The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Part 1)

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.

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