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In 1988, Shoshana Zuboff published a landmark book, The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, which changed our thinking about the impact of computerization on organizations and work. It provided the most insightful account up until then of how digital technology was changing the work of both managers and workers. Based on her early fieldwork in the computerizing offices and factories of the late 1970s and 1980s, she addressed the duality of information technology, its capacity to automate but also to “informate”—her term to refer to translating things, processes, behaviors, and so on into information. This duality set apart information technology from earlier generations of technology; information technology produces new knowledge areas by virtue of its informating capability, always turning the world into information. The result is that these new knowledge areas become the subject of political conflict. The first conflict is over the distribution of knowledge: Who knows? The second is about authority: Who decides who knows? The third is about power: Who decides who decides?

Meanwhile, the same dilemmas of knowledge, authority, and power have moved beyond the realms of offices, stores, and factories to overwhelm everyone of us and our societies as a whole. In her latest book, Zuboff comes up with a new frame of reference through which to view what Google, Facebook, and the like have been doing—nothing less than generating a new variant of capitalism. They were the first movers in this new world. They declared their right to know, to decide who knows, and to decide who decides. In this way they have come to dominate what Zuboff calls “the division of learning in society,” which she sees as the central organizing principle of the twenty‐first century social order, just as the division of labor was the key organizing principle of society in the industrial age.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (a tome of 663 pages, including 127 pages of notes) offers a disturbing exposé of the business model that underpins the digital world in this century. This entails a new mutation of capitalism, which operates by providing “free services” that billions of people use, enabling the providers to monitor the behavior of those customers in amazing detail, often without their explicit consent. “Surveillance capitalism,” Zuboff writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral 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 behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behavior” (8).

Zuboff focuses mainly on Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, which she sees as the Petri dishes in which the DNA of surveillance capitalism is best examined. The fact that surveillance capitalism was invented in the United States, in Silicon Valley, and at Google, makes it an American invention, which, like mass production at an earlier stage, became a global reality. For this reason, much of the book deals with the developments in the United States, but with the explicit recognition that the consequences of these developments are worldwide.

What Zuboff adds to the existing stock of knowledge about the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook, and the like is the insight and scholarship to locate those companies in a broader context. She points out that we are dealing with 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 behavioral productions stealthily derived from the surveillance of users. She rightly emphasizes that surveillance capitalism is a human creation, which lives in history and is not the result of technological inevitability. It was pioneered and elaborated through trial and error at Google, invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the wake of the dotcom bust, when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google's founders Larry Page, and Sergey Brin abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they embarked on a course that boosts ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs in combination with their already by then considerable analytical capabilities and computational power to generate predictions of user click‐through rates, taken as a signal of an ad's relevance. This meant in practice that Google would both repurpose its growing collection of behavioral data, now capitalized on as a behavioral surplus, and develop methods of secret surplus capture that could uncover data which users intentionally chose to keep private—as well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not provide. This surplus would then be analyzed for hidden meanings that could predict click‐through behavior. The surplus data thus formed the basis for new predictions markets involving targeted advertising. Eventually this whole setup became the foundation of a new kind of commerce that depends upon online surveillance at scale.

Contrary to a common misunderstanding, we are not the customers of surveillance capitalism; instead we are the sources of its crucial surplus, the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw material‐extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism's actual customers are the companies that trade in its markets for future behavior. Zuboff insists that, “as long as surveillance capitalism and its behavioral futures markets are allowed to thrive, ownership of the new means of behavior modification eclipses ownership of the means of production as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth and power in the twenty‐first century” (11).

Surveillance capitalism quickly spread to Facebook and later to Microsoft, while a company like Amazon, with its new emphasis on “personalized” services and third‐party revenue, is clearly veering toward it as well. Zuboff thinks (as yet) differently about Apple, to whom surveillance capitalism is a constant challenge, both as an external threat and as a source of internal debate and conflict. Apple's iPods/iTunes innovations leveraged the new capabilities of digital technologies to invert the consumption experience as had been common in the age of mass production. This inversion depended on a few key elements. Digitalization made it possible to rescue valued assets—in this case songs—from the institutional spaces in which they were trapped. The costly institutional procedures that GM's Alfred Sloan had described in relation to mass production and consumption in the 1920s and after were eliminated in favor of a direct route to listeners. In the case of the CD, for instance, Apple bypassed the physical production of the song along with its packaging, inventory, storage, marketing, transportation, distribution, and physical retailing. The combination of the iTunes platform and the iPod device made it possible for listeners to continuously reconfigure their songs at will. Thus, Apple was among the first to attain formidable commercial success by catering to a new society of individuals and their demands for individualized consumption. According to Zuboff, following a line of reasoning by sociologist Ulrich Beck et al., the conditions of the implicated “second modernity”—in contrast to the “first modernity” of the industrial age and Fordist mass production and mass consumption—produced a new kind of individual for whom the Apple inversion, and the many digital innovations that followed, would become essential. Next to its liberating potential, the second modernity has also brought its troubles. Some of the challenges of the second modernity arise from the inevitable costs associated with the creation and sustenance of one's own life. Zuboff underscores that second modernity instability is also the result of institutionalized shifts in economic and social policies and practices associated with neoliberalism and its rise to dominance. “We live in this collision between a centuries‐old story of modernization and a decades‐old story of economic violence that thwarts our pursuit of effective life” (36‐37).

She considers the possibility of a new synthesis: a third modernity that goes beyond the collision, offering a genuine path to a flourishing and effective life for the many, not just the few. For a while, it seemed that Apple's fusion of capitalism and the digital might set a new course toward a third modernity. In her view, the Apple inversion implied trustworthy relationships of advocacy and reciprocity embedded in an alignment of commercial operations with consumers’ genuine interests. Likewise, at the early stage of Google's development, the feedback loops involved in improving its Search functions produced a balance of power. Google Search needed people to learn from, and vice versa. This symbiosis enabled Google's algorithms to learn and produce ever‐more relevant and comprehensive search results. During this early period, behavioral data were put to work entirely on the user's behalf. User data provided value at no cost, and that value was reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services. Users provided the raw material in the form of behavioral data, and those data were harvested to improve speed, accuracy, and relevancy and to help build auxiliary products such as translation. Zuboff calls this “the behavioral value reinvestment cycle” (97), in which all behavioral data are reinvested in the improvement of the product or service.

With the introduction of its targeted advertising patent in 2003, Google would no longer be the passive recipient of accidental data that it could recycle for the benefit of its users. Google hereby moved from its advocacy‐oriented founding toward the elaboration of behavioral surveillance as a full‐blown logic of accumulation (and its associated dispossession). In essence, the behavioral reinvestment cycle was subordinated in favor of a new commercial calculation. Behavioral data, whose value was previously “used up” on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal—and exclusive to Google—raw material for the construction of a dynamic online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more behavioral data than it needed to serve its users. That surplus was the game‐changing, zero‐cost asset that was diverted from service improvement toward a genuine and highly lucrative market exchange, which Zuboff refers to as “the dynamic of behavioral surplus accumulation” (131).

She poignantly compares the way Google unilaterally declared that the worldwide web was free for the taking for its search engine, to colonial conquest, especially that of the first Spaniards under Columbus who landed on the Caribbean islands. The conquest pattern in question unfolded in three phases: legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a luster of justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to legitimate the declaration.

Likewise, the first surveillance capitalists simply declared our private experience to be theirs for the taking, for translation into data for private ownership and then proprietary knowledge. They relied on misdirection and rhetorical concealment, with secret declarations that we as users could neither understand nor contest. Or, put differently, first of all there was the arrogant appropriation of users’ behavioral 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. As I should add, one can see all of this as a latter‐day variant of what Jürgen Habermas referred to as the “colonization of the life‐world” by systems, which he did not or could not foresee at the time of his writing.

Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism's antidemocratic and anti‐egalitarian juggernaut in terms of a market‐driven coup de gens from above (rather than a coup d’état in the classic sense): an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse of digital technology implicated in this form of capitalism. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence of the people. It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. Like the Spanish conquistadores and their silent invocations of the Requirimiento (Monarchical Edict of 1513), surveillance capitalism operates in the declarative form and imposes the social relations of a premodern absolutist authority (513). Paradoxically, this coup is framed as “personalization,” although it tarnishes, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about the individuals concerned that is personal.

Then there is the further evolution of surveillance capitalism, which moved from a focus on individual users to a focus on populations, such as cities, and eventually on society as a whole. Surveillance capitalism started with advertising, but then became more general. The big tech companies have used the knowledge about their users not only for ever more precisely targeted and more subtle ads but also to sell to other companies, politicians, governments, secret services and any other agency willing to pay for it. By now, surveillance capitalism is no longer restricted to companies or even to the Internet sector. It has spread across a wide range of products, services, and economic sectors, including insurance, retail, healthcare, finance, entertainment, education, transportation, and more, generating whole new ecosystems of suppliers, producers, customers, market makers, and market players.

Driven by competition over prediction products, surveillance capitalists first learned that the more surplus, the better the prediction, which led to economies of scale in supply efforts. Then they learned that the more varied the surplus, the higher its predictive value. This new drive toward economies of scope led them from the desktop to mobile, out into the world, to monitor people's drive, run, shopping, search for a parking space, bodily conditions and face, and always their location. And ultimately, they understood that the most predictive behavioral data can be derived from what Zuboff calls “economies of action” as systems are designed to intervene in the state of play and actually modify behavior, steering it toward desired commercial outcomes. The experimental development of this new “means of behavior modification” can be seen in Facebook's infamous contagion experiments and the augmented reality game Pokémon Go developed at Google. In this phase of surveillance capitalism's evolution, the means of production became subordinate to an increasingly complex and comprehensive means of behavior modification. Thus, surveillance capitalism has created a new form of power that Zuboff terms “instrumentarianism.” It knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of weaponry and armies, it reaches its goal through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous architecture of “smart” networked devices, things, and spaces.

There are three key approaches to economies of action, the first two of which Zuboff calls “tuning” and “herding.” The third is what behavioral psychologists refer to as “conditioning.” “Tuning” may involve subliminal cues designed to subtly shape the flow of behavior at the precise time and place for maximally efficient influence. Another kind of tuning involves what behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein called the “nudge,” which they define as “any aspect of a choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way” (294). The term “choice architecture” refers to the ways in which situations are prestructured to channel attention and shape action.

Conditioning is a well‐known approach to inducing behavior change primarily associated with the Harvard radical behaviorist B. F. Skinner. He called the application of reinforcements to shape specific behaviors “operant conditioning.” His larger project was known as “behavior modification” or “behavioral engineering,” in which behavior is continuously shaped to amplify some actions at the expense of others. Skinner imagined a pervasive “technology of behavior” that would enable the application of such methods across entire human populations. In his 1948 “utopian” novel Walden Two, he brazenly extrapolated from the conduct of conditioning‐subjected animals to grand theories of social behavior and human evolution.

Zuboff outlines the intellectual background of the Skinnerian paradigm as it evolved since the late 1930s, and then focuses on the growth and elaboration of behavior modification as an extension of political power, which is key to her present interests and therefore needs elaboration here. In the 1950s and beyond, the CIA called for ever‐bolder behavior modification research and practical applications from academic psychologists. Scientists from the fields of medicine and psychology embarked on a project to demystify Chinese Communists’ brainwashing techniques, reinterpreting them through the frameworks of behavior modification. Their research concluded that “mind control” was better understood as a complex system of conditioning based on unpredictable schedules of reinforcement, in line with Skinner's findings on operant conditioning.

Skinnerian behavior modification practices expanded rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s, achieving some remarkable success in terms of their advocates’ objectives, but also evoking scrutiny from an often‐hostile public. By 1971, when the US Senate's Constitutional Rights Subcommittee convened hearings on the subject, the migration of behavior modification practices from military to civilian applications was already well underway. Behavior modification techniques had spread from government‐funded (typically CIA) psychology labs and military psychological operations to a range of institutional applications, each driven by a mission to reengineer the “defective” personalities of captive individuals in settings that offered total control or close to it, including prisons, psychiatric wards, classrooms, institutions for the mentally handicapped, schools for the autistic, and factories. A number of journalistic accounts raised alarms about the zealousness with which behavior modification techniques were applied and expressed grave concern that they debased their subjects, violated ethical considerations and infringed on fundamental civil liberties.

Another cause for alarm was the 1971 publication of B.F. Skinner's provocative book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which he laid out his social philosophy (already anticipated in Walden Two). Skinner argued that knowledge does not set us free but rather releases us from the illusion of freedom. In reality, freedom, and ignorance are synonyms. The acquisition of knowledge is heroic in that it rescues us from ignorance, but it is also tragic because it necessarily reveals the impossibility of freedom. For Skinner, our attachments to notions such as freedom, will, autonomy, purpose, and agency are defense mechanisms that protect us from the uncomfortable facts of human ignorance. The environment determines behavior, and our ignorance of precisely how it does so is the void that we fill with the fantasy of freedom. Skinner prescribed a future based on behavioral control, rejecting the very idea of freedom (as well as every principle of a liberal society), and cast the notion of human dignity as an accident of self‐serving “narcissism.” He imagined a pervasive “technology of behavior” that would one day enable the application of behavior modification methods across entire human populations. These thoughts triggered a devastating scientific, political, and moral critique from public intellectual Noam Chomsky in a widely read review.

Skinner foresaw powerful new instruments that could engineer behavior in every domain. As early as 1953, he anticipated today's digitally engineered casino environments, whose sophistication in the precise shaping of gamblers’ behavior has made them a testing ground for state security agencies and surveillance capitalists alike. He then also anticipated innovations such as Michael Jensen's incentive systems designed to maximize shareholder value and the choice architectures of behavioral economics designed to nudge behavior along a preferred trajectory. Moreover, Skinner was well aware that the engineering of behavior risked violating individual sensibilities and social norms, especially concerning privacy. In order to assuage these anxieties he advised that observation of human behavior must be unobtrusive, ideally remaining outside the awareness of the persons concerned. However, new technologies of behavior would have to continually expand such privacy invasions in order to access all the data relevant to behavioral prediction and control. In this he anticipated today's data‐harvesting frontier as new detection systems delve deeply into personalities and emotions.

Zuboff points out how the critique of behavior modification in the Senate Subcommittee's 1974 report has direct relevance for our time. It begins by asking a question that we should also ask now: “How did they get away with it?” (324). Just as surveillance capitalism was initially able to take hold and flourish under the auspices of a so‐called “war on terror” and the compulsion for certainty that it evoked, in the mid‐twentieth century the means of behavior modification moved from the lab to the world at large primarily under the cover of cold‐war anxieties. Later, the behavior‐change professionals were called upon by a society turned fearful after years of urban riots, political protest, and rising levels of crime and “delinquency.” The senators argued that calls for “law and order” had motivated the search for quick fixes; immediate and efficient means to control violence and other forms of antisocial behavior, which replaced time‐consuming attempts to understand its source. As so many behavior modification programs aimed at involuntary populations in state prisons and mental institutions, the report recognized that the means of behavior modification had to be reckoned with as a form of state power and questioned the government's constitutional right to “control” citizens’ behavior and mental activity.

The strident rights consciousness of the 1970s drove behavior modification from civilian life and out of the public limelight. However, mostly unknown to the politicians, scholars, rights activists, litigators, and many other citizens who opposed the antidemocratic incursions of the behavioral engineering vision, these methods did not die. The project would resurface as a creature of the market, now tied to unprecedented digital capabilities, scale and scope thriving under the flag of surveillance capitalism. US corporations enjoy the rights of personhood but are free of democratic obligations, legal constraints, moral calculations, and social considerations. Certainly in America, with so much influence of corporate wealth in politics, most elected officials show little interest in contesting behavior modification as a market project, let alone to defend the moral imperatives of the autonomous individual. In its latest incarnation, behavior modification takes the form of a global digital market architecture unfettered by geography, independent of constitutional constraints, and formally indifferent to the risks it poses to freedom, dignity, or the ideals of the liberal society that the 1971 Senate Subcommittee was still determined to defend.

Executives of surveillance capitalism such as Google's Larry Page, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg do not reveal much about their theories, delivering at best episodic and shallow information. But a core group of scientists and computational social scientists has emerged with detailed experimental and theoretical accounts of the ins and outs of instrumentarian power, providing insights into the social principles of an instrumentarian society. A prominent example is the work of Alex Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Lab within MIT's Media Lab. In collaboration with his students and associates, he has vigorously articulated, researched, and widely disseminated a theory of instrumentarian society in tandem with his prolific technical innovations and practical applications. As Zuboff emphasizes, Pentland “completes” Skinner, fulfilling his social vision with big data, ubiquitous digital instrumentation, advanced mathematics, sweeping theory, numerous acclaimed co‐authors, institutional legitimacy, plentiful funding, and corporate friends in high places without having attracted the worldwide backlash, moral revulsion, and anger that Skinner once elicited. She astutely remarks that “this fact alone suggests the depth of psychic numbing to which we have succumbed and the loss of our collective bearings” (419).

Pentland refers to his theory of society as “social physics,” a term that originates in the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, and his 1830s programmatic vision of a scientific approach to the study of society that would equal the precision of the natural sciences—a vision that various later thinkers reinvigorated. Although Pentland never mentions Skinner, in his 2014 book, Social Physics, he brings the old behaviorist's social vision into the twenty‐first century, now fulfilled by the instruments that eluded him in his lifetime. Skinner deplored the absence of “instruments and methods” for the study of human behavior comparable to those available to physics. As if in response, Pentland and his students have spent the last two decades determined to invent the devices, methods, and techniques that can transform all of human behavior, especially social behavior, into highly predictive math. A major outcome thus far is the “sociometer,” a wearable sensor that combines a microphone, accelerometer, Bluetooth connection, analytic software, and machine learning techniques designed to lay bare “the structure and dynamic relationships” in human groups.

Pentland outlines his theory of a full‐blown instrumentarian society in terms of five overarching principles, which Zuboff analyzes in depth, thereby showing the strong resemblances with Skinner's thinking and how Pentland updates Skinner's behaviorist utopia (430‐437). This technocratic society, led by a priesthood of data scientists/planners in collaboration with the owners of the means of behavior modification, is based on the pervasive outfitting and measurement of human behavior for the purpose of modification, control, and—given surveillance capitalism's commercial dominance in the digital world—profit.

Zuboff refers to an emergent system that offers us a view of a future defined by a fusion of instrumentarian and state power; the all‐inclusive “social credit” system that the Chinese government is currently developing as the “core” of China's Internet agenda. The aim is to leverage the explosion of personal data in order to improve citizens’ behavior. Individuals and enterprises are to be scored on various aspects of their conduct: where one goes, what one buys, and who one knows. These scores will be incorporated into a comprehensive database that links to government information as well as to data collected by private businesses. The system tracks “good” and “bad” behavior across a variety of financial and social activities, automatically assigning punishments and rewards to decisively shape behavior toward “building sincerity” in economic, social, and political life—a contemporary version of the old communist goal of “engineering of human souls.” The aim is to achieve guaranteed social rather than market outcomes using instrumentarian means of behavior modification.

Worth mentioning is the willingness that some US tech companies have shown to offer the Chinese government a helping hand with state surveillance and censorship. In August 2018, it was reported that Google planned to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, code‐named Dragonfly. By the end of the year, however, the project had effectively been abandoned after a clash within Google, led by members of the company's privacy team. Meanwhile, researchers at Microsoft Research Asia continue to closely collaborate with scholars linked to a Chinese military‐backed university on AI topics such as facial recognition and machine reading. This has raised concerns that the methods and technologies thus generated could very well be deployed in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where authorities have placed as many as 1.5 million Muslim Uighurs in “re‐education camps” and expanded an intrusive household surveillance system.

Zuboff hastens to point out the similarities between the (US‐dominated) Western and China systems: “Chinese users are rendered, classified, and queued up for prediction with every digital touch, and so are we. We are ranked on Uber, on eBay, on Facebook, and on many other web businesses, and those are only the rankings that we see” (393). “In China, these rankings are public territory, shiny badges of honor and scarlet letters that open or shut every door. In the West, we have ‘likes,’ ‘friends,’ ‘followers,’ and hundreds of other secret rankings that invisibly pattern our lives” (468). Chinese users are assigned a “character” score, while the US government presses the tech companies to develop algorithms for a “radicalism” score. We in the West have our own digital dossiers. Indeed, by means of the shadow text, in which behavioral surplus is lined up for manufacture into prediction products—separate from the first text, which users experience—our behavior is evaluated, categorized, and predicted in millions of ways that we can neither know nor contest.

The existing trend of social engineering and nudging individuals toward “better” behavior is also part of the Silicon Valley approach that holds that human problems can be solved once and for all through the disruptive power of technology. In that sense, perhaps the most disturbing element of the China story is not the Chinese government's agenda per se, but how similar it is to the path big tech companies are taking in the United States and the many regions within its digital orbit.

What can be done to curtail the progress of instrumentarianism? Current US privacy laws have not kept pace with the development of instrumentarianism. When assessing the ways in which digital capabilities challenge existing law, US scholars and jurists focus on Fourth Amendment doctrine which circumscribes the relationship between individuals and the state. It is of course vital, Zuboff writes, that the protections of the Fourth Amendment doctrine catch up to the twenty‐first century by protecting us from search and seizure of our information in ways that reflect contemporary realities of data collection. However, the problem is that even expanded protections from the state do not shield citizens from the assault on sanctuary (legal and otherwise) wrought by instrumentarian power and driven by surveillance capitalism's economic imperatives. Nevertheless, there could be some positive developments at this front, which needs mentioning.

The Cambridge Analytica revelations in March 2018 disclosed that this London‐based consulting firm had harvested the personal information of around 87 million Facebook users and deployed it for political purposes, which triggered congressional and parliamentary hearings, multiple regulatory investigations and a fundamental rethinking of Facebook's future. The US Federal Trade Commission began an inquiry into Facebook's privacy practices, and was joined by the US Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI in the summer of 2018. There are also initiatives like the Center for Human Technology, an activist group of former Facebook and Google employees aimed at “the reversal of the digital attention crisis” in trying to create a truly privacy‐friendly Internet. At the time of writing (March 2019), the US Department of Justice has declared that it opened a criminal investigation into Facebook's privacy practices. Facebook is also in discussion with the FTC about a possible settlement in a privacy case that could lead to a fine of several billion dollars.

Apparently panicked by his company's continuous fall from grace, Mark Zuckerberg just announced that Facebook will take a radically different course in the near future, in which “privacy‐focused” social networks will be central. For a start, the message services of Facebook's Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp will be integrated into one, which will have end‐to‐end encryption—only readable by sender and receiver, not by Facebook. This is only to be the first step toward a privacy‐oriented Internet. The announcement immediately triggered many responses, from hopeful to outright cynical. Zuckerberg's plan may very well be an ostentatious attempt to dodge penalties and regulations rather than a serious break with the business model that made Facebook into a capitalist behemoth. After all, Zuckerberg envisions a future in which closed, encrypted networks exist next to the open networks that are the standard now. The plan does not mean the end of Facebook's and Instagram's timelines, where users share their lives with many others and whereby Facebook continues its regular surveillance practices for the purpose of offering microtargeted ads that has made the company almost all its money.

Many hopes are set on the new EU regulation known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which became enforceable in May 2018. (Part of this law was anticipated by the action of the Spanish Data Protection Agency which, in August 2011, had ordered Google to stop indexing the contested links of 90 Spaniards who had fought for this aspect of their informational privacy under the banner of “the right to be forgotten.”) The EU approach fundamentally differs from that of the United States in that companies must justify their activities within the GDPR's regulatory framework. The regulations include: a requirement to notify people when personal data is breached; a high threshold for the definition of “consent” that puts limits on a company's reliance on this tactic to approve personal data use; a prohibition on making personal information public by default; a requirement to use privacy by design when building systems; a right to erasure of data (= the right to be forgotten), and expanded protections against decisionmaking generated by automated systems that imposes “consequential” effects on a person's life. The new regulatory framework also imposes substantial fines for violations, which will increase to a possible 4 percent of a company's global revenue, and it allows for class‐action lawsuits in which users can combine to assert their rights to privacy and data protection. With the GDPR and such actions as the $1.7 billion fine the European Commission imposed on Google in March 2019 (for forcing users to agree not to accept advertisements from other search engines), the EU is clearly much further ahead than the United States.

Zuboff rightly argues that GDPR's impact will depend upon how European societies interpret the new regulatory regime in legislation and in the courts. And it will not be the phrasing of the regulations but rather collective action by popular movements at the grassroots level that focus on the relevant issues, which shape these interpretations. Importantly, technology is not the inevitable force that the tech leaders want us to believe. She refers to the rich history of digital applications prior to surveillance capitalism that really were empowering and consistent with democratic values. Surveillance capitalism is a human‐made phenomenon. It is therefore in the realm of politics that surveillance capitalism must be tackled. Surveillance capitalism has had two decades to root and flourish relatively unrestrained. From a human rights standpoint, there is a strong need for new paradigms resulting from a close understanding of surveillance capitalism's economic imperatives and foundational mechanisms. The GDPR is a good starting point on which to build to help found a new paradigm of information capitalism.

Zuboff is skeptical of some proposals to solve the problems in question. The idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution, but what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place? All that it does is further institutionalize and legitimate data capture. More significantly, data ownership also does not reckon with the realities of behavioral surplus. Users might get ownership of the data that they give to surveillance capitalists, but they will not get ownership of the surplus of the predictions derived from those data—not without new legal concepts and interventions built on an understanding of these operations. Furthermore, there may be sound antitrust reasons to break up the largest tech firms, but this fact alone will not eliminate surveillance capitalism. Instead, it will result in smaller surveillance capitalist firms and open the field for more surveillance capitalist competitors. Moreover, large tech companies may shore themselves up against antitrust measures; Facebook is a case in point. Once the recently proclaimed integration of its three messaging platforms—WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger—occurs, attempts to break such a bolstered entity up will become all the more difficult.

In the end, Zuboff acknowledges that there is no simple action program to effectively curb surveillance capitalism. But she correctly states that in any confrontation with the unprecedented (which surveillance capitalism most surely is), the work begins first of all with naming. She considers her own work in this regard as the first necessary step toward taming this rogue mutation of capitalism and aims to contribute to a sea change in public opinion, most of all the young.

This is an impressive and illuminating book—a true masterwork. Some reviewers have noted that it reminds them of Thomas Piketty's magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty‐First Century (2014) —that Zuboff herself quotes from—in that it opens our eyes to things we ought to have noticed but overlooked. Through the usage of notions such as “accumulation,” “commodification,” and “behavioral surplus” (playing on the notion of “surplus value”) Zuboff's elaborate analysis reminds this reader more of Capital, Karl Marx's nineteenth‐century quest for the “iron laws” of capitalism. The book is thoroughly sourced and well‐written, accessible yet challenging, thought‐provoking and stimulates deep reflection. It demands a close, slow reading in stages, in order to optimally digest all of this healthy intellectual food. It goes well beyond “an initial mapping of a terra incognita” that will hopefully “pave the way for more explorers,” as is the author's self‐professed intention (17). It introduces an appropriate vocabulary; that is, concepts and frames which enable us to recognize the overall pattern in what seemed to be disparate phenomena, theoretical notions, and fragments of rhetoric and practice. Thus, it provides a comprehensive heuristic schema, an analytical framework that—along with Zuboff's fruitful borrowings and creative integration of relevant insights from an array of philosophers, historians, economists, sociologists (including eminent thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Jean‐Paul Sartre, John Searle, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Polanyi, David Harvey), data scientists and AI experts—helps us to develop a deeper understanding of the inner workings and logic of the new mutant of capitalism.

There are a few details to take issue with, however. Industrial capitalism is more entrenched and persistent in the United States than Zuboff suggests, and her characterization of its golden, post‐World War II years (lasting until the early 1970s) is rosier than the actual reality was for significant parts of the working population. The New Deal order had a “social‐democratic tinge” (in Richard Hofstadter's terms) that existed in the United States neither before nor after. But it remained by and large confined to the white, male industrial working class, into which members of the second‐generation “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe had by that time integrated. It is true, however, that the “embedded liberalism” and Keynesian economics of the postwar era tethered market capitalism (however imperfectly) to society's interests. Surveillance capitalism abandons the reciprocities with people of the social compact that then helped to embed capitalism in society.

This also calls the following bold conclusion by Zuboff into question: “The struggle for power and control in society is no longer associated with the hidden facts of class and its relationship to production but rather by the hidden facts of automated engineered behavior modification” (309). To the contrary, capitalist elites (investors, especially venture capitalists) still play crucial roles in financing and (often indirectly) controlling the state of play. Zuboff herself mentions the relevance of the ownership of the means of behavior modification for surveillance capitalism, and refers to the rise of shareholder capitalism and its impact on the management of corporations. Moreover, the scientists, engineers, social scientists, and managers involved, choose (consciously or not) to advance and operate the digital systems in question for the interests of surveillance capitalists. They could make a different choice, as some indeed have done or may very well do in the future. In this context, “production,” should also be understood in a much broader sense than manufacturing to include all kinds of services and highly skilled white‐collar work.

Furthermore, Zuboff's view of the longue durée history of capitalism (apparently inspired by Piketty's observations) seems much too optimistic regarding the possibilities of a capitalism that combines with new forms of organization and ownership to provide a human digital form in tune with a replenished democracy (520‐521). There appears to be quite a lot of wishful thinking here.

We must also realize that relying on a company like Apple (whose earlier practices Zuboff admires) for support in the fight against the excesses of surveillance capitalism is no longer pertinent, if it ever was. Today, Apple presents itself as a moral crusader, fearless, blameless, and ostentatiously restricting collection of its users’ data under the slogan “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” Apple's CEO Tim Cook wants the US government to come up with a stringent privacy law, like that of the EU, in itself a good move but Cook disregards how much power he himself has. Indeed, there is much hypocrisy here. If Apple is so troubled by Google's practices, why is Google Search then the default in Apple's web browser and not a privacy‐friendly variant like DuckDuckGo or Startpage.com? This is simply, of course, because Google pays Apple billions of dollars for this preferential position. Cook admonishes against the “shadow economy” behind online stores, but at the same time Apple keeps its own advertising network for, among other things, the App Store, where 1.4 billion devices get their software from. And why are Google's and Facebook's apps available in the App store at all? The answer is obvious: people would not buy an iPhone with no Google, You Tube, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apps installed on it; apparently Apple's own services do not suffice or are not good enough yet.

At the time of writing, Apple has launched a new platform with paid subscriptions for games, TV series, magazines and newspapers (as yet only two: LA Times and The Wall Street Journal), partly to compensate for a decline in revenues and profits because of slowing iPhone sales. It has announced a series of new TV deals and original programs that will put it head to head with Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and their rivals in streaming media. Apple thereby continues to publicize an emphasis on privacy‐friendly, ad‐free services, with the selection and production of content largely in the hands of human experts—an indirect sneer at Google and Facebook whose financial well‐being depends largely on advertising and automated recommendations. Apple too uses such techniques, but relies more on human selection. Still, on its way to become a provider, following the example of Amazon in trying to combine as many services as possible, Apple may turn into a full‐fledged surveillance capitalist.

Somewhat problematic is Zuboff's conclusion that the instrumentarian power of surveillance capitalism should not be seen in terms of “digital totalitarianism”—an omnipresent Big Brother watching and aiming to control people everywhere all the time—but rather as a nontotalitarian “Big Other” that bends the new digital apparatus to the interests of the surveillance capitalist project, the result of which is an all‐pervading means of behavior modification whose economies of action are designed to maximize surveillance revenues. She draws too sharp a contrast between these two forms of power in suggesting that surveillance capital's instrumentarian power is best understood as the precise antithesis of Orwell's Big Brother. The Orwellian view of what is happening does have a granule of truth in it, with the obvious qualification however, that this now involves first of all commercial surveillance: ubiquitous monitoring by corporate capitalists rather than the state (although in the context of homeland security and the “war on terror” the US government maintains ties to all‐seeing tech companies that remain shadowy and opaque, which whistleblowers like Edward Snowden have informed us about).

But it should then also be recognized that in everyday reality there is a combination of Orwellian and Huxleyan elements. In the dystopian society that Aldous Huxley envisioned in his Brave New World (1932), people are drugging themselves into bliss by various means, thereby voluntarily sacrificing their rights, rather than George Orwell's vision of the future in Nineteen Eighty‐Four (1949), in which totalitarian governments resort to repression by means of ever‐present surveillance, thought control through propaganda, and brutal censorship. In Huxley's dystopia, distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. It can be argued that contemporary America, formally a liberal democracy, shows culturally a Huxleyan–Orwellian mix of hedonistic entertainment and distraction (with infotainment playing a crucial role), advertising/propaganda (corporate, political, military), surveillance and repression—the latter hardly, if at all, recognized by the mainstream media.

To be clear, none of these issues diminishes the great merits of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It will most likely become the definitive work on today's digital capitalism for years to come—an essential read for every engaged citizen in this day and age.

Mel van Elteren - First published: 27 June 2019 - https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13051

I remember reading this entire article, non stop, deeply fascinated by the world of counter surveillance capitalist methods and journalism finishing it at exactly 10:00am on the dot like the lord said "this is exactly what I needed you reading" and I wasn't disappointed. I definitely recommend yall check out Shoshana Zuboff's book that highlights the workings and perils of the surveillance capitalist industry that itself relies on white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to thrive.

#tech #technonlogy #democracy #privacy #surveillance capitalism #surveillance cap #illegal surveillance #surveillance systems #government surveillance #news #journalism

Couvre-feux, contrôles policiers multiples, toute-puissance de l’administration, emballement de l’industrie technosécuritaire : la pandémie de Covid-19 se traduit, en France, par un contrôle accru des populations, suspectées par principe de ne pas participer à la « guerre » contre le virus.

#vivelarépublique #upthebaguette #France #Emmanuel Macron #surveillance systems #vie privée #sécuritarisme #autoritarisme

Under Surveillance

The lens in focus

remains gazed upon your steps

and your ways are weighed

measured by strange secret weights

laugh if you must to ease doubt

and don't ask for truth

which cost you can hardly bear

dance a weary reel

run, run back and forth the race

to nowhere set before you.

D W Eldred

#poetry #double tanka #surveillance systems

Why Global Sovereign Surveillance Quietly Leads Back to Korean Drone Innovation

⚡ Snapshot: LIG Nex1 is a South Korean defense firm specializing in integrated drone surveillance systems designed for secure, sovereign national security. These systems offer advanced capabilities for border monitoring, emphasizing independent data control and resilience against external interference, positioning South Korea as a key player in critical defense technology. 🎯 Key Takeaways LIG…

#Drone Technology #LIG NEX1 #National Security #South Korea Defense #Surveillance Systems

Smart Ways to Protect Your Company from Break-Ins and Scams

Apart from the physical running of your business, one of the most crucial things you will have to consider is keeping your company secure from fraud and identity theft. There is nothing worse than having your hard work ruined by thieves who break into your office. This post will provide some instances of how you may protect your company against theft in a sensible and effective manner. If you ever find yourself dealing with the aftermath of fraud or need legal advice on protecting your assets, consulting a fraud lawyer can help you understand your rights and the best steps to take.

Detection and Response Systems

Every place where your company is operated should be equipped with security alarms that will notify you and the authorities if a break-in attempt is conducted. However, although the upfront cost of having them may be substantial, the long-term benefits of safeguarding you and your organization will outweigh the original investment in terms of money. Even if your company is very small, putting security in place to safeguard you is well worth the investment.

Key Safe

Another method of guaranteeing that your business is protected from thievery is to have a key safe put at each site where your company operates. Even the most conscientious among us run the danger of misplacing or losing our keys. You can also use an app to check whether everyone has put their keys in the key safe before they leave for the day, which is a terrific solution for key safes. Whenever someone takes one out, the app will let you know. It will also let you know when they put one back in. You may be able to track down the person responsible for a break-in if an employee failed to replace a lost key. With a key safe, you can be certain that all your keys will be stored safely and securely together, rather than scattered all over the place. This is particularly beneficial if someone is unable to arrive at work since you can inform the person who is substituting the special code and operations can continue as usual.

Be Clever

Finally, giving thieves the idea that someone is usually on the premises can effectively dissuade them from ever attempting a crime in the first place. Keeping a light on or some ambient noise will provide the idea that someone is inside, causing the burglar to reconsider his or her decision to enter. A vacant property with no surveillance systems and easy entry is perfect for a burglar. Prevent them from being able to rapidly enter and exit the premises where your company operates. Stop them from entering in via windows by locking them every night. When you're finished, double-check that all the doors are securely locked. If you live in the building where your company is located, keep a light on even while you're in bed to create the appearance that you're awake. Even if you're going out of town, you may want to consider having a colleague or a friend temporarily live at your home so that it never looks empty and inviting.

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#Company Security #Identity Theft #key safe #surveillance systems