Part 1 of the book examines the formation and basic logics of surveillance capitalism. Part 2 is appropriately entitled "The Advance of Surveillance Capitalism."

Zuboff begins with surveillance capitalism's second economic imperative--this is the "prediction imperative." In order to foretell future behaviour, surveillance capitalists need better quality of prediction products, which is accomplished by "economies of scope" and "economies of action" (p. 199). Economies of scope refer to the necessity of varied types of behavioural surplus (i.e. not just clicks on Facebook) and the dimension of depth, or data "from intimate patterns of the self" (p. 199). Economies of action refers to something more insidious. It describes the processes involved in shaping behaviour, which is the best way to predict behaviour. Surveillance capitalists actively intervene and "nudge, tune, herd, manipulate, and modify behaviour" (p. 200) for certain outcomes.

In order to achieve economies of scale and economies of action, Zuboff notes that a new era of "surveillance commerce" is initiated: she calls this "the reality business" (p. 200). This is the collection of "machine-based extraction architecture" (e.g. IoT) in the real world that constantly renders behaviour into data and predictions, and through which surveillance capitalists produce guaranteed outcomes. The imperatives of surveillance capitalism fit perfectly with the ideals of ubiquitous computing; through the texts of key figures in the field, Zuboff describes a world where technologies disappear and blend into the fabric of everyday life and an apparatus of ubiquitous sensing produces a digital omniscience.

Zuboff details some of the technologies and methods that are being developed to render our interior selves into raw material by surveillance capitalist firms. Facebook user likes can "automatically and accurately estimate" personal attributes like "sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender" (p. 273). "Affective computing" (p. 281) targets unconscious emotional expressions in the form of facial expressions, vocal tonality, and other such signals to extract higher quality behavioural data.

The transformation to this real world extraction architecture is not just an abstract idea--it comes with concrete consequences. Zuboff delineates three different categories in economies of action, these are tuning, herding, and conditioning. Tuning refers to the use of "subliminal cues designed to subtly shape the flow of behaviour" or can come in the form of manipulations in the "choice architecture" (p. 293) through the "nudge." Herding involves controlling individual behaviour by modifying the environment in which human actions take place. Ubiquitous computing is not only an apparatus for sensing, but also for controlling outcomes. Finally, conditioning refers to Skinner's work in operant conditioning, in which subjects are put under a system of "schedule of reinforcements" (rewards, recognition, praise) to produce certain behaviours reliably. Zuboff returns extensively to Skinner's work in Part 3. One of the examples fhat Zuboff provides is auto insurance. Auto insurers can use the constant flow of data about driving behaviours, our feelings, what we are saying, etc. to price premiums by the millisecond. They are also able to control driving behaviour by using behavioural data and an incentive structure, promoting certain driving behaviours while discouraging others. At the very worst, surveillance capitalists have complete control and can completely shut down vehicular systems, leaving the driver stranded and helpless.
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As Zuboff repeatedly states throughout the book, surveillance capitalism and the current application of technologies is the result of a series of choices--they were not inevitable. The technology and research could have easily been applied to help people and for the betterment of society. Affective computing was originally designed for a medical setting, for the challenges of autistic children (p. 287). The Aware Home project, which was a collaboration of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech, was the source of the original image of the smart home. In this image, behavioural data from ubiquitous computing would be reinvested into the home as a closed loop to improve the lives of the occupants, instead of being sold on behavioural futures markets.

​Economies of scope and economies of action have implications for human subjectivity. Zuboff identifies the "assertion of freedom of will" as an assertion of "the right to the future tense as a condition of a fully human life" (p. 331). While uncertainty is a precondition to human freedom, surveillance capitalists and their techniques of human modification eliminate uncertainty for a world of guaranteed outcomes. Zuboff succintly sums up the development of surveillance capitalism: "... this decade-and-a-half trajectory has taken us from automating information flows about you to automating you" (p. 339). A lot of commentators in the West stoke fear about the dystopian potential of the Chinese social credit system without casting the same critical gaze at the systems being constructed by the profit-driven surveillance capitalists in their own living room.

A great, comprehensive introduction to future studies by Yale University sociologist Wendell Bell.

As an introductory manual on the field, I found that there was nothing too surprising written in the book. Bell's research goes through the history of the discipline from its roots in nation-state planning, think tanks like RAND, and key works and key figures. He discusses the purpose of future studies--"the purpose of future studies are to discover or invent, examine and evaluate, and propose possible, probable, and preferable futures" (p. 73)--and delineates nine major tasks for the discipline. He articulates the key assumptions of the discipline and provides an overview of the various methodologies that futurists have created to study the future. The book is good reference material (albeit outdated) for research done in the field, especially for the section on methodology. I was able to discover academic anthropologists other than Robert Textor who have engaged with future studies.

The most interesting section is probably Bell's section on epistemology. He discusses three theories of knowledge, which are positivism, postpositivism, and critical realism. He notes the influence of postpositivism and post-modernism on the field of future studies, critiques these influences, tries to re-orient the discipline around the epistemological framework of critical realism. Very briefly speaking, critical realism assumes the existence of an objective external world but admits the role of individual biases in the process of scientific discoveries. However, it assumes that intersubjective evaluation can overcome these limitations. Bell seems to frame critical realism as the best of both worlds: it holds onto the positivism's optimism of the progression of human knowledge, while incorporating legitimate postpositivist critiques on positivism.

After establishing the critical realist framework, Bell introduces some terms that are good to think with. He distinguishes between presumptively true/false predictions and terminally true/false predictions. Presumptively true/false predictions are made before the event and are taken as such when they withstand the attempts to refute them. Terminally true/false predictions are assessments of phenomena after the event. These two need not align, obviously, especially since presumptively true/false predictions can alter the course of the future (e.g. research on climate change). Future studies truly benefits from an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary spirit--futurists should not be researchers of methodologies and mere technicians.

I found something else interesting while reading Foundations of Future Studies--there seems to have been a great deal of interest in future studies in the past, perhaps more so than in the present. According to Bell, the World Future Society, which was founded in 1966, peaked at 60,000 members in 1979, hit a low of 22,500 in 1985 and rose to 1994 in 30,000. It would not be accurate to measure interest in the field using membership numbers for this single organization (perhaps there's been a splintering in the field or bad management, I am a current member and I do not find the World Future Society very compelling), after all, Bell expresses a general optimism for the field. However, I cannot help but think that perhaps the future was a far more exciting topic for the public imagination than it is now.

In the 1960s, there was the space race, there was Star Trek, there was the Jetsons, and human beings actually landed and walked on the moon (it's strange that thinking about this can be so strange--it was over 50 years ago!). Our cultural images of the future now are mostly in the form of dystopias, stories of environmental collapse, the extinction of all human life--basically, images of the future where the future ceases to exist. Instead of working on flying cars and life-changing technologies, our best and brightest technical minds are doing A/B tests for Facebook and Google; instead of leading lives of leisure, where we can explore our true passions, we are forced into more work, and this is precarious labour that barely sustains life. Meanwhile, everything is done to appease the all-mighty shareholder. With the idea of shareholder value maximization, the "future" is violently and artificially tranched and comes in the form of quarterly shareholder reports. In the contemporary political imagination, neo-classical economics seems to have colonized the social under the rubric of the economic. Why have a whole field of future studies when a priesthood of neo-classical economists can calculate the future?

Probably one of the most important books of the decade. Zuboff lays out the basic concepts and the framework to understand surveillance capitalism. In the first part (of three parts) of the book, Zuboff acts as a journalist and traces the mutation of capitalism into surveillance capitalism, and of the discovery of behavioural surplus.

Her story of surveillance capitalism begins with the "second modernity" (I am not familiar with this categorization, but the "first modernity" refers to Ford, mass production, and the creation of mass consumers), where individuals shook off the last chains of feudal society and began to feel "entitlement to self-determination" (p. 35). Neo-liberal economics fed on the energies of the "second modernity" (I think Michel Houellebecq would agree here; read Atomized) and became the dominant ideological framework for society.

Apple, and its "fusion of capitalism and the digital" (p. 46) resulted in the promise of a third modernity. The third modernity was appropriated by surveillance capitalism instead as large companies claimed ownership of the virtual world. The current set of circumstances is also the result of historical contingency, to a certain effect, as surveillance capabilities was intensified by the events of September 11, 2001, which set the stage for a collaboration between the government and surveillance capitalists.

It was Google that discovered behavioral surplus. Zuboff tells an interesting narrative here. Founded in 1998, Google originally "embodied the promise of information capitalism as a liberating and democratic social force" (p. 67)--I smell the trope of the idealistic tech nerd and the internet as a space for democratic freedom--all of the data that was produced by users was reinvested to improving the product. Zuboff calls this the "behavioral value reinvestment cycle" (p. 69). This changed as Google faced growing pressures from investors. Behavioural surplus, or the traces of data left behind by users, started to be used for predictions on user behaviour, the efficacy of which was measured by click-through rates of ads. Advertising transformed from an art to a science. The combination of "behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms" (p. 83) formed the basis of Google's unprecedented model of capitalism: surveillance capitalism.

The logics of surveillance capitalism require the extraction of behavioural data--users are the raw materials for surveillance capitalists, while advertisers are the customers. For Zuboff, this is the moment when Google broke off the reciprocities that existed in previous forms of capitalism--this is generalizable to other surveillance capitalists.

Zuboff also dedicates a large amount of space to an analysis of the strategies that surveillance capitalists used to slowly whittle down our rights to privacy. She makes it clear that the current status quo is due to human decisions. It is not the result of the autonomous and unstoppable logics of technological development. I forgo this section in the review.
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Zuboff is a Harvard Business School professor. Ideologically, Zuboff is not a hardcore leftist. She speaks of the "first modernity" in which the capitalist system had "reciprocities" (as opposed to a relationship of exploitation) with the social order. She supplements this with Durkheim. In her reading, the sociologist wrote about "the perennial human quest to live effectively in our 'conditions of existence' as the invisible causal power that summons the division of labor, technologies, work organization, capitalism, and ultimately civilization itself" (p. 32). Put in a way that is distasteful for some, she seems to be saying that the needs and wants of the consumer drives societal changes (consumer utility as autonomous agent of history). Put in another way, she is saying that the search for better material conditions motivates human beings, which seems more reasonable. Base and superstructure are flipped around in this formulation. I think the fact that Zuboff goes on media like Democracy Now shows how dire the current historical conjuncture really is: alliances are formed between people with such different ideological perspectives.