Many have concluded from this turmoil that market democracy is no longer viable, despite the fact that the combination of markets and democracy has served humanity well, helping to lift much of humankind from millennia of ignorance, poverty, and pain. For some of these thinkers it is the markets that must go, and for others it is democracy that’s slated for obsolescence. Repulsed by the social degradation and climate chaos produced by nearly four decades of neoliberal policy and practice, an important and varied group of scholars and activists argues that the era of capitalism is at end. Some propose more-humane economic alternatives,63 some anticipate protracted decline,64 and others, repelled by social complexity, favor a blend of elite power and authoritarian politics in closer emulation of China’s authoritarian system.65
These developments alert us to a deeper truth: just as capitalism cannot be eaten raw, people cannot live without the felt possibility of homecoming. Hannah Arendt explored this territory more than sixty years ago in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she traced the path from a thwarted individuality to a totalizing ideology. It was the individual’s experience of insignificance, expendability, political isolation, and loneliness that stoked the fires of totalitarian terror. Such ideologies, Arendt observed, appear as “a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.”66 Years later, in his moving 1966 essay “Education after Auschwitz,” social theorist Theodor Adorno attributed the success of German fascism to the ways in which the quest for effective life had become an overwhelming burden for too many people: “One must accept that fascism and the terror it caused are connected with the fact that the old established authorities… decayed and were toppled, while the people psychologically were not yet ready for self-determination. They proved to be unequal to the freedom that fell into their laps.”67
Should we grow weary of our own struggle for self-determination and surrender instead to the seductions of Big Other, we will inadvertently trade a future of homecoming for an arid prospect of muted, sanitized tyranny. A third modernity that solves our problems at the price of a human future is a cruel perversion of capitalism and of the digital capabilities it commands. It is also an unacceptable affront to democracy. I repeat Thomas Piketty’s warning: “A market economy… if left to itself… contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.”68 This is precisely the whirlwind that we will reap at the hands of surveillance capitalism, an unprecedented form of raw capitalism that is surely contributing to the tempering of commitment to the democratic prospect as it successfully bends populations to its soft-spoken will. It gives so much, but it takes even more.
Surveillance capitalism arrived on the scene with democracy already on the ropes, its early life sheltered and nourished by neoliberalism’s claims to freedom that set it at a distance from the lives of people. Surveillance capitalists quickly learned to exploit the gathering momentum aimed at hollowing out democracy’s meaning and muscle. Despite the democratic promise of its rhetoric and capabilities, it contributed to a new Gilded Age of extreme wealth inequality, as well as to once-unimaginable new forms of economic exclusivity and new sources of social inequality that separate the tuners from the tuned. Among the many insults to democracy and democratic institutions imposed by this coup des gens, I count the unauthorized expropriation of human experience; the hijack of the division of learning in society; the structural independence from people; the stealthy imposition of the hive collective; the rise of instrumentarian power and the radical indifference that sustains its extractive logic; the construction, ownership, and operation of the means of behavior modification that is Big Other; the abrogation of the elemental right to the future tense and the elemental right to sanctuary; the degradation of the self-determining individual as the fulcrum of democratic life; and the insistence on psychic numbing as the answer to its illegitimate quid pro quo. We can now see that surveillance capitalism takes an even more expansive turn toward domination than its neoliberal source code would predict, claiming its right to freedom and knowledge, while setting its sights on a collectivist vision that claims the totality of society. Though still sounding like Hayek, and even Smith, its antidemocratic collectivist ambitions reveal it as an insatiable child devouring its aging fathers.
Cynicism is seductive and can blind us to the enduring fact that democracy remains our only channel for reformation. It is the one idea to have emerged from the long story of human oppression that insists upon a people’s inalienable right to rule themselves. Democracy may be under siege, but we cannot allow its many injuries to deflect us from allegiance to its promise. It is precisely in recognition of this dilemma that Piketty refuses to concede defeat, arguing that even “abnormal” dynamics of accumulation have been—and can again be—mitigated by democratic institutions that produce durable and effective countermeasures: “If we are to regain control of capital, we must bet everything on democracy.…”69
Democracy is vulnerable to the unprecedented, but the strength of democratic institutions is the clock that determines the duration and destructiveness of that vulnerability. In a democratic society the debate and contest afforded by still-healthy institutions can shift the tide of public opinion against unexpected sources of oppression and injustice, with legislation and jurisprudence eventually to follow.
VI. Be the Friction
This promise of democracy reflects an enduring lesson that I absorbed from Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate wedged in the back of a seminar room and straining to hear his instruction of the Chilean doctoral candidates who would soon lead their country to cataclysm, marching under the Friedman-Hayek flag. The professor was an optimist and a tireless educator who believed that legislative and judicial action invariably reflect the public opinion of twenty to thirty years earlier. It was an insight that he and Hayek—the two have been described as “soul mates and adversaries”—had crafted and transformed into systematic strategies and tactics.70 As Hayek told Robert Bork in a 1978 interview, “I’m operating on public opinion. I don’t even believe that before public opinion has changed, a change in the law will do any good… the primary thing is to change opinion.…”71 Friedman’s conviction oriented him toward the long game as he threw himself into the distinctly nonacademic project of neoliberal evangelism with a steady stream of popular articles, books, and television programs. He was always sensitive to the impact of local experience, from school textbooks to grassroots political campaigns.
The critical role of public opinion explains why even the most destructive “ages” do not last forever. I echo here what Edison said a century ago: that capitalism is “all wrong, out of gear.” The instability of Edison’s day threatened every promise of industrial civilization. It had to give way, he insisted, to a new synthesis that reunited capitalism and its populations. Edison was prophetic. Capitalism has survived the longue durée less because of any specific capability and more because of its plasticity. It survives and thrives by periodically renewing its roots in the social, finding new ways to generate new wealth by meeting new needs. Its evolution has been marked by a convergence of basic principles—private property, the profit motive, and growth—but with new forms, norms, and practices in each era.72 This is precisely the lesson of Ford’s discovery and the logic behind successive episodes of revitalization over many centuries. “There is no single variety of capitalism or organization of production,” Piketty writes. “This will continue to be true in the future, no doubt more than ever: New forms of organization and ownership remain to be invented.”73 Harvard philosopher Roberto Unger enlarges on this point, arguing that market forms can take any number of distinct legal and institutional directions, “each with dramatic consequences for every aspect of social life” and “immense importance for the future of humanity.”74
When I speak to my children or an audience of young people, I try to alert them to the
historically contingent nature of “the thing that has us” by calling attention to ordinary values and expectations before surveillance capitalism began its campaign of psychic numbing. “It is not OK to have to hide in your own life; it is not normal,” I tell them. “It is not OK to spend your lunchtime conversations comparing software that will camouflage you and protect you from continuous unwanted invasion.” Five trackers blocked. Four trackers blocked. Fifty-nine trackers blocked, facial features scrambled, voice disguised…
I tell them that the word “search” has meant a daring existential journey, not a finger tap to already existing answers; that “friend” is an embodied mystery that can be forged only face-to-face and heart-to-heart; and that “recognition” is the glimmer of homecoming we experience in our beloved’s face, not “facial recognition.” I say that it is not OK to have our best instincts for connection, empathy, and information exploited by a draconian quid pro quo that holds these goods hostage to the pervasive strip search of our lives. It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance, and desire to be catalogued, manipulated, and then used to surreptitiously herd us through the future tense for the sake of someone else’s profit. “These things are brand-new,” I tell them. “They are unprecedented. You should not take them for granted because they are not OK.”
If democracy is to be replenished in the coming decades, it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us. In this I do not mean only our “personal information.” What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own life and authorship of one’s own experience. What is at stake is the inward experience from which we form the will to will and the public spaces to act on that will. What is at stake is the dominant principle of social ordering in an information civilization and our rights as individuals and societies to answer the questions Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? That surveillance capitalism has usurped so many of our rights in these domains is a scandalous abuse of digital capabilities and their once grand promise to democratize knowledge and meet our thwarted needs for effective life. Let there be a digital future, but let it be a human future first.
I reject inevitability, and it is my hope that as a result of our journey together, you will too. We are at the beginning of this story, not the end. If we engage the oldest questions now, there is still time to take the reins and redirect the action toward a human future that we can call home. I turn once more to Tom Paine, who called upon each generation to assert its will when illegitimate forces hijack the future and we find ourselves hurled toward a destiny that we did not choose: “The rights of men in society are neither devisable, nor transferable, nor annihilable, but are descendible only; and it is not in the power of any generation to intercept finally and cut off the descent. If the present generation or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent.”75
Whatever has gone wrong, the responsibility to right it is renewed with each generation. Pity us and those who come next if we forfeit a human future to powerful companies and a rogue capitalism that fail to honor our needs or serve our genuine interests. Worse still would be our own voiceless capitulation to the message of inevitability that is power’s velvet-gloved right hand. Hannah Arendt, referring to her work on the origins of totalitarianism, wrote that “the natural human reaction to such conditions is one of anger and indignation because these conditions are against the dignity of man. If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, then I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities.”76
So it is for me and perhaps for you: the bare facts of surveillance capitalism necessarily arouse my indignation because they demean human dignity. The future of this narrative will depend upon the indignant citizens, journalists, and scholars drawn to this frontier project; indignant elected officials and policy makers who understand that their authority originates in the foundational values of democratic communities; and, especially, indignant young people who act in the knowledge that effectiveness without autonomy is not effective, dependency-induced compliance is no social contract, a hive with no exit can never be a home, experience without sanctuary is but a shadow, a life that requires hiding is no life, touch without feel reveals no truth, and freedom from uncertainty is no freedom.
We return here to George Orwell, but perhaps not in the way you might imagine. In an indignant 1946 review of James Burnham’s best seller, The Managerial Revolution, Orwell takes aim at Burnham for his cowardly attachment to power. The thesis of Burnham’s 1940 book was that capitalism, democracy, and socialism would not survive World War II. All would be replaced by a new planned centralized society modeled on totalitarianism. A new “managerial” class composed of executives, technicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers would concentrate all power and privilege in their own hands: an aristocracy of talent built on a semi-slave society. Throughout the book, Burnham insisted on the “inevitability” of this future and extolled the managerial capabilities evident in German and Russian political leadership. Writing in 1940, Burnham prophesied a Germany victory and the “managed” society to follow. Later, as the war still raged and the Red Army scored key successes, Burnham wrote a series of supplemental notes to later editions of the book in which he asserted with equal certainty that Russia would dominate the world.
Orwell’s disgust is palpable: “It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now, the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.” Burnham’s “sensational” contradictions revealed his own enthrallment with power and a complete failure to ascertain the creative principle in human history. “In each case,” Orwell thundered, “he was obeying the same instinct: the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible.”77
Orwell reviled Burnham for his absolute failure of “moral effort,” expressed in his profound loss of bearings. Under these conditions, “literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it.” Burnham’s loss of bearings allowed him “to think of Nazism as something rather admirable, something that could and probably would build up a workable and durable social order.”78
Burnham’s cowardice is a cautionary tale. We are living in a moment when surveillance capitalism and its instrumentarian power appear to be invincible. Orwell’s courage demands that we refuse to cede the future to illegitimate power. He asks us to break the spell of enthrallment, helplessness, resignation, and numbing. We answer his call when we bend ourselves toward friction, rejecting the smooth flows of coercive confluence. Orwell’s courage sets us against the relentless tides of dispossession that demean all human experience. Friction, courage, and bearings are the resources we require to begin the shared work of synthetic declarations that claim the digital future as a human place, demand that digital capitalism operate as an inclusive force bound to the people it must serve, and defend the division of learning in society as a source of genuine democratic renewal.
Arendt, like Orwell, asserts the possibility of new beginnings that do not cleave to already visible lines of power. She reminds us that every beginning, seen from the perspective of the framework that it interrupts, is a miracle. The capacity for performing such miracles is entirely human, she argues, because it is the source of all freedom: “What usually remains intact in the epochs of petrification and foreordained doom is the faculty of freedom itself, the sheer capacity to begin, which animates and inspires all human activities and is the hidden source… of all great and beautiful things.”79
The decade
s of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now, when we recall the lordly “barons” of the late nineteenth century, we call them “robbers.”
Surely the Age of Surveillance Capitalism will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live. It instructs us in the irreplaceable value of our greatest moral and political achievements by threatening to destroy them. It reminds us that shared trust is the only real protection from uncertainty. It demonstrates that power untamed by democracy can only lead to exile and despair. Friedman’s cycle of public opinion and durable law now reverts to us: it is up to us to use our knowledge, to regain our bearings, to stir others to do the same, and to found a new beginning. In the conquest of nature, industrial capitalism’s victims were mute. Those who would try to conquer human nature will find their intended victims full of voice, ready to name danger and defeat it. This book is intended as a contribution to that collective effort.
The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, but above all it was because the people of East Berlin said, “No more!” We too can be the authors of many “great and beautiful” new facts that reclaim the digital future as humanity’s home. No more! Let this be our declaration.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The two people who contributed the most to this work at the beginning no longer stand beside me, that I might shower them with gratitude at the end. When a lightning fire destroyed our home in 2009, thousands of books along with every trace of my scholarly career and new work in progress vanished in a few hours. I thought that I would never write again, but my brilliant and beloved husband, Jim Maxmin, insisted that time would bring rebirth. It did. For nearly thirty years, Jim was my first, last, and most important reader and interlocutor. He patiently absorbed early drafts of these chapters, as we excitedly argued our way through the new ideas. It remains incredible to me that we cannot share the fruit of this long labor. Jim’s great love and boundless enthusiasm fortified me for the long road, in work and life. His spirit lives through these pages in ways too numerous to reckon.
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