The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

  Our artists, like our young people, are canaries in the coal mine. That the need to make ourselves invisible is the theme of a brilliant artistic vanguard is another kind of message in a bottle cast from the front lines of mourning and revulsion. Glass life is intolerable, but so is fitting our faces with masks and draping our bodies in digitally resistant fabrics to thwart the ubiquitous lawless machines. Like every counter-declaration, hiding risks becomes an adaptation when it should be a rallying point for outrage. These conditions are unacceptable. Tunnels under this wall are not enough. This wall must come down.

  The greatest danger is that we come to feel at home in glass life or in the prospect of hiding from it. Both alternatives rob us of the life-sustaining inwardness, born in sanctuary, that finally distinguishes us from the machines. This is the well from which we draw the capacities to promise and to love, without which both the private bonds of intimacy and the public bonds of society wither and die. If we do not alter this course now, we leave a monumental work for the generations that follow us. Industrial capitalism commandeered nature only to saddle the coming generations with the burden of a burning planet. Will we add to this burden with surveillance capitalism’s invasion and conquest of human nature? Will we stand by as it subtly imposes the life of the hive while demanding the forfeit of sanctuary and the right to the future tense for the sake of its wealth and power?

  Paradiso calls it a revolution, and Pentland says it is the death of individuality. Nadella and Schmidt advocate the machine hive as our role model, with its coercive confluence and preemptive harmonies. Page and Zuckerberg understand the transformation of society as a means to their commercial ends. There are dissenters among us, to be sure, but the declaration of life without walls has thus far failed to trigger a mass withdrawal of agreement. This is in part the result of our dependency and in part because we do not yet appreciate the breadth and depth of what the architects have in store, let alone the consequences that this “revolution” might entail.

  Our sensibilities grow numb to the monstrosity of Big Other as its features are developed, tested, elaborated, and normalized. We become deaf to the lullaby of walls. Hiding from the machines and their masters drifts from the obsessions of the vanguard to a normal theme of social discourse and eventually our conversations around the dinner table. Each step down this path occurs as if in the fog of war: scattered fragments and incidents that appear abruptly and often in obscurity. There is little room to perceive the pattern, let alone its origins and meaning. Nonetheless, each deletion of the possibility of sanctuary leaves a void that is seamlessly and soundlessly filled by the new conditions of instrumentarian power.

  CONCLUSION

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  A COUP FROM ABOVE

  He shook with hate for things he’d never seen,

  Pined for a love abstracted from its object,

  And was oppressed as he had never been.

  —W. H. AUDEN

  SONNETS FROM CHINA, III

  Surveillance capitalism departs from the history of market capitalism in three startling ways. First, it insists on the privilege of unfettered freedom and knowledge. Second, it abandons long-standing organic reciprocities with people. Third, the specter of life in the hive betrays a collectivist societal vision sustained by radical indifference and its material expression in Big Other. In this chapter we explore each of these departures from historical norms and then face the question that they raise: is surveillance capitalism merely “capitalism”?

  I. Freedom and Knowledge

  Surveillance capitalists are no different from other capitalists in demanding freedom from any sort of constraint. They insist upon the “freedom to” launch every novel practice while aggressively asserting the necessity of their “freedom from” law and regulation. This classic pattern reflects two bedrock assumptions about capitalism made by its own theorists: The first is that markets are intrinsically unknowable. The second is that the ignorance produced by this lack of knowledge requires wide-ranging freedom of action for market actors.

  The notion that ignorance and freedom are essential characteristics of capitalism is rooted in the conditions of life before the advent of modern systems of communication and transportation, let alone global digital networks, the internet, or the ubiquitous computational, sensate, actuating architectures of Big Other. Until the last few moments of the human story, life was necessarily local, and the “whole” was necessarily invisible to the “part.”

  Adam Smith’s famous metaphor of the “invisible hand” drew on these enduring realities of human life. Each individual, Smith reasoned, employs his capital locally in pursuit of immediate comforts and necessities. Each one attends to “his own security… his own gain… led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” That end is the efficient employ of capital in the broader market: the wealth of nations. The individual actions that produce efficient markets add up to a staggeringly complex pattern, a mystery that no one person or entity could hope to know or understand, let alone to direct: “The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would… assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever.…”1

  The neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek, whose work we discussed briefly in Chapter 2 as the foundation for the market-privileging economic policies of the past half century, drew the most basic tenets of his arguments from Smith’s assumptions about the whole and the part. “Adam Smith,” Hayek wrote, “was the first to perceive that we have stumbled upon methods of ordering human economic cooperation that exceed the limits of our knowledge and perception. His ‘invisible hand’ had perhaps better have been described as an invisible or unsurveyable pattern.”2

  As with Planck, Meyer, and Skinner, both Hayek and Smith unequivocally link freedom and ignorance. In Hayek’s framing, the mystery of the market is that a great many people can behave effectively while remaining ignorant of the whole. Individuals not only can choose freely, but they must freely choose their own pursuits because there is no alternative, no source of total knowledge or conscious control to guide them. “Human design” is impossible, Hayek says, because the relevant information flows are “beyond the span of the control of any one mind.” The market dynamic makes it possible for people to operate in ignorance without “anyone having to tell them what to do.”3

  Hayek chose the market over democracy, arguing that the market system enabled not only the division of labor but also “the coordinated utilization of resources based on equally divided knowledge.” This system, he argued, is the only one compatible with freedom. Perhaps some other kind of civilization might have been devised, he reckoned, “like the ‘state’ of the termite ants,” but it would not be compatible with human freedom.4

  Something is awry. It is true that many capitalists, including surveillance capitalists, vigorously employ these centuries-old justifications for their freedom when they reject regulatory, legislative, judicial, societal, or any other form of public interference in their methods of operation. However, Big Other and the steady application of instrumentarian power challenge the classic quid pro quo of freedom for ignorance.

  When it comes to surveillance capitalist operations, the “market” is no longer invisible, certainly not in the way that Smith or Hayek imagined. The competitive struggle among surveillance capitalists produces the compulsion toward totality. Total information tends toward certainty and the promise of guaranteed outcomes. These operations mean that the supply and demand of behavioral futures markets are rendered in infinite detail. Surveillance capitalism thus replaces mystery with certainty as it substitutes rendition, behavioral modification, and prediction for the old “unsurveyable pattern.” This is a fundamental reversal of the classic ideal of the “market” as intrinsically unknowable.

  Recall Mark Zuckerberg’s boast that Facebook would know every book, film, and song a person ha
d ever consumed and that its predictive models would tell you what bar to go to when you arrive in a strange city, where the bartender would have your favorite drink waiting.5 As the head of Facebook’s data science team once reflected, “This is the first time the world has seen this scale and quality of data about human communication.… For the first time, we have a microscope that… lets us examine social behavior at a very fine level that we’ve never been able to see before.…”6 A top Facebook engineer put it succinctly: “We are trying to map out the graph of everything in the world and how it relates to each other.”7

  The same objectives are echoed in the other leading surveillance capitalist firms. As Google’s Eric Schmidt observed in 2010, “You give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”8 Satya Nadella of Microsoft understands all physical and institutional spaces, people, and social relationships as indexable and searchable: all of it subject to machine reasoning, pattern recognition, prediction, preemption, interruption, and modification.9

  Surveillance capitalism is not the old capitalism, and its leaders are not Smith’s or even Hayek’s capitalists. Under this regime, freedom and ignorance are no longer twin born, no longer two sides of the same coin called mystery. Surveillance capitalism is instead defined by an unprecedented convergence of freedom and knowledge. The degree of that convergence corresponds exactly to the scope of instrumentarian power. This unimpeded accumulation of power effectively hijacks the division of learning in society, instituting the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion upon which surveillance revenues depend. Surveillance capitalists claim the freedom to order knowledge, and then they leverage that knowledge advantage in order to protect and expand their freedom.

  Although there is nothing unusual about the prospect of capitalist enterprises seeking every kind of knowledge advantage in a competitive marketplace, the surveillance capitalist capabilities that translate ignorance into knowledge are unprecedented because they rely on the one resource that distinguishes the surveillance capitalists from traditional utopianists: the financial and intellectual capital that permits the actual transformation of the world, materialized in the continuously expanding architectures of Big Other. More astonishing still is that surveillance capital derives from the dispossession of human experience, operationalized in its unilateral and pervasive programs of rendition: our lives are scraped and sold to fund their freedom and our subjugation, their knowledge and our ignorance about what they know.

  This new condition unravels the neoliberal justification for the evisceration of the double movement and the triumph of raw capitalism: its free markets, free-market actors, and self-regulating enterprises. It suggests that surveillance capitalists mastered the rhetoric and political genius of the neoliberal ideological defense while pursuing a novel logic of accumulation that belies the most fundamental postulates of the capitalist worldview. It’s not just that the cards have been reshuffled; the rules of the game have been transformed into something that is both unprecedented and unimaginable outside the digital milieu and the vast resources of wealth and scientific prowess that the new applied utopianists bring to the table.

  We have carefully examined surveillance capitalism’s novel foundational mechanisms, economic imperatives, gathering power, and societal objectives. One conclusion of our investigations is that surveillance capitalism’s command and control of the division of learning in society are the signature feature that breaks with the old justifications of the invisible hand and its entitlements. The combination of knowledge and freedom works to accelerate the asymmetry of power between surveillance capitalists and the societies in which they operate. This cycle will be broken only when we acknowledge as citizens, as societies, and indeed as a civilization that surveillance capitalists know too much to qualify for freedom.

  II. After Reciprocity

  In another decisive break with capitalism’s past, surveillance capitalists abandon the organic reciprocities with people that have long been a mark of capitalism’s endurance and adaptability. Symbolized in the twentieth century by Ford’s five-dollar day, these reciprocities hearken back to Adam Smith’s original insights into the productive social relations of capitalism, in which firms rely on people as employees and customers. Smith argued that price increases had to be balanced with wage increases “so that the labourer may still be able to purchase that quantity of those necessary articles which the state of the demand for labour… requires that he should have.”10 The shareholder-value movement and globalization went a long way toward destroying this centuries-old social contract between capitalism and its communities, substituting formal indifference for reciprocity. Surveillance capitalism goes further. It not only jettisons Smith, but it also formally rescinds any remaining reciprocities with its societies.

  First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely on people as consumers. Instead, the axis of supply and demand orients the surveillance capitalist firm to businesses intent on anticipating the behavior of populations, groups, and individuals. The result, as we have seen, is that “users” are sources of raw material for a digital-age production process aimed at a new business customer. Where individual consumers continue to exist in surveillance capitalist operations—purchasing Roomba vacuum cleaners, dolls that spy, smart vodka bottles, or behavior-based insurance policies, just to name a few examples—social relations are no longer founded on mutual exchange. In these and many other instances, products and services are merely hosts for surveillance capitalism’s parasitic operations.

  Second, by historical standards the large surveillance capitalists employ relatively few people compared to their unprecedented computational resources. This pattern, in which a small, highly educated workforce leverages the power of a massive capital-intensive infrastructure, is called “hyperscale.” The historical discontinuity of the hyperscale business operation becomes apparent by comparing seven decades of GM employment levels and market capitalization to recent post-IPO data from Google and Facebook. (I have confined the comparison here to Google and Facebook because both were pure surveillance capitalist firms even before their public offerings.)

  From the time they went public to 2016, Google and Facebook steadily climbed to the heights of market capitalization, with Google reaching $532 billion by the end of 2016 and Facebook reaching $332 billion, without Google ever employing more than 75,000 people or Facebook more than 18,000. General Motors took four decades to reach its highest market capitalization of $225.15 billion in 1965, when it employed 735,000 women and men.11 Most startling is that GM employed more people during the height of the Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights of market capitalization.

  The GM pattern is the iconic story of the United States in the twentieth century, before globalization, neoliberalism, the shareholder-value movement, and plutocracy unraveled the public corporation and the institutions of the double movement. Those institutions rationalized GM’s employment policies with fair labor practices, unionization, and collective bargaining, emblematic of stable reciprocities during the pre-globalization decades of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, for example, 80 percent of adults said that “big business” was a good thing for the country, 66 percent believed that business required little or no change, and 60 percent agreed that “the profits of large companies help make things better for everyone who buys their products or services.”12

  Although some critics blamed these reciprocities for GM’s failure to adapt to global competition in the late 1980s, leading eventually to its bankruptcy in 2009, analyses have shown that chronic managerial complacency and doomed financial strategies bore the greatest share of responsibility for the firm’s legendary decline, a conclusion that is fortified by the successes of the German automobile industry in the twenty-first century, where strong labor institutions formally share decis
ion making authority.13

  Hyperscale firms have become emblematic of modern digital capitalism, and as capitalist inventions they present significant social and economic challenges, including their impact on employment and wages, industry concentration, and monopoly.14 In 2017, 24 hyperscale firms operated 320 data centers with anywhere between thousands and millions of servers (Google and Facebook were among the largest).15

  Not all hyperscale firms are surveillance capitalists, however, and our focus here is restricted to the convergence of these two domains. The surveillance capitalists that operate at hyperscale or outsource to hyperscale operations dramatically diminish any reliance on their societies as sources of employees, and the few for whom they do compete, as we have seen, are drawn from the most-rarefied strata of data science.

  The absence of organic reciprocities with people as either sources of consumers or employees is a matter of exceptional importance in light of the historical relationship between market capitalism and democracy. In fact, the origins of democracy in both America and Britain have been traced to these very reciprocities. In America the violation of consumer reciprocities awakened an unstoppable march toward liberty as economic power translated into political power. A half century later in Britain, a grudging, practical, self-interested respect for the necessary interdependence of capital and labor translated into new patterns of political power, expressed in the gradual expansion of the franchise and the nonviolent shift to more-inclusive democratic institutions. Even a brief glance at these world-altering histories can help us grasp the degree to which surveillance capitalism diverges from capitalism’s past.