. It has been repeated not only by surveillance capitalists, but also by governments advocating the mass surveillance of civilians. She is brisk in response: \u201cI tell people, if you have
nothing to hide then you are nothing. This isn\u2019t about Hayekian individuality, libertarianism \u2013 it\u2019s a historical process of individuation that has developed hand in hand with political freedom and democracy.\u201d It\u2019s also not Orwell, not Big Brother. \u201cThere\u2019s no one coming to take anyone away to the Gulag. It doesn\u2019t want to kill us. It just wants to move us in the direction of its predictions and get the data.\u201d Although, \u201cin China we see the attempt to annex these technologies to the repressive state\u201d.
Some have also proposed that \u201cchoice architecture\u201d \u2013 nudges and coaxes \u2013 can be societally beneficial, if used wisely. Proponents of this argument include Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (co-authors of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness). Zuboff disagrees vigorously. \u201cOnce you legitimate the ex-machina nudge it is intolerable. It is an act of power over the other \u2013 rather than educating or alerting. Nudging is paternalistic. Behavioural economists such as Thaler legitimated the nudge, empowered and increased the audacity of the surveillance capitalists. Thaler got the Nobel prize.\u201d
Why does she care so much? \u201cI gave up a lot of time to write this book, over many years,\u201d she says. \u201cI gave up time with my husband, my children. I gave up my health. Everything I had I gave, because I felt I was up against the clock of social amnesia, psychic numbing \u2013 people were losing their sense of astonishment.\u201d Yes, she agrees that \u201cSnowden made a huge contribution to
waking people up. The tech companies were implicated.\u201d Leaked documents showed the NSA collecting data from Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. And the Cambridge Analytica scandal? \u201cCarole Cadwalladr\u2019s work is heroic. And Chris Wylie [the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower] revealed that every aspect of Cambridge Analytica\u2019s operations was simply mimicking a day in the life of a surveillance capitalist.\u201d Instead of behavioural modification for commercial ends, the ends become political? Voting instead of buying? \u201cDemocracy is on the ropes in the UK, US, many other countries. Not in small measure because of the operations of surveillance capitalism.\u201d
Every time Zuboff speaks in public, she asks the audience: \u201cWhat are the concerns that bring you here?\u201d People call out words: privacy; dystopia; control; monopoly; manipulation; intrusion; exploitation; democracy; misinformation; fear; freedom; power; rebellion; slavery; resistance.
Everywhere the words are virtually the same. What can be done? People object, but nothing happens. Doesn\u2019t that lead to lassitude? \u201cRegulation,\u201d she says, firmly. \u201cThis is what the tech companies fear most. We say that markets that trade in human futures are illegal \u2013 like the slave trade was made illegal.\u201d Then we design \u201cprograms as a closed loop\u201d and \u201creclaim the idea that we can have the digital without surveillance capitalism\u201d. This will require the \u201cindignation\u201d of citizens, journalists, scholars and law-makers. \u201cSurveillance capitalism has had 20 years unimpeded by law. But it is very young.\u201d
The following day Zuboff is to give another speech, asking another audience: \u201cWhat are the concerns that bring you here?\u201d like a reclaimed version of that old Facebook question: \u201cWhat\u2019s on your mind?\u201d
Zuboff has now been on the road for nine months. The alternative, doing nothing and being \u201csubsumed in unadulterated power\u201d is not an option for her. \u201cWe are not simply users. We are much used. We have to awaken to our shared future.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2019\/oct\/04\/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-capitalism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shoshana Zuboff: \u2018Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy\u2019Joanna KavennaWhat began as advertising is now a threat to freedom and democracy argues the author and scholar. Time to wake up — and fight for a different digital future Defending privacy \u2026 Shoshana Zuboff analyses the digital era in her book The Age of Surveillance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_regular_price":[],"currency_symbol":[],"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-442","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_slider_layout_featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":"","post_slider_layout_landscape_large":"","post_slider_layout_portrait_large":"","post_slider_layout_square_large":"","post_slider_layout_landscape":"","post_slider_layout_portrait":"","post_slider_layout_square":"","full":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":501,"href":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/442\/revisions\/501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kaf1.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}