That radical indifference produces equivalence without equality also affects the high science of targeted advertising. For example, journalist Julia Angwin and her colleagues at ProPublica discovered that Facebook “enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of ‘Jew hater,’ ‘How to burn jews,’ or ‘History of why jews ruin the world.’”38 As the journalists explained, “Facebook has long taken a hands-off approach to its advertising business.… Facebook generates its ad categories automatically based both on what users explicitly share with Facebook and what they implicitly convey through their online activity.” Similarly, reporters at BuzzFeed discovered that Google enables advertisers to target ads to people who type racist terms into the search bar and even suggests ad placements next to searches for “evil jew” and “Jewish control of banks.”39
In the 2017 postelection environments in the United States and the United Kingdom, as “fake news” dominated the spotlight, journalists discovered hundreds of examples in which prediction products had placed ads from legitimate brands, such as Verizon, AT&T, and Walmart, alongside heinous material, including disinformation sites, hate speech, extreme political content, and terrorist, racist, and anti-Semitic publications and videos.40
Most interesting was the assumed outrage and disbelief among surveillance capitalism’s customers: the advertising agencies and their clients who long ago chose to sell their souls to radical indifference, turning Google and Facebook into the duopoly of the online ad market and driving the massive expansion of surveillance capitalism.41 It had been nearly two decades since Google invented the formula that ceded ad placement to the equivalency metrics of click-through rates, supplanting earlier approaches that sought to align advertising placements with content that reflected the advertiser’s brand values. Customers forfeited those established reciprocities in favor of the “auto magic” of Google’s secret algorithms trained on proprietary behavioral surplus culled from unwitting users. Indeed, it was the radical indifference of click metrics that bred online displays of extremism and sensationalism in the first place, as prediction products favor content designed to magnetize engagement.
The election scandals shined a harsh spotlight on these settled practices to which the world had already become accustomed. In the heat of controversy, many top brands made a show of suspending their ads on Google and Facebook until the companies eliminated corrupt content or guaranteed acceptable ad placements. Politicians in Europe and the United States accused Google and Facebook of profiting from hatred and of weakening democracy with corrupt information. Initially, both companies seemed to assume that the noise would quickly fade. Mark Zuckerberg said it was “crazy”42 to think that fake news had influenced the elections. Google responded to its advertising customers with vague platitudes, offering little in the way of change.
This was not the first time that the leading surveillance capitalists had been called to account by public and press.43 In addition to the many cycles of outrage generated by Street View, Beacon, Gmail, Google Glass, News Feed, and other incursions, Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of the tech companies’ collusion with state intelligence agencies triggered an international eruption of loathing toward the surveillance capitalists. Google and Facebook learned to weather these storms with what I have called the “dispossession cycle,” and close observation of this new crisis suggested that a fresh cycle was in full throttle. As the threat of regulatory oversight grew, the adaptation phase of the cycle set in with a vengeance. There were public apologies, acts of contrition, attempts at mollification, and appearances before the US Congress and the EU Parliament.44 Zuckerberg “regretted” his “dismissive” attitude and prayed for forgiveness on the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.45 Sheryl Sandberg told ProPublica that “we never intended or anticipated this functionality being used this way.…”46 Facebook conceded that it could do more to combat online extremism.47 Google’s European chief told customers, “We apologise. Whenever anything like that happens, we don’t want it to happen and we take responsibility for it.”48
Consistent with the aims of the adaptation phase of the cycle, Bloomberg Businessweek observed of Google, “The company is trying to fight fake news without making sweeping changes.”49 Although both Google and Facebook made modest operational adjustments to try to diminish economic incentives for disinformation and instituted warning systems to alert users to probable corruption, Zuckerberg also used his super-voting power to reject a shareholder proposal that would have required the company to report on its management of disinformation and the societal consequences of its practices, and Google executives successfully fought back a similar shareholder proposal that year.50 Time would tell whether the companies’ users and customers would inflict financial punishment, and if so, how sustained that punishment might be.
By early 2018, a quiet shift from adaptation to redirection at Facebook was already poised to transform crisis into opportunity. “Despite facing important challenges… we also need to keep building new tools to help people connect, strengthen our communities, and bring the world closer together,” Zuckerberg told investors.51 A Zuckerberg post followed up by a statement from the head of the company’s News Feed declared that henceforth the News Feed would favor posts from friends and family, especially posts that “spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people… we will predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about.… These are posts that inspire back-and-forth discussion… whether that’s a post from a friend seeking advice… a news article or video prompting lots of discussion.… Live videos often lead to discussion among viewers… six times as many interactions as regular videos.”52
Radical indifference means that it doesn’t matter what is in the pipelines as long as they are full and flowing. Camouflaged as a retreat from corruption, the new strategy doubled down on activities rich in behavioral surplus, especially the live videos that Zuckerberg had long coveted. In a New York Times report, advertisers were quick to observe that the new rules would fuel Facebook’s “‘long-held’ video ambitions” and that the company had made clear its belief that its future lay in videos and video ads. One advertising executive commented that video content is “among the most shared and commented-upon content on the web.”53
Beyond all the explanations for the scourge of disinformation in the surveillance capitalist online environment is a deeper and more intransigent fact: radical indifference is a permanent invitation to the corruption of the first text. It sustains the pathological division of learning in society by forfeiting the integrity of public knowledge for the sake of the volume and scope of the shadow text. Radical indifference leaves a void where reciprocities once thrived. For all their freedom and knowledge, this is one void that surveillance capitalists will not fill because doing so would violate their own logic of accumulation. It is obvious that the rogue forces of disinformation grasp this fact more crisply than do Facebook’s or Google’s genuine users and customers as those forces learn to exploit the blind eye of radical indifference and escalate the perversion of learning in an open society.
IV. What Is Surveillance Capitalism?
Surveillance capitalism’s successful claims to freedom and knowledge, its structural independence from people, its collectivist ambitions, and the radical indifference that is necessitated, enabled, and sustained by all three now propel us toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions. Instead, surveillance capitalism must be reckoned as a profoundly antidemocratic social force. The reasoning I employ is not mine alone. It echoes Thomas Paine’s unyielding defense of the democratic prospect in The Rights of Man, the polemical masterpiece in which he contested the defense of monarchy in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Paine argued for the capabilities of the common person and against aristocratic privilege. Among his reasons to reject aristocratic rule was its lack of
accountability to the needs of people, “because a body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody, ought not to be trusted by any body.”54
Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic and antiegalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above. It is not a coup d’état in the classic sense but rather a coup de gens: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse that is Big Other. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence over the division of learning in society: the privatization of the central principle of social ordering in the twenty-first century. Like the adelantados and their silent incantations of the Requirimiento, surveillance capitalism operates in the declarative form and imposes the social relations of a premodern absolutist authority. It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. In a surreal paradox, this coup is celebrated as “personalization,” although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.
“Tyranny” is not a word that I choose lightly. Like the instrumentarian hive, tyranny is the obliteration of politics. It is founded on its own strain of radical indifference in which every person, except the tyrant, is understood as an organism among organisms in an equivalency of Other-Ones. Hannah Arendt observed that tyranny is a perversion of egalitarianism because it treats all others as equally insignificant: “The tyrant rules in accordance with his own will and interest… the ruler who rules one against all, and the ‘all’ he oppresses are all equal, namely equally powerless.” Arendt notes that classical political theory regarded the tyrant as “out of mankind altogether… a wolf in human shape.…”55
Surveillance capitalism rules by instrumentarian power through its materialization in Big Other, which, like the ancient tyrant, exists out of mankind while paradoxically assuming human shape. Surveillance capitalism’s tyranny does not require the despot’s whip any more than it requires totalitarianism’s camps and gulags. All that is needed can be found in Big Other’s reassuring messages and emoticons, the press of the others not in terror but in their irresistible inducements to confluence, the weave of your shirt saturated with sensors, the gentle voice that answers your queries, the TV that hears you, the house that knows you, the bed that welcomes your whispers, the book that reads you.… Big Other acts on behalf of an unprecedented assembly of commercial operations that must modify human behavior as a condition of commercial success. It replaces legitimate contract, the rule of law, politics, and social trust with a new form of sovereignty and its privately administered regime of reinforcements.
Surveillance capitalism is a boundary-less form that ignores older distinctions between market and society, market and world, or market and person. It is a profit-seeking form in which production is subordinated to extraction as surveillance capitalists unilaterally claim control over human, societal, and political territories extending far beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm or the market. Using Karl Polanyi’s lens, we see that surveillance capitalism annexes human experience to the market dynamic so that it is reborn as behavior: the fourth “fictional commodity.” Polanyi’s first three fictional commodities—land, labor, and money—were subjected to law. Although these laws have been imperfect, the institutions of labor law, environmental law, and banking law are regulatory frameworks intended to defend society (and nature, life, and exchange) from the worst excesses of raw capitalism’s destructive power. Surveillance capitalism’s expropriation of human experience has faced no such impediments.
The success of this coup de gens stands as sour testimony to the thwarted needs of the second modernity, which enabled surveillance capitalism to flourish and still remains its richest vein for extraction and exploitation. In this context it is not difficult to understand why Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offers his social network as the solution to the third modernity. He envisions a totalizing instrumentarian order—he calls it the new global “church”—that will connect the world’s people to “something greater than ourselves.” It will be Facebook, he says, that will address problems that are civilizational in scale and scope, building “the long-term infrastructure to bring humanity together” and keeping people safe with “artificial intelligence” that quickly understands “what is happening across our community.”56 Like Pentland, Zuckerberg imagines machine intelligence that can “identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all, including terrorists planning attacks using private channels, people bullying someone too afraid to report it themselves, and other issues both local and global.”57 When asked about his responsibility to shareholders, Zuckerberg told CNN, “That’s why it helps to have control of the company.”58
For more than three centuries, industrial civilization aimed to exert control over nature for the sake of human betterment. Machines were our means of extending and overcoming the limits of the animal body so that we could accomplish this aim of domination. Only later did we begin to fathom the consequences: the Earth overwhelmed in peril as the delicate physical systems that once defined sea and sky gyrated out of control.
Right now we are at the beginning of a new arc that I have called information civilization, and it repeats the same dangerous arrogance. The aim now is not to dominate nature but rather human nature. The focus has shifted from machines that overcome the limits of bodies to machines that modify the behavior of individuals, groups, and populations in the service of market objectives. This global installation of instrumentarian power overcomes and replaces the human inwardness that feeds the will to will and gives sustenance to our voices in the first person, incapacitating democracy at its roots.
The rise of instrumentarian power is intended as a bloodless coup, of course. Instead of violence directed at our bodies, the instrumentarian third modernity operates more like a taming. Its solution to the increasingly clamorous demands for effective life pivots on the gradual elimination of chaos, uncertainty, conflict, abnormality, and discord in favor of predictability, automatic regularity, transparency, confluence, persuasion, and pacification. We are expected to cede our authority, relax our concerns, quiet our voices, go with the flow, and submit to the technological visionaries whose wealth and power stand as assurance of their superior judgment. It is assumed that we will accede to a future of less personal control and more powerlessness, where new sources of inequality divide and subdue, where some of us are subjects and many are objects, some are stimulus and many are response.
The compulsions of this new vision threaten other delicate systems also many millennia in the making, but this time they are social and psychological. I am thinking here of the hard-won fruits of human suffering and conflict that we call the democratic prospect and the achievements of the individual as a source of autonomous moral judgment. Technological “inevitability” is the mantra on which we are trained, but it is an existential narcotic prescribed to induce resignation: a snuff dream of the spirit.
We’ve been alerted to the “sixth extinction” as vertebrate species disappear faster than at any time since the end of the dinosaurs. This cataclysm is the unintended consequence of the reckless and opportunistic methods, also exalted as inevitable, with which industrialization imposed itself on the natural world because its own market forms did not hold it to account. Now the rise of instrumentarian power as the signature expression of surveillance capitalism augurs a different kind of extinction. This “seventh extinction” will not be of nature but of what has been held most precious in human nature: the will to will, the sanctity of the individual, the ties of intimacy, the sociality that binds us together in promises, and the trust they breed. The dying off of this human future will be just as unintended as any other.
V. Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy
Instrumentarian power has gathered strength outside of mankind but also outside of democracy. There can be no law to protect us from the unprecedented, and democratic societies, l
ike the innocent world of the Tainos, are vulnerable to unprecedented power. In this way, surveillance capitalism may be viewed as part of an alarming global drift toward what many political scientists now view as a softening of public attitudes toward the necessity and inviolability of democracy itself.
Many scholars point to a global “democratic recession” or a “deconsolidation” of Western democracies that were long considered impervious to antidemocratic threats.59 The extent and precise nature of this threat are being debated, but observers describe the bitter saudade associated with rapid social change and fear of the future conveyed in the lament “My children will not see the life that I lived.”60 Such feelings of alienation and unease were expressed by many people around the world in a thirty-eight-nation survey published by Pew Research in late 2017. The findings suggest that the democratic ideal is no longer a sacred imperative, even for citizens of mature democratic societies. Although 78 percent of respondents say that representative democracy is “good,” 49 percent also say that “rule by experts” is good, 26 percent endorse “rule by a strong leader,” and 24 percent prefer “rule by the military.”61
The weakening attachment to democracy in the United States and many European countries is of serious concern.62 According to the Pew survey, only 40 percent of US respondents support democracy and simultaneously reject the alternatives. A full 46 percent find both democratic and nondemocratic alternatives to be acceptable, and 7 percent favor only the nondemocratic choice. The US sample trails Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, and Canada in its depth of commitment to democracy, but other key Western democracies, including Italy, the UK, France, and Spain, along with Poland and Hungary, fall at or below the thirty-eight-country median of 37 percent that are exclusively committed to democracy.
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