11. Social persuasion: As we have seen repeatedly, there is an endless cascade of beguiling rhetoric aimed at persuading people of the wonders associated with surveillance capitalist innovations: targeted advertising, personalization, and digital assistants. Beyond that, economies of action are intentionally designed to persuade us to follow one another along prescribed courses of action.
12. Foreclosed alternatives: The “dictatorship of no alternatives” is in full force here. We have seen that the behavioral value reinvestment cycle is increasingly rare. The Aware Home gave way to the Google Home. Surveillance capitalism spread across the internet, and the drive toward economies of scope and action has forced it out into the real world. From apps to devices to the One Voice, it is ever more difficult to identify avenues of escape, let alone genuine alternatives.
13. Inevitabilism: The Trojan horse of computer mediation—devices, apps, connection—enters the scene in a relentless deluge of inevitabilist rhetoric, successfully distracting us from the highly intentional and historically contingent surveillance capitalism within. New institutional facts proliferate and stabilize the new practices. We fall into resignation and a sense of helplessness.
14. The ideology of human frailty: In addition to inevitabilism, surveillance capitalism has eagerly weaponized behavioral economics’ ideology of human frailty, a worldview that frames human mentation as woefully irrational and incapable of noticing the regularity of its own failures. Surveillance capitalists employ this ideology to legitimate their means of behavior modification: tuning, herding, and conditioning individuals and populations in ways that are designed to elude awareness.
15. Ignorance: This remains a salient explanation. Surveillance capitalists dominate an abnormal division of learning in which they know things that we cannot know while compelled to conceal their intentions and practices in secret backstage action. It is impossible to understand something that has been crafted in secrecy and designed as fundamentally illegible. These systems are intended to ensnare us, preying on our vulnerabilities bred by an asymmetrical division of learning and amplified by our scarcity of time, resources, and support.
16. Velocity: Surveillance capitalism rose from invention to domination in record time. This reflects its ability to attract capital and its laws of motion, but it also reflects a specific strategy in which velocity is consciously deployed to paralyze awareness and freeze resistance while distracting us with immediate gratifications. Surveillance capitalism’s velocities outrun democracy even as they outrun our ability to understand what is happening and consider the consequences. This strategy is borrowed from a long legacy of political and military approaches to the production of speed as a form of violence, most recently known as “shock and awe.”19
These sixteen answers suggest that in the nearly two decades since the invention of surveillance capitalism, existing laws, largely centered on privacy and antitrust, have not been sufficient to disrupt its growth. We need laws that reject the fundamental legitimacy of surveillance capitalism’s declarations and interrupt its most basic operations, including the illegitimate rendition of human experience as behavioral data; the use of behavioral surplus as free raw material; extreme concentrations of the new means of production; the manufacture of prediction products; trading in behavioral futures; the use of prediction products for third-order operations of modification, influence, and control; the operations of the means of behavioral modification; the accumulation of private exclusive concentrations of knowledge (the shadow text); and the power that such concentrations confer.
The rejection of these new institutions of surveillance capital and the declarations upon which they are built would signify a withdrawal of social agreement to surveillance capitalism’s aims and methods in the same way that we once withdrew agreement to the antisocial and antidemocratic practices of raw industrial capitalism, righting the balance of power between employers and workers by recognizing workers’ rights to collective bargaining and outlawing child labor, hazardous working conditions, excessive work hours, and so on.
The withdrawal of agreement takes two broad forms, a distinction that will be useful as we move into Part III. The first is what I call the counter-declaration. These are defensive measures such as encryption and other privacy tools, or arguments for “data ownership.” Such measures may be effective in discrete situations, but they leave the opposing facts intact, acknowledging their persistence and thus paradoxically contributing to their legitimacy. For example, if I “opt out” of tracking, I opt out for me, but my action does not challenge or alter the offending practice. The second form of disagreement is what I call the synthetic declaration. If the declaration is “check,” the counter-declaration is “checkmate,” and the synthetic declaration changes the game. It asserts an alternative framework that transforms the opposing facts. We bide our time with counter-declarations and make life more tolerable, but only a synthetic alternative vision will transform raw surveillance capitalism in favor of a digital future that we can call home.
I turn to the history of the Berlin Wall as an illustration of these two forms of disagreement. From 1961 through the early 1980s, courageous East Berliners carved seventy-one tunnels through the sandy soil beneath the city, affording several hundred people a means of escape to West Berlin.20 The tunnels are testament to the necessity of counter-declarations, but they did not bring down the wall or the power that sustained it.
The synthetic declaration gathered force over decades, but its full expression would have to wait until near midnight on November 9, 1989, when Harald Jäger, the senior officer on duty that night at the Bornholmer Street passage, gave the order to open the gates, and twenty thousand people surged across the wall into West Berlin. As one historian describes that event, “By the night of November 9, when the people appeared at the Berlin Wall and demanded to know of the border officials, Will you let us pass?, those people had become so certain of themselves, and the officials so unsure of themselves, that the answer was We will.”21
IV. Prophecy
Nearly seventy years ago, the economic historian Karl Polanyi reflected on the ways in which industrial capitalism’s market dynamics would, if left unchecked, destroy the very things that it aimed to buy and sell: “The commodity fiction disregarded the fact that leaving the fate of soil and people to the market would be tantamount to annihilating them.”22 In the absence of synthetic declaration, Polanyi’s prophecy appears headed for fulfillment, and this fact alone must put us on alert. What does Polanyi’s prophecy augur for our time?
Industrial capitalism followed its own logic of shock and awe, taking aim at nature to conquer “it” in the interests of capital; now surveillance capitalism has human nature in its sights. We have only gradually come to understand that the specific methods of domination employed by industrial capitalism for more than two centuries have fundamentally disoriented the conditions that support life on Earth, violating the most basic precepts of civilization. Despite the many benefits and immense accomplishments of industrial capitalism, it has left us perilously close to repeating the fate of the Easter Islanders, who wrecked the ground that gave them life, then fashioned statues to scan the horizon for the aid and succor that would never come. If industrial capitalism dangerously disrupted nature, what havoc might surveillance capitalism wreak on human nature?
The answer to this question requires a return to imperatives. Industrial capitalism brought us to the brink of epic peril, but not as a consequence of an evil lust for destruction or runaway technology. Rather, this result was ineluctably driven by its own inner logic of accumulation, with its imperatives of profit maximization, competition, the relentless drive for labor productivity through the technological elaboration of production, and growth funded by the continuous reinvestment of surplus.23 It is Weber’s “economic orientation” that matters, and how that orientation merges with the specific form of capitalism that rises to dominance in each age.
The logic of industrial capitalism e
xempted the enterprise from responsibility for its destructive consequences, unleashing the destabilization of the climate system and the chaos it spells for all creatures. Polanyi understood that raw capitalism could not be cooked from within. He argued that it was up to society to impose those obligations on capitalism by insisting on measures that tether the capitalist project to the social, preserving and sustaining life and nature.
Similarly, the meaning of Polanyi’s prophecy for us now can be grasped only through the lens of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives as they frame its claim to human experience. If we are to rediscover our sense of astonishment, then let it be here: if industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism will thrive at the expense of human nature and threatens to cost us our humanity. Polanyi’s prophecy requires us to ask if we may yet avert this fate with our own synthetic declarations.
Parts I and II have been devoted to understanding the origins of surveillance capitalism and identifying, naming, and scrutinizing its foundational mechanisms and economic imperatives. The idea from the start was that naming and taming are inextricable, that fresh and careful naming can better equip us to intercept these mechanisms of dispossession, reverse their action, produce urgently needed friction, challenge the pathological division of learning, and ultimately synthesize new forms of information capitalism that genuinely meet our needs for effective life. Social participation and individual effectiveness should not require the sacrifice of our right to the future tense, which comprises our will to will, our autonomy, our decision rights, our privacy, and, indeed, our human natures.
However, it would be wrong to suppose that surveillance capitalism can be grasped solely through the prism of its economic action or that the challenges we face are restricted to discerning, containing, and transforming its foundational mechanisms. The consequences of this new logic of accumulation have already leaked and continue to leak beyond commercial practices into the fabric of our social relations, transforming our relationships to ourselves and to one another. These transformations provide the soil in which surveillance capitalism has flourished: an invasive species that creates its own food supply. In transforming us, it produces nourishment for its own march forward.
It is easier, perhaps, to see these dynamisms by looking to the past. The difference between industrial capitalism and industrial civilization is the difference between the economic operation and the societies it produced. The variant of industrial capitalism that rose to dominance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a specific kind of moral milieu that we sense intuitively even when we do not name it.
Industrial capitalism was marked by the specialized division of labor, with its historically specific characteristics: the conversion of craft work to mass production based on standardization, rationalization, and the interchangeability of parts; the moving assembly line; volume production; large populations of wage earners concentrated in factory settings; professionalized administrative hierarchies; managerial authority; functional specialization; and the distinction between white-collar work and blue-collar work.
The list is illustrative, not exhaustive, but enough to remind us that industrial civilization was drawn from these expressions of the economic imperatives that ruled industrial expansion. The division of labor shaped culture, psychology, and social experience. The shift from craft to hourly wages created new populations of employees and consumers, men and women wholly dependent on the means of production owned and operated by private firms.
This was the crucible of mass society, its hierarchical authority, and its centralized bureaucratic forms of public and private power, all of it haunted by the specters of conformity, obedience, and human standardization. Lives were defined by institutions that mirrored industrial organization: schools, hospitals, and even aspects of family and domestic life, in which ages and stages were understood as functions of the industrial system, from training to retirement.
At a time when surveillance capitalism has emerged as the dominant form of information capitalism, we must ask the question: what kind of civilization does it foretell? The chapters that follow in Part III are intended as an initial contribution to this urgent conversation. I have said that there can be no commitment to “guaranteed outcomes” without the power to make it so. What is the nature of this new power? How will it transform our societies? What solution for a third modernity does it proffer? What novel struggles will haunt these new days, and what do they portend for a digital future that we can call home? These are the questions that guide us into Part III.
PART III
INSTRUMENTARIAN POWER FOR A THIRD MODERNITY
CHAPTER TWELVE
TWO SPECIES OF POWER
So an age ended, and its last deliverer died
In bed, grown idle and unhappy; they were safe:
The sudden shadow of a giant’s enormous calf
Would fall no more at dusk across their lawns outside.
—W. H. AUDEN
SONNETS FROM CHINA, X
I. A Return to the Unprecedented
Under surveillance capitalism, the “means of production” serves the “means of behavioral modification.” Machine processes replace human relationships so that certainty can replace trust. This new assembly relies upon a vast digital apparatus, world-historic concentrations of advanced computational knowledge and skill, and immense wealth. The arc of behavioral modification at scale integrates the many operations that we have examined: ubiquitous extraction and rendition, actuation (tuning, herding, conditioning), behavioral surplus supply chains, machine-intelligence–based manufacturing processes, fabrication of prediction products, dynamic behavioral futures markets, and “targeting,” which leads to fresh rounds of tuning, herding, conditioning, and the coercions of the uncontract, thus renewing the cycle.
This assembly is a market project: its purpose is to fabricate predictions, which become more valuable as they approach certainty. The best predictions feed on totalities of data, and on the strength of this movement toward totality, surveillance capitalists have hijacked the division of learning in society. They command knowledge from the decisive pinnacle of the social order, where they nourish and protect the shadow text: the urtext of certainty. This is the market net in which we are snared.
In Parts I and II we examined the conditions, mechanisms, and operations that construct this private knowledge kingdom and its lucrative predictions that evolve toward certainty in order to guarantee market players the outcomes that they seek. As I wrote in Chapter 7, there can be no guarantee of outcomes without the power to make it so. This is the dark heart of surveillance capitalism: a new type of commerce that reimagines us through the lens of its own distinctive power, mediated by its means of behavioral modification. What is this power, and how does it remake human nature for the sake of its lucrative certainties?
As to this species of power, I name it instrumentarianism, defined as the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behavior for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization, and control. In this formulation, “instrumentation” refers to the puppet: the ubiquitous connected material architecture of sensate computation that renders, interprets, and actuates human experience. “Instrumentalization” denotes the social relations that orient the puppet masters to human experience as surveillance capital wields the machines to transform us into means to others’ market ends. Surveillance capitalism forced us to reckon with an unprecedented form of capitalism. Now the instrumentarian power that sustains and enlarges the surveillance capitalist project compels a second confrontation with the unprecedented.
When scholars, civil society leaders, journalists, public figures, and, indeed, most of us speak out courageously against this new power, invariably we look to Orwell’s Big Brother and more generally the specter of totalitarianism as the lens through which to interpret today’s threats. Google, Facebo
ok, and the larger field of commercial surveillance are frequently depicted as “digital totalitarianism.”1 I admire those who have stood against the incursions of commercial surveillance, but I also suggest that the equation of instrumentarian power with totalitarianism impedes our understanding as well as our ability to resist, neutralize, and ultimately vanquish its potency. There is no historical precedent for instrumentarianism, but there is vivid precedent for this kind of encounter with an unprecedented new species of power.
In the years before totalitarianism was named and formally analyzed, its critics appropriated the language of imperialism as the only framework at hand with which to articulate and resist the new power’s murderous threats. Now surveillance capitalism has cast us adrift in another odd, dark sea of novel and thus indiscernible dangers. As scholars and citizens did before us, it is we who now reach for familiar vernaculars of twentieth-century power like lifesaving driftwood.
We are back to the syndrome of the horseless carriage, where we attach our new sense of peril to old, familiar facts, unaware that the conclusions to which they lead us are necessarily incorrect. Instead, we need to grasp the specific inner logic of a conspicuously twenty-first-century conjuring of power for which the past offers no adequate compass. Totalitarianism was bent on the reconstruction of the human species through the dual mechanisms of genocide and the “engineering of the soul.” Instrumentarian power, as we shall see, takes us in a sharply different direction. Surveillance capitalists have no interest in murder or the reformation of our souls. Although their aims are in many ways just as ambitious as those of totalitarian leaders, they are also utterly distinct. The work of naming a strange form of power unprecedented in the human experience must begin anew for the sake of effective resistance and the creative power to insist on a future of our own making.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Page 43
