II. Who Knows?
This book began by recalling an urgent question posed to me by a young pulp mill manager in a small southern town: “Are we all going to be working for a smart machine, or will we have smart people around the machine?” In the years that followed that rainy evening, I closely observed the digitalization of work in the pulp mill. As I described it in In the Age of the Smart Machine, the shift to information technology transformed the mill into an “electronic text” that became the primary focus of every worker’s attention. Instead of the hands-on tasks associated with raw materials and equipment, doing “a good job” came to mean monitoring data on screens and mastering the skills to understand, learn from, and act through the medium of this electronic text. What seems ordinary today was extraordinary then.
These obvious changes, I argued, signaled a deep and significant transformation. The ordering principle of the workplace had shifted from a division of labor to a division of learning. I wrote about the many women and men who surprised themselves and their managers as they conquered new intellectual skills and learned to thrive in the information-rich environment, but I also documented the bitter conflicts that attended those achievements, summarized as dilemmas of knowledge, authority, and power.
Any consideration of the division of learning must resolve these dilemmas expressed in three essential questions. The first question is “Who knows?” This is a question about the distribution of knowledge and whether one is included or excluded from the opportunity to learn. The second question is “Who decides?” This is a question about authority: which people, institutions, or processes determine who is included in learning, what they are able to learn, and how they are able to act on their knowledge. What is the legitimate basis of that authority? The third question is “Who decides who decides?” This is a question about power. What is the source of power that undergirds the authority to share or withhold knowledge?
The young manager would ultimately find his answers, but they were not what either of us had hoped for. Even as the pulp mill workers struggled and often triumphed, Hayek’s worldview was taking hold at the highest policy levels and Jensen’s operational disciplines were finding an eager welcome on Wall Street, which quickly learned to impose them on every public company. The result was a cost-down business model oriented to its Wall Street audience, which insisted on automating and exporting jobs rather than investing in the digital skills and capabilities of the US worker. The answer to the question Who knows? was that the machine knows, along with an elite cadre able to wield the analytic tools to troubleshoot and extract value from information. The answer to Who decides? was a narrow market form and its business models that decide. Finally, in the absence of a meaningful double movement, the answer to Who decides who decides? defaults entirely to financial capital bound to the disciplines of shareholder-value maximization.
It is not surprising that nearly forty years later, a Brookings Institution report laments that millions of US workers are “shut out of decent middle-skill opportunities” in the face of “rapid digitalization.” The report exhorts companies to “invest urgently in IT upskilling strategies for incumbent workers, knowing that digital skills represent a key channel of productivity gains.”12 How different might our society be if US businesses had chosen to invest in people as well as in machines?
Most companies opted for the smart machine over smart people, producing a well-documented pattern that favors substituting machines and their algorithms for human contributors in a wide range of jobs. By now, these include many occupations far from the factory floor.13 This results in what economists call “job polarization,” which features some high-skill jobs and other low-skill jobs, with automation displacing most of the jobs that were once “in the middle.”14 And although some business leaders, economists, and technologists describe these developments as necessary and inevitable consequences of computer-based technologies, research shows that the division of learning in the economic domain reflects the strength of neoliberal ideology, politics, culture, and institutional patterns. For example, in continental and northern Europe, where key elements of the double movement have survived in some form, job polarization is moderated by substantial investments in workforce education that produce a more inclusive division of learning as well as high-quality innovative products and services.15
Most critical to our story is that we now face a second historical phase of this conflict. The division of learning in the economic domain of production and employment is critical, but it is only the beginning of a new struggle over the even larger question of the division of learning in society. The dilemmas of knowledge, authority, and power have burst through the walls of the workplace to overwhelm our daily lives. As people, processes, and things are reinvented as information, the division of learning in society becomes the ascendant principle of social ordering in our time.
A wholly new electronic text now extends far beyond the confines of the factory or office. Thanks to our computers, credit cards, and phones, and the cameras and sensors that proliferate in public and private spaces, just about everything we now do is mediated by computers that record and codify the details of our daily lives at a scale that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. We have reached the point at which there is little that is omitted from the continuous accretion of this new electronic text. In later chapters we review many illustrations of the new electronic text as it spreads silently but relentlessly, like a colossal oil slick engulfing everything in its path: your breakfast conversation, the streets in your neighborhood, the dimensions of your living room, your run in the park.
The result is that both the world and our lives are pervasively rendered as information. Whether you are complaining about your acne or engaging in political debate on Facebook, searching for a recipe or sensitive health information on Google, ordering laundry soap or taking photos of your nine-year-old, smiling or thinking angry thoughts, watching TV or doing wheelies in the parking lot, all of it is raw material for this burgeoning text. Information scholar Martin Hilbert and his colleagues observe that even the foundational elements of civilization, including “language, cultural assets, traditions, institutions, rules, and laws… are currently being digitized, and for the first time, explicitly put into visible code,” then returned to society through the filter of “intelligent algorithms” deployed to govern a rapidly multiplying range of commercial, governmental, and social functions.16 The essential questions confront us at every turn: Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?
III. Surveillance Capital and the Two Texts
There are important parallels with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the division of labor first emerged as the foremost principle of social organization in the nascent industrial societies of Europe and North America. These experiences can offer guidance and alert us to what is at stake. For example, when the young Emile Durkheim wrote The Division of Labor in Society, the title itself was controversial. The division of labor had been understood as a critical means of achieving labor productivity through the specialization of tasks. Adam Smith memorably wrote about this new principle of industrial organization in his description of a pin factory, and the division of labor remained a topic of economic discourse and controversy throughout the nineteenth century. Durkheim recognized labor productivity as an economic imperative of industrial capitalism that would drive the division of labor to its most extreme application, but that was not what held his fascination.
Instead, Durkheim trained his sights on the social transformation already gathering around him, observing that “specialization” was gaining “influence” in politics, administration, the judiciary, science, and the arts. He concluded that the division of labor was no longer quarantined in the industrial workplace. Instead, it had burst through those factory walls to becoming the critical organizing principle of industrial society. This is also an example of Edison’s insight: that the principles of capitalism initially aimed at prod
uction eventually shape the wider social and moral milieu. “Whatever opinion one has about the division of labor,” Durkheim wrote, “everyone knows that it exists, and is more and more becoming one of the fundamental bases of the social order.”17
Economic imperatives predictably mandated the division of labor in production, but what was the purpose of the division of labor in society? This was the question that motivated Durkheim’s analysis, and his century-old conclusions are still relevant for us now. He argued that the division of labor accounts for the interdependencies and reciprocities that link the many diverse members of a modern industrial society in a larger prospect of solidarity. Reciprocities breed mutual need, engagement, and respect, all of which imbue this new ordering principle with moral force.
In other words, the division of labor was summoned into society at the beginning of the twentieth century by the rapidly changing circumstances of the first modernity’s new individuals, discussed in Chapter 2. It was an essential response to their new “conditions of existence.” As people like my great-grandparents joined the migration to a modern world, the old sources of meaning that had bonded communities across space and time melted away. What would hold society together in the absence of the rules and rituals of clan and kin? Durkheim’s answer was the division of labor. People’s needs for a coherent new source of meaning and structure were the cause, and the effect was an ordering principle that enabled and sustained a healthy modern community. As the young sociologist explained,
The most remarkable effect of the division of labor is not that it increases output of functions divided, but that it renders them solidary. Its role… is not simply to embellish or ameliorate existing societies, but to render societies possible which, without it, would not exist.… It passes far beyond purely economic interests, for it consists in the establishment of a social and moral order sui generis.18
Durkheim’s vision was neither sterile nor naive. He recognized that things can take a dark turn and often do, resulting in what he called an “abnormal” (sometimes translated as “pathological”) division of labor that produces social distance, injustice, and discord in place of reciprocity and interdependency. In this context, Durkheim singled out the destructive effects of social inequality on the division of labor in society, especially what he viewed as the most dangerous form of inequality: extreme asymmetries of power that make “conflict itself impossible” by “refusing to admit the right of combat.” Such pathologies can be cured only by a politics that asserts the people’s right to contest, confront, and prevail in the face of unequal and illegitimate power over society. In the late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, that contest was led by labor and other social movements that asserted social equality through institutions such as collective bargaining and public education.
The transformation that we witness in our time echoes these historical observations as the division of learning follows the same migratory path from the economic to the social domain once traveled by the division of labor. Now the division of learning “passes far beyond purely economic interests,” for it establishes the basis for our social order and its moral content.
The division of learning is to us, members of the second modernity, what the division of labor was to our grandparents and great-grandparents, pioneers of the first modernity. In our time the division of learning emerges from the economic sphere as a new principle of social order and reflects the primacy of learning, information, and knowledge in today’s quest for effective life. And just as Durkheim warned his society a century ago, today our societies are threatened as the division of learning drifts into pathology and injustice at the hands of the unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism has achieved.
Surveillance capitalism’s command of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of the two texts. The specific mechanisms of surveillance capitalism compel the production of two “electronic texts,” not just one. When it comes to the first text, we are its authors and readers. This public-facing text is familiar and celebrated for the universe of information and connection it brings to our fingertips. Google Search codifies the informational content of the world wide web. Facebook’s News Feed binds the network. Much of this public-facing text is composed of what we inscribe on its pages: our posts, blogs, videos, photos, conversations, music, stories, observations, “likes,” tweets, and all the great massing hubbub of our lives captured and communicated.
Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, however, the first text does not stand alone; it trails a shadow close behind. The first text, full of promise, actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text. Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how trivial or fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction. That surplus fills the pages of the second text. This one is hidden from our view: “read only” for surveillance capitalists.19 In this text our experience is dragooned as raw material to be accumulated and analyzed as means to others’ market ends. The shadow text is a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its analyses, and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves. Worse still, it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text. It automatically feeds on our experience as we engage in the normal and necessary routines of social participation.
More mystifying still are the ways in which surveillance capitalists apply what they learn from their exclusive shadow text to shape the public text to their interests. There have been myriad revelations of Google and Facebook’s manipulations of the information that we see. For now I’ll simply point out that Google’s algorithms, derived from surplus, select and order search results, and Facebook’s algorithms, derived from surplus, select and order the content of its News Feed. In both cases, researchers have shown that these manipulations reflect each corporation’s commercial objectives. As legal scholar Frank Pasquale describes it, “The decisions at the Googleplex are made behind closed doors… the power to include, exclude, and rank is the power to ensure which public impressions become permanent and which remain fleeting.… Despite their claims of objectivity and neutrality, they are constantly making value-laden, controversial decisions. They help create the world they claim to merely ‘show’ us.”20 When it comes to the shadow text, surveillance capitalism’s laws of motion compel both its secrecy and its continuous growth. We are the objects of its narratives, from whose lessons we are excluded. As the source from which all the treasure flows, this second text is about us, but it is not for us. Instead, it is created, maintained, and exploited outside our awareness for others’ benefit.
The result is that the division of learning is both the ascendant principle of social ordering in our information civilization and already a hostage to surveillance capitalism’s privileged position as the dominant composer, owner, and guardian of the texts. Surveillance capitalism’s ability to corrupt and control these texts produces unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that operate precisely as Durkheim had feared: the relatively free rein accorded to this market form and the innately illegible character of its action have enabled it to impose substantial control over the division of learning outside of our awareness and without means of combat. When it comes to the essential questions, surveillance capital has gathered the power and asserted the authority to supply all the answers. However, even authority is not enough. Only surveillance capital commands the material infrastructure and expert brainpower to rule the division of learning in society.
IV. The New Priesthood
Scientists warn that the world’s capacity to produce information has substantially exceeded its ability to process and store information. Consider that our technological memory has roughly doubled about every three years. In 1986 only 1 percent of the world’s information was digitized and 25 percent in 2000. By 2013, the progress of digitalization and datafication (the application of software that allows computer
s and algorithms to process and analyze raw data) combined with new and cheaper storage technologies had translated 98 percent of the world’s information into a digital format.21
Information is digital, but its volume exceeds our ability to discern its meaning. As the solution to this problem, information scholar Martin Hilbert counsels, “The only option we have left to make sense of all the data is to fight fire with fire,” using “artificially intelligent computers” to “sift through the vast amounts of information.… Facebook, Amazon, and Google have promised to… create value out of vast amounts of data through intelligent computational analysis.”22 The rise of surveillance capitalism necessarily turns Hilbert’s advice into a dangerous proposition. Although he does not mean to, Hilbert merely confirms the privileged position of the surveillance capitalists and the asymmetrical power that enables them to bend the division of learning to their interests.
Google’s asymmetrical power draws on all the social sources that we have considered: its declarations, its defensive fortifications, its exploitation of law, the legacy of surveillance exceptionalism, the burdens of second-modernity individuals, and so on. But its power would not be operational without the gargantuan material infrastructure that surveillance revenues have bought. Google is the pioneer of “hyperscale,” considered to be “the largest computer network on Earth.”23 Hyperscale operations are found in high-volume information businesses such as telecoms and global payments firms, where data centers require millions of “virtual servers” that exponentially increase computing capabilities without requiring substantial expansion of physical space, cooling, or electrical power demands.24 The machine intelligence at the heart of Google’s formidable dominance is described as “80 percent infrastructure,” a system that comprises custom-built, warehouse-sized data centers spanning 15 locations and, in 2016, an estimated 2.5 million servers in four continents.25
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