The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

  8. Hal Varian, “Beyond Big Data,” Business and Economics 49, no. 1 (January 2014). This perfect information is what behavioral economists call “unbounded rationality” or “unrestricted cognitive competence.” See Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1998), 30.

  9. For a powerful examination of this problem in relation to click-wrap and other forms of boilerplate, see Robin Kar and Margaret Radin, “Pseudo-contract & Shared Meaning Analysis” (Legal Studies Research Paper, University of Illinois College of Law, November 16, 2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3083129.

  10. Weber argued that the “decentralization of lawmaking” expressed in the “private ordering of contracts” does not necessarily produce “a decrease in the degree of coercion.” He warned that when a legal order imposes few “mandatory and prohibitory norms and ever so many ‘freedoms’ and ‘empowerments,’ [it] can nonetheless… facilitate a quantitative and qualitative increase not only of coercion in general but quite specifically of authoritarian coercion.” This is precisely how early-twentieth-century industrial employers used their rights of freedom of contract to employ child labor, demand twelve-hour workdays, and impose dangerous working conditions, and it is precisely how we have been saddled with illegitimate and audacious click-wrap agreements whose authors have found similar shelter in their claims to freedom of contract. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 668–81.

  11. Hal R. Varian, “Economic Scene; If There Was a New Economy, Why Wasn’t There a New Economics?” New York Times, January 17, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/17/business/economic-scene-if-there-was-a-new-economy-why-wasn-t-there-a-new-economics.html.

  12. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism.

  13. Oliver E. Williamson, “The Theory of the Firm as Governance Structure: From Choice to Contract,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 16, no. 3 (2002): 174.

  14. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism, 30–31, 52.With his usual insight, Evgeny Morozov made this connection in a prescient 2014 discussion of the origins of “Big Data” analytics in the ambitions of socialist planners. Evgeny Morozov, “The Planning Machine,” The New Yorker, October 6, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine.

  15. “Repo Man Helps Pay Off Bill for Elderly Couple’s Car,” ABC News, November 23, 2016, http://abcnews.go.com/US/repo-man-helps-pays-off-bill-elderly-couples/story?id=43738753; Sarah Larimer, “A Repo Man Didn’t Want to Seize an Elderly Couple’s Car, So He Helped Pay It Off for Them Instead,” Washington Post, November 24, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2016/11/24/a-repo-man-didnt-want-to-seize-an-elderly-couples-car-so-he-helped-pay-it-off-for-them-instead/?utm_term =.5ab21c4510ab.

  16. Timothy D. Smith, Jeffrey T. Laitman, and Kunwar P. Bhatnagar, “The Shrinking Anthropoid Nose, the Human Vomeronasal Organ, and the Language of Anatomical Reduction,” Anatomical Record 297, no. 11 (2014): 2196–2204, https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.23035.

  17. Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Jennifer King, “Research Report: What Californians Understand About Privacy Offline” (SSRN Scholarly Paper, Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, May 15, 2008), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1133075.

  18. Joseph Turow et al., “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities That Enable It,” Annenberg School for Communication, September 29, 2009, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1478214; Joseph Turow, Michael Hennessy, and Nora Draper, “The Tradeoff Fallacy: How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them Up to Exploitation,” Annenberg School for Communication, June 2015, https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/publications/tradeoff-fallacy-how-marketers-are-misrepresenting-american-consumers-and; Lee Rainie, “Americans’ Complicated Feelings About Social Media in an Era of Privacy Concerns,” Pew Research Center, March 27, 2018, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/27/americans-complicated-feelings-about-social-media-in-an-era-of-privacy-concerns.

  19. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (Paris, France: Le Figaro, 1909); F. T. Marinetti and R. W. Flint, Marinetti: Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972); Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Forgotten Books, 2008).

  20. Greg Mitchell, The Tunnels: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill (New York: Crown, 2016); Kristen Greishaber, “Secret Tunnels That Brought Freedom from Berlin’s Wall,” Independent, October 18, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/secret-tunnels-that-brought-freedom-from-berlins-wall-1804765.html.

  21. Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic, 2014), 181.

  22. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 137.

  23. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1. Peter S. Menell, “2014: Brand Totalitarianism” (UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper, University of California, September 4, 2013), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2318492; “Move Over, Big Brother,” Economist, December 2, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/3422918; Wojciech Borowicz, “Privacy in the Internet of Things Era,” Next Web, October 18, 2014, http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/10/18/privacy-internet-things-era-will-nsa-know-whats-fridge; Tom Sorell and Heather Draper, “Telecare, Surveillance, and the Welfare State,” American Journal of Bioethics 12, no. 9 (2012): 36–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2012.699137; Christina DesMarais, “This Smartphone Tracking Tech Will Give You the Creeps,” PCWorld, May 22, 2012, http://www.pcworld.com/article/255802/new_ways_to_track_you_via_your_mobile_devices_big_brother_or_good_business_.html; Rhys Blakely, “‘We Thought Google Was the Future but It’s Becoming Big Brother,’” Times, September 19, 2014, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/technology/internet/article4271776.ece; CPDP Conferences, Technological Totalitarianism, Politics and Democracy, 2016, http://www.internet-history.info/media-library/mediaitem/2389-technological-totalitarianism-politics-and-democracy.html; Julian Assange, “The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” New York Times, June 1, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html; Julian Assange, “Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society,” New York Times, December 4, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/julian-assange-on-living-in-a-surveillance-society.html; Michael Hirsh, “We Are All Big Brother Now,” Politico, July 23, 2015, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/big-brother-technology-trial-120477.html; “Apple CEO Tim Cook: Apple Pay Is Number One,” CBS News, October 28, 2014, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-apple-pay-is-number-one; Mathias Döpfner, “An Open Letter to Eric Schmidt: Why We Fear Google,” FAZ.net, April 17, 2014, http://www.faz.net/1.2900860; Sigmar Gabriel, “Sigmar Gabriel: Political Consequences of the Google Debate,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 20, 2014, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/sigmar-gabriel-consequences-of-the-google-debate-12948701-p6.html; Cory Doctorow, “Unchecked Surveillance Technology Is Leading Us Towards Totalitarianism,” International Business Times, May 5, 2017, http://www.ibtimes.com/unchecked-surveillance-technology-leading-us-towards-totalitarianism-opinion-2535230; Martin Schulz, “Transcript of Keynote Speech at Cpdp2016 on Technological, Totalitarianism, Politics and Democracy,” Scribd, 2016, https://www.scribd.com/document/305093114/Keynote-Speech-at-Cpdp2016-on-Technological-Totalitarianism-Politics-and-Democracy.

  2. Mussolini appointed Gentile to his cabinet as minister for Public Instruction when he first assumed power in 1922, describing Gentile as his “teacher.” See A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 2004), 60.

  3. Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, 30.

  4. Gregor, 62–63.

  5. Benito Mussolini, The Do
ctrine of Fascism (Hawaii: Haole Church Library, 2015), 4.

  6. Frank Westerman, Engineers of the Soul: The Grandiose Propaganda of Stalin’s Russia, trans. Sam Garrett (New York: Overlook, 2012), 32–34 (italics mine); Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations (New York: Penguin, 1992).

  7. Westerman, Engineers of the Soul, 22–29.

  8. Waldemar Gurian, “Totalitarianism as Political Religion,” in Totalitarianism, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 120. Ironically, perhaps, many scholars concluded that Italy never in fact did become a truly totalitarian state, citing the continuity of institutions—such as the Catholic Church—and the absence of mass murder. Some argue that theory and practice were more fully elaborated in Germany and even more extensively—and over a longer period—in the Soviet Union, despite Soviet elites’ rejection of the term in their reluctance to be identified with fascism.

  9. Claude Lefort, “The Concept of Totalitarianism,” Democratiya 9 (2007): 183–84.

  10. On Duranty as a Soviet apologist, see Westerman, Engineers of the Soul, 188; Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 468.

  11. Conquest, The Great Terror, 485.

  12. Conquest, 447.

  13. Conquest, 405.

  14. Conquest, Stalin, 222, 228.

  15. Conquest, 229.

  16. Walter Duranty, “What’s Going On in Russia?” Look, August 15, 1939, 21.

  17. Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for New York Times articles written from Moscow in 1931. Subsequently, Duranty’s reporting was challenged by anti-Stalinist groups who regarded Duranty as a tool for Stalinist propaganda. The Pulitzer committee investigated the allegations for six months and in the end decided not to revoke the award. Years later, the New York Times would conclude that Duranty’s work was some of the worst reporting in the history of that newspaper. None of this prevented Look and other periodicals from continuing to rely on Duranty’s accounts of life in the Soviet Union, certainly a significant contribution to the slow pace of public recognition of the unique features of totalitarian power.

  18. Conquest, The Great Terror, 467–68.

  19. Conquest, 486.

  20. Carl J. Friedrich, “The Problem of Totalitarianism—an Introduction,” in Totalitarianism, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 1.

  21. Friedrich, “The Problem of Totalitarianism,” 1–2. Friedrich was born and educated in Germany and worked as an advisor to the US military governor of Germany from 1946 to 1949.

  22. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken, 2004), 387.

  23. Arendt, The Origins, 431.

  24. Arendt, xxvii.

  25. Arendt, 429.

  26. Carl J. Friedrich, ed., Totalitarianism (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964); Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956); Theodor Adorno, “Education After Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966); Theodor W. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (New York: Routledge, 1991); Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Question: ‘What Is German?’” New German Critique no. 36 (Autumn, 1985): 121–31; Gurian, “Totalitarianism as Political Religion”; Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, Nature of Human Society Series (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968).

  27. See Raul Hilberg’s monumental account of the destruction of European Jews, which conveys the complexity of the Nazis’ mass mobilizations, including systems of transportation and production, military operations, ministerial hierarchies, orchestrated secrecy, and the recruitment of friends and neighbors to terrorize and murder their friends and neighbors: The Destruction of the European Jews (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985). See also Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1997); Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin, 2002); Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998); Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). In Russia, Solzhenitsyn’s account of the concentration camp system reveals the corps of party officials and ordinary citizens required to “feed” the constant flow of terror. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).

  28. Richard Shorten, Modernism and Totalitarianism—Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 50.

  29. Shorten, Modernism, Chapter 1.

  30. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 297–98.

  31. Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding (New York: Schocken, 1994), 343.

  32. “Behavior: Skinner’s Utopia: Panacea, or Path to Hell?” Time, September 20, 1971, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,909994,00.html.

  33. B. F. Skinner, “Current Trends in Experimental Psychology,” in Cumulative Record, 319, www.bfskinner.org (italics mine).

  34. See Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. and Elizabeth Nielsen-Gammon, “B. F. Skinner and Psychotechnology: The Case of the Heir Conditioner,” Review of General Psychology 3, no. 3 (1999): 155–67, https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.3.3.155.

  35. B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism (New York: Vintage, 1976), 1–9.

  36. John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review 20 (1913): 158–77.

  37. Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society; “Max Planck,” Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Detroit, MI: Scribner’s, 2008),http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/physics-biographies/max-planck.

  38. “Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck,” Nobel-winners.com, December 16, 2017, http://www.nobel-winners.com/Physics/max_karl_ernst_ludwig_planck.html. As a biographer of Max Planck writes, “Planck recalled that his ‘original decision to devote myself to science was a direct result of the discovery… that the laws of human reasoning coincide with the laws governing the sequences of the impressions we receive from the world about us; that, therefore, pure reasoning can enable man to gain an insight into the mechanism of the [world]….’ He deliberately decided, in other words, to become a theoretical physicist at a time when theoretical physics was not yet recognized as a discipline in its own right. But he went further: he concluded that the existence of physical laws presupposes that the ‘outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared… as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.’”

  39. Erwin Esper examines the factors that isolated Meyer within American psychology and therefore deprived much of his work of the recognition it should have enjoyed. See, especially, Erwin A. Esper, “Max Meyer in America,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 3, no. 2 (1967): 107–31, https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6696(196704)3:2<107:AID-JHBS2300030202>3.0.CO;2-F.

  40. Esper, “Max Meyer.”

  41. Skinner, About Behaviorism, 14.

  42. Skinner reiterated Meyer’s definitive importance to the radical behaviorist point of view. See, for example, his 1967 debate with the philosopher Brand Blanshard, where he stated the following: “A special problem arises from the inescapable fact that a small part of the universe is enclosed within the skin of each of us. It is not different in kind from the rest of the universe, but because our contact with it is intimate and in some ways exclusive, it receives special consideration. It is said to be known in a special way, to contain the immediately given, to be the first thing a man knows and according to some the only thing he can really know. Philosophers, following Descartes, begin with it in their analysis of mind. Almost everyone seems to begin
with it in explaining his own behavior. There is, however, another possible starting point—the behavior of what Max Meyer used to call the Other-One. As a scientific analysis grows more effective, we no longer explain that behavior in terms of inner events. The world within the skin of the Other-One loses its preferred status.” See Brand Blanshard, “The Problem of Consciousness: A Debate with B. F. Skinner,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 27, no. 3 (1967): 317–37.

  43. Max Meyer, “The Present Status of the Problem of the Relation Between Mind and Body,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9, no. 14 (1912): 371, https://doi.org/10.2307/2013335.

  44. Esper, “Max Meyer,” 114. In Meyer’s thinking, this reduction to “organism” was inherently humanistic in that it stresses the commonalities among persons and even species. All of us sleep and wake, eat and drink, dance, laugh, cry, reproduce, and die.

  45. See Max Planck, “Phantom Problems in Science,” in Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 52–79, 75. In 1946 Planck’s long-held views on the unity of science and scientific reasoning would be summarized in his paper on “phantom problems” in science, including the “mind-body problem” and the “problem of free will.” Planck viewed the mind-body controversy, like all phantom problems in philosophy and science, as a failure to specify “the viewpoint of the observation” and adhere to it consistently (italics mine). He argued that the “internal” or “psychological” viewpoint and the “external” or “physiological” viewpoint were too frequently confused: “What you feel, think, want, only you can know as firsthand information. Other people can conclude it only indirectly, from your words, conduct, actions and mannerisms. When such physical manifestations are entirely absent, they have no basis whatever to enable them to know your momentary mental state.” The external viewpoint was thus the only one admissible “as the basis of our scientific observation of volitional processes.” The establishment of this “external viewpoint” as the basis for the scientific study of human behavior is critical to our story, and Planck’s paper suggests the influence that his thinking exerted on Meyer (and even the possibility that Planck had read Meyer’s 1921 work). In any case, the resonance between Planck’s argument and Meyer’s is plain.