surveillance capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff  · 15 Jan 2019  · 918pp  · 257,605 words

their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zuboff, Shoshana, 1951- author. Title: The age of surveillance capitalism : the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power / Shoshana Zuboff. Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references

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It is about the darkening of the digital dream and its rapid mutation into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism. III. What Is Surveillance Capitalism? Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or

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our societies, our democracies, and our emerging information civilization are examined in detail in the coming chapters. The evidence and reasoning employed here suggest that surveillance capitalism is a rogue force driven by novel economic imperatives that disregard social norms and nullify the elemental rights associated with individual autonomy that are essential

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key battleground upon which the possibility of a human future at the new frontier of power will be contested. IV. The Unprecedented One explanation for surveillance capitalism’s many triumphs floats above them all: it is unprecedented. The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it

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society, and imposing a totalizing collectivist vision of life in the hive, with surveillance capitalists and their data priesthood in charge of oversight and control. Surveillance capitalism and its rapidly accumulating instrumentarian power exceed the historical norms of capitalist ambitions, claiming dominion over human, societal, and political territories that range far beyond

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years of experience in high-technology corporations and startups, primarily in Silicon Valley. These interviews were conducted as I developed my “ground truth” understanding of surveillance capitalism and its material infrastructure. Early on I approached a small number of highly respected data scientists, senior software developers, and specialists in the “internet

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predictions that were sometimes right; His lucky guesses were rewarded well. —W. H. AUDEN SONNETS FROM CHINA, VI I. Google: The Pioneer of Surveillance Capitalism Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism. New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered

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“Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is talking about when they talk about big data.” “Data” are the raw material necessary for surveillance capitalism’s novel manufacturing processes. “Extraction” describes the social relations and material infrastructure with which the firm asserts authority over those raw materials to achieve economies

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logic of accumulation that also introduces its own distinctive laws of motion. Here and in following chapters, we will examine these foundational dynamics, including surveillance capitalism’s idiosyncratic economic imperatives defined by extraction and prediction, its unique approach to economies of scale and scope in raw-material supply, its necessary construction

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differences for capitalism in these two moments of originality at Ford and Google. Ford’s inventions revolutionized production. Google’s inventions revolutionized extraction and established surveillance capitalism’s first economic imperative: the extraction imperative. The extraction imperative meant that raw-material supplies must be procured at an ever-expanding scale. Industrial capitalism

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fabric of Facebook’s online culture, where they could “invite” users into a “conversation.”88 VIII. Summarizing the Logic and Operations of Surveillance Capitalism With Google in the lead, surveillance capitalism rapidly became the default model of information capitalism on the web and, as we shall see in coming chapters, gradually drew competitors from

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shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks. CHAPTER FIVE THE ELABORATION OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: KIDNAP, CORNER, COMPETE All words like Peace and Love, all sane affirmative speech, had been soiled, profaned, debased to a horrid mechanical screech. —W.

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are threatened as the division of learning drifts into pathology and injustice at the hands of the unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism has achieved. Surveillance capitalism’s command of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of the two texts. The specific mechanisms of

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predicting, regulating, or prohibiting the activities of surveillance capitalists will fall short. The primary frameworks through which our societies have sought to assert control over surveillance capitalism’s audacity are those of “privacy rights” and “monopoly.” Neither the pursuit of privacy regulations nor the imposition of constraints on traditional monopoly practices has

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the prediction imperative insists on surplus culled from these new flows and surveillance capitalists fill the front seats of the classroom of digital omniscience. IV. Surveillance Capitalism’s Realpolitik Waning levels of government leadership and funding for “ubiquitous computing” leave the technology companies to lead in basic research and applications, each

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conducive to a democracy. And fundamentally, information warfare is not conducive to democracy.85 This “warfare” and its structure of invasion and conquest represent surveillance capitalism’s standard operating procedures to which billions of innocents are subjected each day, as rendition operations violate all boundaries and modification operations claim dominion over

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are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us. Although it is still possible to imagine automated behavioral modification without surveillance capitalism, it is not possible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the marriage of behavior modification and the technological means to automate its application. This marriage is essential to economies of action

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therefore, it was espoused, could design highly effective plans.14 Varian deftly swaps out socialism’s “new man” and installs instead a market defined by surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives, expressed through a ubiquitous computational architecture, the machine intelligence capabilities to which data are continuously supplied, the analytics that discern patterns,

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that keep us ignorant of its practices, and to insist on the conditions of lawlessness required for these operations. These declarations institutionalized surveillance capitalism as a market form. 3. Historical context: Surveillance capitalism found shelter in the neoliberal zeitgeist that equated government regulation of business with tyranny. This “paranoid style” favored self-management regimes

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the latent needs of second-modernity individuals seeking resources for effective life in an increasingly hostile institutional environment. Once bitten, the apple was irresistible. As surveillance capitalism spread across the internet, the means of social participation become coextensive with the means of behavioral modification. The exploitation of second-modernity needs that enabled

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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

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monitors, computes, and modifies human behavior. Big Other combines these functions of knowing and doing to achieve a pervasive and unprecedented means of behavioral modification. Surveillance capitalism’s economic logic is directed through Big Other’s vast capabilities to produce instrumentarian power, replacing the engineering of souls with the engineering of behavior

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a full-blown instrumentarian society based on the pervasive outfitting and measurement of human behavior for the purposes of modification, control, and—in light of surveillance capitalism’s commercial dominance of the networked sphere—profit. Pentland insists that “social phenomena are really just aggregations of billions of small transactions between individuals.…”

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tighten their grasp, and the system flourishes. Industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognize. Surveillance capitalism, I have suggested, depends instead upon the exploitation and control of human nature. The market reduces us to our behavior, transformed into another fictional

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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

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-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

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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

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professional journalism on the internet. Both corporations inserted themselves between publishers and their populations, subjecting journalistic “content” to the same categories of equivalence that dominate surveillance capitalism’s other landscapes. In a formal sense, professional journalism is the precise opposite of radical indifference. The journalist’s job is to produce news and

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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

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a special issue of the Journal of Information Technology devoted to the theme of “big data,” they enthusiastically embraced my first academic paper on surveillance capitalism, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” and helped speed its way to publication. Special thanks to the Senior Scholars of the International Conference

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BusinessWeek.com and Fast Company. strategy+business magazine named Zuboff one of the eleven most original business thinkers in the world. Her 2015 article on surveillance capitalism, “Big Other,” received the Best Paper Award from the International Conference on Information Systems. For more information, see shoshanazuboff.com. @shoshanazuboff Praise for The

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I. Human Natural Resources II. The Cry Freedom Strategy III. Shelter: The Neoliberal Legacy IV. Shelter: Surveillance Exceptionalism V. Fortifications CHAPTER FIVE The Elaboration of Surveillance Capitalism: Kidnap, Corner, Compete I. The Extraction Imperative II. Cornered III. The Dispossession Cycle Stage One: Incursion Stage Two: Habituation Stage Three: Adaptation Stage Four:

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EIGHTEEN A Coup from Above I. Freedom and Knowledge II. After Reciprocity III. The New Collectivism and Its Masters of Radical Indifference IV. What Is Surveillance Capitalism? V. Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy VI. Be the Friction NOTES CHAPTER ONE 1. Martin Hilbert, “Technological Information Inequality as an Incessantly Moving Target: The Redistribution of Information

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modernity; second modernity; third modernity Mohammed, Jahangir, 227 Monarchical Edict of 1513 (Requirimiento), 178 Monitor, 325 monopoly (antitrust): as category that falls short in contesting surveillance capitalism, 14, 23, 194, 344, 486; as means of cornering behavioral surplus supply routes, 132–138 moral life of civilization: shaped by practices of capitalism,

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and industrial capitalism, 94, 345–346, 470, 515 Nazism, 355 neofeudalism, 44 neoliberalism: as shelter for rise of surveillance capitalism, 101, 107–112, 341; surveillance capitalism’s origins in, 504–505 neoliberal market economics, 37–41; helps surveillance capitalism flourish, 54; increase in inequalities under, 42–45; vs individualization, 18, 37. See also Friedman, Milton; Hayek

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with social media, 462, 466–467; mental health consequences of, 463–465, 466–467; operating through privatized digital spaces, 456 social connection: dependent upon surveillance capitalism, 383, 455–456; surveillance capitalism offers, 383 “social credit” system, China’s, 388–394 social Darwinism, 106 social efficiency (Pentland), 429, 438 social graphs: Facebook’s, 92,

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387–388; Microsoft patent for preempting human behavior, 412; and Pentland’s work on sociometrics, 425; use of social media, 173–174, 386, 388, 393 surveillance capital, 94 surveillance capitalism: awareness as threat to, 307–308; dressed up in rhetoric of empowerment, 10; emergence of, 52–55; expansion into offline world, 10, 19–20

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Taínos (indigenous people), 12, 177–178, 193 targeted applications, 217, 250 Tea Act (1773), 503 TechCrunch, 317, 318, 458–459 technological “drift,” 226 technologies, surveillance capitalism confused with (“puppet master vs puppet”), 14–17, 238, 352, 376 technology addiction, hand-and-glove relationship of, 449–453 technology of human behavior, 369

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

by Anu Bradford  · 25 Sep 2023  · 898pp  · 236,779 words

democracy, and nurturing an egalitarian and inclusive communitarian culture, the internet has also been used repeatedly to diminish these values, creating an ecosystem in which surveillance capitalism can thrive and societal divides deepen.2 Mitigating the individual and societal harms that arise from the internet is just one piece of the broader

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companies relates to their collection of user data as part of their business model and the impact of that data collection on user privacy. This “surveillance capitalism” describes how tech companies extract vast data on their users’ private lives and commercialize that information through targeted advertising, which threatens those people’s rights

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, the battle has primarily focused on safeguarding the fundamental rights of European citizens in a globalized world.48 The EU is seeking to rein in surveillance capitalism and protect European citizens from being exploited by US tech giants. But the EU is also seeking to protect Europeans from American and Chinese government

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privacy and individual autonomy on a daily basis. These platforms engage in what Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism,” extracting users’ data for commercial gain and compromising their “decisional privacy” in the process.186 This surveillance capitalism enables behavioral advertising and other forms of manipulation, which then subvert individual choice, liberty, and self-governance

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about achieving greater strategic autonomy. For example, it is not clear Europeans actually want a “European Google” if that requires submitting to the company’s “surveillance capitalism” in ways that compromises individuals’ fundamental rights to data privacy. Europeans are also not prepared to adopt the Chinese model of surveillance even if that

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necessary in today’s society, lending further support to the EU model. The European regulatory model also protects internet users’ privacy more than the extensive “surveillance capitalism” enabled by the American market-driven model, where tech companies track internet users’ every move online and acquire a trove of personal data that they

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for years and decades to come, including whether we, as humans, control technology or whether technology and its providers control and exploit us—and whether surveillance capitalism, digital authoritarianism, or liberal democratic values will prevail as a foundation for human engagement and for our society as we advance further into the digital

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Media Good or Bad for Democracy?, Sur: Int’l J. on Hum. Rts. 83, 84–87 (2018). 2.See generally Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019). 3.Alison Beard, Can Big Tech Be Disrupted?, Harv. Bus. Rev., Jan

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Scandal Omits Why It Delayed Investigating, TechCrunch (Mar. 21, 2018), https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/21/zuckerberg-cambridge-analytica/. 186.Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of a New Power 17 (2019). 187.Karl Manheim & Lyric Kaplan, Artificial Intelligence: Risks to Privacy

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-revitalize-european-democracy-pub-77806. 76.David Kaye, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet 13 (2019). 77.Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). 78.Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on

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Media Good or Bad for Democracy?, 15 Sur: Int’l J. on Hum. Rts. 83, 84–87 (2018). 21.See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power 8–12 (2019). 22.See Sheera Frenkel, Whistleblower Discusses How Instagram May Lead

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, 134–35 Sudan, 297–98 Sugon, 161–62 Sullivan, Jake, 209, 251–52, 351 Summit of Democracy, 390 Sun Jiandong, 80 Sunstein, Cass, 64–65 surveillance capitalism, 4, 66, 135–36, 368–69 surveillance imperialism, 17 surveillance technology(-ies) AI-driven, 85, 293 Chinese, 77–91, 297–98, 314–20 citizen response

The Smartphone Society

by Nicole Aschoff

rigged news feeds.33 These developments, argues Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, are part of a new mutant form of capitalism called “surveillance capitalism.”34 Worse, critics say we’ve allowed our phones to victimize our children. Catherine Price, in a piece for the New York Times, confessed, “I

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Substitute Phone, see his website: https://klemensschillinger.com/projects/substitute-phone. 32. Rojek, Presumed Intimacy, 8–9. 33. Harcourt, Exposed. 34. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff presents a rich, thoughtful account that should be read by everyone. 35. Price, “How to Break Up with Your Phone.” 36. Freed, Wired Child

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Public Sphere, cited in McChesney, Digital Disconnect, 66. 42. Bell, “Facebook Is Eating the World.” 43. For a detailed analysis of this transition see Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, chapter 3. 44. The Financial Times has followed these cases closely. See, for example, Toplensky, “EU Fines Google €2.4bn over Abuse of Search Dominance

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‘Rumour.’” Financial Times, November 5, 2018. ———. “Apple Investigates Illegal Student Labour at Watch Assembly Plant.” Financial Times, October 28, 2018. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. Zucman, Gabriel. “Global Wealth Inequality.” NBER Working Paper 25462

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–43 surveillance: big data and, 84; by government, 81, 137–38, 144, 148–49; by law enforcement, 96–97, 137–38, 176n28; by Uber, 127 surveillance capitalism, 8 sustainability, 151–52, 154–55 SVR (Silicon Valley Rising), 147 Syrian war, 90 Tahrir Square, 92 task app, mobile, 32 “tasker,” 30 TaskRabbit, 30

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US

by Rana Foroohar  · 5 Nov 2019  · 380pp  · 109,724 words

one of the most pressing economic issues of our time. Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff and other scholars have decried the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” which is, as Zuboff defines it, “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction

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goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification” via digital surveillance technologies.18 She believes (and I would agree) that surveillance capitalism represents a significant threat to our economic and political systems, as well as a potential instrument for social control.19 I’ve also come to

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has been the marker for larger industry-wide shifts. Google has, after all, been the pioneer of big data, targeted advertising, and the type of surveillance capitalism that this book will cover. It was following the “move fast and break things” ethos long before Facebook.2 I’ve been following the company

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could argue that the tech companies are simply the canaries in the coal mine for what will eventually become a much larger shift toward a surveillance capitalism system in which businesses and organizations of all stripes will take part. Just as the businesses that figured out how to use mechanized equipment in

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have been interested in before), and a host of other companies. It created an entirely new model for how to get people to buy things. Surveillance capitalism would become the best and fastest way for companies to grow—not just the platforms themselves, but all the other sorts of businesses that would

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Googlers understood that, too. In fact, that was one of their major competitive advantages. As Shoshana Zuboff lays out in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Page, Brin, and Schmidt (along with Hal Varian) were the first in Silicon Valley to fully understand the concept of “behavioral surplus,” in which “human

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experience is subjugated to surveillance capitalism’s market mechanisms and reborn as ‘behavior.’ ”10 What she’s saying, in simple terms, is that everything we do, say, and think—online and

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human activity—the things we post, our videos, our books, our inventions—is potentially raw material to be commodified by Big Tech. “Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production-based managerial capitalism,” she writes.11 Nearly everything we do can be mined

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-wide Clusters.”)41 Predictably, his theories of the new data economics tended to favor his employer. As Shoshana Zuboff has written, in the sort of surveillance capitalism practiced by Google and other Big Tech firms, “Contract and the rule of law are supplanted by the rewards and punishments of a new kind

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in transactional terms, something that is reflected in the language of the day (we “maximize” time and “monetize” relationships). Now, with the rise of the surveillance capitalism practiced by Big Tech, we ourselves are maximized for profit. Remember that our personal data is, for Big Tech companies and others that harvest it

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the technology sector distracts us from the real question….Many of the changes that we discuss are inevitable. They’re coming.”17 The Cost of Surveillance Capitalism Perhaps. But the idea that this should preclude any discussion of the effects of the technology sector on the public at large is simply arrogant

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, and today, I’m being given ads for airline seats with more legroom,” said Pasquale, who outlined in detail the way in which Google’s surveillance capitalism worked. He compared the policy makers’ obliviousness of the implications of these practices to the way in which regulators were willfully blind to the risks

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. But it wasn’t until 2016 that the general public really understood the vast possibility held by such techniques when amplified by the kind of surveillance capitalism practiced by the largest platform technology firms. In the run-up to the presidential election, political groups spent a total of $1.4 billion in

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had been used to spread disinformation and suppress votes, “I wanted to believe that [they] would eventually change their approach.” It wasn’t to be. Surveillance Capitalism on Steroids If election manipulation were the only way in which Big Tech was undermining democracy and civil liberty, it would be bad enough. But

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equitable ways to share that pie. There are those who believe that even to have the discussion of how better to share the spoils of surveillance capitalism is to capitulate to it. You can certainly make that argument. But the fact is that the horse is out of the barn. I’d

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is getting into this business. As a result, we may not be able to simply regulate away all the problems that are being posed by surveillance capitalism. That’s why it is worth considering whether the companies that extract our digital oil should have to pay for it. California has also proposed

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Has Too Much Power,” Financial Times, May 14, 2017; Foroohar, “Echoes of Wall Street in Silicon Valley’s Grip.” 18. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), introductory page. 19. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other

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: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology, April 17, 2015. 20. Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power,

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and Society, accessed May 9, 2019, https://datasociety.net/​initiatives/​future-of-labor/​mapping-inequalities-across-the-on-demand-economy/. 62. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology, April 17, 2015. 63. Wikipedia, s.v. “The Great Transformation,” last modified March 29

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, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 237–38. 8. Ibid., 80–81. 9. Author interview. 10. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 101. 11. Ibid., 63. 12. In a January

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, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 117. 39. Ibid., 12. 40. Ibid., 14. 41. Ibid., 202. 42. Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology, April 17, 2015. 43. Ibid., 15. 44. Rana Foroohar, “The End of Privacy,” Financial

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. New York: Knopf, 2016. ———. The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age. New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019. ABOUT THE AUTHOR RANA FOROOHAR is the global

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism

by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias  · 19 Aug 2019  · 458pp  · 116,832 words

and Capitalism Why is it that so far we have talked simply of capitalism and not digital capitalism, informational capitalism, communicative capitalism, platform capitalism, or surveillance capitalism, to name some rival terms?131 The reason is straightforward. No convincing argument has yet been made that capitalism today is anything other than what

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of information” is growing.132 Surveillance is certainly part of this, again as we have emphasized, but not sufficiently to brand today’s capitalism as surveillance capitalism. For, within the longer history of colonialism and capitalism, surveillance has often been the accompaniment to the direct appropriation of laboring bodies for value (think

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Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2011. Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89. Zuboff, Shoshana. In the Age of the Smart

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

by Ben Tarnoff  · 13 Jun 2022  · 234pp  · 67,589 words

users to ads they were more likely to click on, which pleased advertisers. Money poured in and the investors were happy. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff describes this moment as a turning point not only in the history of Google but in the history of capitalism. In her view

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rich and plentiful that it could be put to work selling ads and not just improving search—gave birth to a new economic logic called “surveillance capitalism.” “Google had discovered a way to translate its nonmarket interactions with users into surplus raw material for the fabrication of products aimed at genuine market

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Google’s transformation into an advertising company, as his chief operating officer. Sandberg thus became, in Shoshana Zuboff’s memorable phrase, “the ‘Typhoid Mary’ of surveillance capitalism.” The online mall of social media would look a bit different than the online mall of search. The goal would be to keep users locked

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more years of development before Google’s logs analytics tool, “Sawmill,” was “activated” in 2003; see 344–45. See also Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 67–70. 90, Google had been selling … Google began

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In the Plex, 86. 90, How was the quality score calculated? Calculation of quality score: Levy, In the Plex, 91–92; Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 82–83; Bernard J. Jansen and Tracy Mullen, “Sponsored Search: An Overview of the Concept, History, and Technology,” International Journal of Electronic Business 6, no

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,” which was soon expanded to incorporate other factors. 91, The beauty of the arrangement … Levy, In the Plex, 92–93. 92, In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism … “Behavioral surplus”: Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance, 63–97. “Google had discovered …”: Ibid., 93. 92, This wasn’t the first time … Pioneering scholar of surveillance

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of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 94, These enclosures would be particularly … “Typhoid Mary”: Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 92. 94, The online mall of social media … Maximize engagement: Karen Hao, “How Facebook Got Addicted to Spreading Misinformation,” MIT Technology Review, March 11, 2021

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these ads … “Advertising packages …”: Hwang, Subprime Attention Crisis, 76. 96, Immense amounts of data … Zuboff on mind control: See for example Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 293–328, and Shoshana Zuboff, “You Are Now Remotely Controlled,” New York Times, January 24, 2020. 97, This is not to downplay … “Attention is commodified

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Press, 2004). “Industrial growth …”: E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966 [1963]), 552. Index The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff), 92 Amazon Amazon Web Services (AWS) of, 108, 109, 163–64 Cape Town office of, 105, 106–8 CEO Andy Jassy of, 106 and

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, 176 Karl Marx on, 78 and Luddite movement, 174, 175 and subsumption of labor, 78, 84 and surveillance capitalism, 92, 94, 96 in the US, 125 and venture capital, 119–22 See also The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, (Zuboff); Bezos, Jeff CenturyLink, 59–60 Cerf, Vinton, 11, 19–20, 113, 114 Chattanooga, TN, 38

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets

by Brett Scott  · 4 Jul 2022  · 308pp  · 85,850 words

digital corporations require remote digital money. Digital money underpinned by the banking sector is laying the foundations for the next stage of both US-dominated surveillance capitalism and its Chinese counterpart (which has higher state involvement but seeks the same outward expansion of its digital tech giants). The digital payments industry, however

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your overheated car on a patch of crumbling highway, with no mobile Internet to help you. The slow absorption of rural South Africa into transnational surveillance capitalism is a process that will take some time, but will lead to the end of the Kerouac world there too. This ongoing process is the

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transform the bars of the iron cage into a fine transnational digital mesh. This is what we are currently experiencing in the creep of automated surveillance capitalism, which is given different names depending on where it creeps: in cities it is called ‘smart cities’, in our homes ‘smart homes’, in our bodies

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constant resetting of expectations we have with each technological change, and the trade-offs built into it. Primary among these trade-offs in modern digital surveillance capitalism is that the technologies we are increasingly addicted to are permanently and directly plugged into powerful corporations and governments. As the process of tying people

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to address them more closely, after which I will discuss paths we may take going forward. The contradictory bind When describing the rise of automated surveillance capitalism, it is easy to point out its various dangers, but something more subtle drives my own discomfort. It is the pervasive feeling of inauthenticity that

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any personal agency when it comes to defining how this fusion will play out, but the intuitive desire to fend off the creep of hyperconnected surveillance capitalism still drives many counter-reactions. In this vein, we should expect to see our cryptocurrency ‘protestants’ continue to imagine an exit to a non-state

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World

by Bruce Schneier  · 3 Sep 2018  · 448pp  · 117,325 words

are on the Internet, and how we can hide who we are. In Chapter 4, I explain the political and economic forces that favor insecurity: surveillance capitalism, cybercrime, cyberwar—and the more invasive corporate and government practices that feed off insecurity. Finally, in Chapter 5, I describe why the risks are increasing

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enforcement, social control, international espionage, and cyberattack. The dynamics of all of this are complicated, so we’ll take it a step at a time. SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM CONTINUES TO DRIVE THE INTERNET Corporations want your data. The websites you visit are trying to figure out who you are and what you want

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sites you frequent are either selling your data, or selling access to you based on your data. Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff calls this “surveillance capitalism,” and it’s the business model of the Internet. Companies build systems that spy on people in exchange for services. This surveillance is easy because

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Internet. If you look at lists of the world’s most valuable companies over the past decade, you’ll find the ones that engage in surveillance capitalism: Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. Apple is the exception; it makes its money only by selling hardware, and that’s why

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. Already, all new Toyota cars track speed, steering, acceleration, and braking—even whether a driver has her hands on the wheel. The twin enticements of surveillance capitalism are “free and convenient.” It has shaped the commercial Internet for over two decades. Soon it will drive much, much more. And it requires insecurity

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to arrest, intimidate, or just monitor. Government surveillance for political and social control is normal on today’s Internet. The same technologies that gave us surveillance capitalism also enable governments to conduct their own surveillance. The degree to which this has been occurring has come to light only in the past few

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fight being forced to secure their devices, but it will benefit them in the long run. Rules about securing data have the potential to threaten surveillance capitalism. Companies will argue that they need to collect everything for possible future analysis, to train machine-learning systems, and because it might be valuable someday

…

—but it makes no sense from a policy perspective. Cyberbullying, cybercrime, cyberterrorism, and cyberwar are not the same, and they’re different from cyberespionage and surveillance capitalism. Some threats are properly countered by the police, and some by the military. Other threats are not the government’s business at all, and are

…

, especially the FTC, will continue to investigate and fine the most egregious violators. And there will be no changes in regulating either government surveillance or surveillance capitalism. Any fatalities will be blamed on specific individuals and products, and not on the system that enables them. Despite the imminent threats, I think it

…

term, government mass surveillance is not sustainable. We’ve got to limit it if we want a trustworthy Internet and, by extension, a trustworthy society. Surveillance capitalism is not sustainable. We’ve got to limit it, too. As long as surveillance is the business model of the Internet, the companies you entrust

…

under the unremitting extraction of data about both our public and our inner lives—data available to both governments and corporations but not to us. Surveillance capitalism is pervasively damaging to society; sooner or later, society will demand reform. In order for corporations and governments to be trusted, they need to be

…

,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/fbi-again-calls-for-magical-solution-to-break-into-encrypted-phones. 57“surveillance capitalism”: Shoshana Zuboff (17 Apr 2015), “Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754

…

controlled by, 59–64 data sought by, 57 infrastructure controlled by, 117 insecurity favored by, 56 profit maximization by, 118 regulation evaded by, 154–55 surveillance capitalism in, 57–59, 65, 209 CrashOverride, 2, 4–5 credential stealing, 45–47 credit card fraud, 16, 100 crime rate, public toleration of, 92 crimeware

…

, 208 mass, 201–2 networked with smart devices, 4 by social media, 58–59, 169 ubiquitous, 201–2 by US law enforcement, 67, 173–76 surveillance capitalism, 57–59, 65, 209 Suskind, Ron, 93–94 Sutton, Willie, 74 Sweeney, Latanya, 222 Symantec, 74 Syrian Electronic Army, 69 Tailored Access Operations (TAO), 45

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

by Matthew B. Crawford  · 8 Jun 2020  · 386pp  · 113,709 words

behind the promised driverless revolution, we have to come to grips with something genuinely new in the world, and that is the rise of surveillance capitalism. DRIVERLESS CARS AND SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM The short version is this: when automakers started turning their cars into data vacuums, sucking up gobs of data about your movements through

…

last twenty-five years, and even contributed a few of my own. But it was only upon reading Shoshana Zuboff’s masterwork The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published in 2019, that the big picture came into view. What follows is heavily indebted to her work, both the details and the larger frame

…

. Let’s start with the big picture of surveillance capitalism and some definitions, and work our way to the implications for internet-mediated mobility. Zuboff is emerita professor at Harvard Business School. She writes

…

: Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement,

…

will have to justify their cost purely on their own merits, and meeting this market niche will be a boutique operation. Presumably the captains of surveillance capitalism will populate their own lives with such dumb stuff, just as they currently send their children to special schools from which devices with screens are

…

modification pioneered by B. F. Skinner. Zuboff parses Pokémon Go! as a sort of proof-of-concept experiment for working out the next stage of surveillance capitalism, in which ubiquitous computing—the saturation of the material world with digital devices—serves not merely to gather behavioral data for the sake of predicting

…

.co.uk/technology/google/5130068/Google-will-carry-on-with-camera-cars-despite-privacy-complaints-over-street-views.html. 2.Shoshanna Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2018), p. 44. 3.Zuboff, Age of

…

Surveillance Capitalism, p. 48. 4.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, pp. 146–50. 5.James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 53. 6.Scott gives

…

gradient—of personal knowledge—along which to conduct this labor arbitrage. See Horan, “Uber’s Path of Destruction,” pp. 109–110. 10.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 152. A GLORIOUS, COLLISIONLESS MANNER OF LIVING 1.Here I rely on an unpublished manuscript by Thomas S. Schrock, who parses the perversity of

…

Work,” July 9, 2014, Arvind Narayanan—Princeton (personal website), http://randomwalker.info/publications/no-silver-bullet-de-identification.pdf, as cited in Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 245. 3.Jennifer Valentino-deVries et al., “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret,” New York

…

/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html. 4.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 8 (emphases in original). 5.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, pp. 217–218. 6.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 238. 7.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 201. 8.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 240. 9.Monte Zweben, “Life-Pattern Marketing: Intercept People in

…

Their Daily Routines,” SeeSaw Networks, March 2009, as cited in Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 243. 10.Dyani Sabin, “The Secret History of ‘Pokémon GO,’ as Told by Creator John Hanke,” Inverse, February 28, 2017, https://www.inverse.com/

…

-based social graph.” See Joseph Bernstein, “You Should Probably Check Your Pokémon Go Privacy Settings,” Buzzfeed, July 11, 2016, as cited in Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 317. CONCLUDING REMARKS: SOVEREIGNTY ON THE ROAD 1.Further, license plate readers are being installed on those digital road signs you may have noticed

…

’s Adult Soapbox Derby aerial combats, 173–176 affection for the present, 82 affective capitalism, 114 Afghanistan, 229 Agape Baptist Church, 201 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff), 302–303 air quality, 75–79 airbag deployment, 86, 88 airbags, 90–91, 95, 96–97 air-cooled Volkswagens. See also Volkswagen Beetle folk

…

–5 realizing full potential of, 7–8 road infrastructure for, 43 sharing control with, 104–105 as smart device, 304 smooth-flowing mobility of, 277 surveillance capitalism and, 301–308 Volvo Concept 26, 39–40 driver-road mediation, 111 drivers. See also driving attentional capacity, 103–104 attitudes toward automobiles, 41–42

…

–266 resentments provoked by, 271–272 Subaru transmissions, 156 Super Squish pistons, 146–147 superior drivers, 254 Surry, Virginia, 191 surveillance and coercion, 306–307 surveillance capitalism behavioral data and, 302 driverless cars and, 301–308 location data and, 301 prediction products and, 302–303 sustained habitation, 274 tandem drift, 167–168

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