Review: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019.

This book is the most significant book I’ve read in a while. It outlines the dark side of modern social media.

Zuboff’s premise is that “Google discovered that we are less valuable than others’ bets on our future behavior.” The closer they can get to accurate predictions, the more money they make. (And Facebook later repeated this discovery.)

This put them on a path of needing to consume any information about us that they can get. (Thus maps, Pokemon Go, email, …) Once you can make predictions, you have an incentive to move to control, whether direct or by nudging you (without your consent).

Zuboff makes the analogy that just like the imperative of industrial capitalism leads to global warming, that this information imperative will lead to dehumanization.

“If we are to rediscover our sense of astonishment, then let it be here: if industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature, and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism will thrive at the expense of human nature and threatens to cost us our humanity.“

She documents her ideas thoroughly (150 pages of footnotes:)

Just as totalitarianism struggled to be understood (and was originally analyzed in terms of imperialism), surveillance capitalism is a new thing. Surveillance capitalism is not totalitarian.

The power: “instrumentarianism, defined as the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behavior for the purpose of modification, predication, monetarization, and control.“

The key question for us: “Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?”

Surveillance capitalism took from us without permission, pushing pushing to normalize what would be unacceptable.