'“Surveillance
capitalism,” Zuboff writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw
material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are
applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural
surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine
intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that
anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction
products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural
futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from
these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our
future behaviour.”
While
the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has
been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been
missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate
them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us think that we are
dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is
the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products,
to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial
capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly
derived from the surveillance of users. In that sense, her vast (660-page) book
is a continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl
Polanyi and – dare I say it – Karl Marx.
Viewed
from this perspective, the behaviour of the digital giants looks rather
different from the roseate hallucinations of Wired magazine. What one
sees instead is a colonising ruthlessness of which John D Rockefeller would
have been proud. First of all there was the arrogant appropriation of users’
behavioural data – viewed as a free resource, there for the taking. Then the
use of patented methods to extract or infer data even when users had explicitly
denied permission, followed by the use of technologies that were opaque by
design and fostered user ignorance.
And,
of course, there is also the fact that the entire project was conducted in what
was effectively lawless – or at any rate law-free – territory. Thus Google
decided that it would digitise and store every book ever printed, regardless of
copyright issues. Or that it would photograph every street and house on the
planet without asking anyone’s permission. Facebook
launched its infamous “beacons”, which reported a user’s online
activities and published them to others’ news feeds without the knowledge of
the user. And so on, in accordance with the disrupter’s mantra that “it is
easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission”.'
