The postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote about the Panopticon, a prison designed for maximum surveillance, control and domination over its prisoners. This prison makes it possible for the officials running it to see everything the inmates do yet also makes it impossible for the inmates to see what the officials do or even who they are. How such a facility can be achieved using the simple structures of architecture is immaterial to this discussion. Such a prison, presumably intended solely for criminals, may be unnecessary in these days because we have technology that does the same job and does it more effectively. This technology is called the internet and instead of being inhabited by individuals incarcerated against their wills, it is inhabited by voluntary participants. Some might argue that comparing the internet to a maximum security prison is a false dichotomy, but Shoshana Zuboff lays out a strong case for this argument in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
The concept behind surveillance capitalism is that digital technology is used to harvest data from its users. This data, which is extracted from the internet and SMART technologies like smart phones and smart cars, is sold in bulk to data processing companies which then sell it to big corporations who re-insert it into advertisements on internet websites or else use it to micromanage things like car or health insurance rates, mortgage interest rates, and access to employment or education. The ultimate goal of big tech companies is behavior modification as internet targeted advertising is used to push and pull people in the direction of spending more money to the benefit of the technocrats holding the whips and reins of digital power over us.
Zuboff effectively uses comparisons to historical turning points, specifically the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age, to contextualize the present time as a later, third stage of capitalist development. The top echelons of Silicon Valley are rightfully likened to the robber barons of old but with one major difference: where industrialists like Edison and Ford sought to make money by manufacturing products for public consumption that would be useful for the consumers, the current tech industry offers little in return for the massive amounts of data they collect. While it is true that we get a lot of free benefits from search engines like Google and social media sites like Facebook, the price is that these firms are used to watch and monitor us to mine as much data as they possible can about all aspects of our lives. This isn’t just a matter of what content we look at online. Cellphones track our locations using GPS, data is collected on the amount of time we spend online and what times we use the internet, data is collected on the length of sentences we write and how effectively we use punctuation, and things like the like buttons and emojis on Facebook are used to track our moods and interests. Internet data miners seek out information about what motivates us unconsciously, what manipulates our emotions, and what could be going on in the deepest recesses of our own consciousness. If you’ve ever wondered why your toaster or your vacuum cleaner needs to have a microchip, the reason is that SMART technologies of all varieties are transmitting information about your behavioral patterns to household items like cell phones and WiFi routers which then get scraped for as much data on you and everyone else as can possibly be collected. Data is extracted from our lives the way oil is extracted from the ground and our individual best interests are not a part of the equation. All this is being done for the profit and power of giant corporations.
Of course there are obvious ethical problems with this whole structure of surveillance capitalism. The most obvious one is the invasion of your privacy. Tech companies are not only monitoring our outward behavior, but also digging deeply into our minds with internet technology to monitor our psyches and use the information to control us. The author falls back on the existentialist philosophy of Sartre and Beauvois to say we have a human right to the inner sanctuary of our private thoughts and also the right to make choices about our individual futures. She doesn’t go into a deep analysis of existentialism, but she does use it as a theoretical basis for resistance to surveillance capitalism.
On the other hand, while tech companies are invading our privacy, it is impossible for us to access information about them. She uses the medieval citadel as a metaphor to describe how big tech has isolated themselves from our scrutiny by building defensive walls, both legal and digital, to ensure that we never know exactly what they are up to. This asymmetrical political and economic structure has returned us to a type of medieval society divided between an inaccessible, all powerful aristocracy and a class of peasants and serfs with diminishing abilities for class mobility.
Another ethical issue mentioned by Zuboff is that of behavior modification. She relies heavily on the radical behaviorist program of psychologist B.F. Skinner to make her case. Skinner was a determinist whose core idea is that people have no free will. Choice is an illusion and human behavior is simply a matter of responding to stimuli in the surrounding environment. Skinner believed that thoughts and emotions, the things that make us human, are unnecessary and that human societies can reach perfection by setting the right environmental parameters, turning humans into little more than machines, albeit machines without negative things like wars or poverty. Whether humans are happy or not was irrelevant to him. Zuboff argues that Skinner’s radical behaviorism is the theoretical starting point for surveillance capitalism as the purpose of targeted advertising is the use of environmental stimuli for the purpose of behavior modification, all for the benefit of the leaders of the tech industry whose goal is to maximize profits by making us spend money without thinking.
Zuboff’s passages on behavior modification are the weakest parts of her argument. Not only does she spend far too much time describing the program of Skinner for the purposes of the narrative, but she also never sufficiently sites specific instances of tech industry leaders referring to Skinner or behaviorist psychology. While she acknowledges that the motivations and activities of big tech are inscrutable, she also has to take a major leap of faith to make the case that behavior modification is the main purpose of data extraction from internet usage. Being opaque and inaccessible, the motivations and theories of big tech leaders is impossible to verify so she inserts Skinner’s radical behaviorism to fill in this gap in her knowledge. Admittedly it does fit all too well. Given this absence of certainty, it might be tempting to use it as grounds for dismissal of this part of her argument, however if you further research this subject, there is reason to take her word seriously. There are a lot of videos of lectures and conferences involving engineers and code writers from major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, video game designers, and others who confirm that websites and cell phones are designed to be addictive because the longer users spend on these sites, the more data they can collect and that translates into higher profits for tech billionaires and advertisers. If Skinner is not speficially the godfather of surveillance capitalism, there is a lot in his theories that justify and support it.
The author does give some examples of how the internet has been used for coercive purposes. Since information about the Pokemon Go game has been leaked, it is known that the app was designed for the purposes of behavioral control. The game’s players are led to public spaces to collect characters on their phones and yet Pokemon Go players may not be directly aware that these public locations are often near businesses that collude with the game’s creators to expand their customer bases.
Other experiments mentioned were conducted by Facebook. One posted the names of users who voted in an election to motivate more people to vote; comparisons with geographical areas used as control groups shows that rates of voter participation were higher in places where people saw the pro-voting information than in places where they didn’t. Another experiment involved manipulating the Facebook algorithm to boost stories with positive emotional content to the top of newsfeeds in an attempt to make people more happy in what they post. Facebook metrics showed that they had a 2 percent success rate. The former Facebook experiment was obviously more successful than the latter, yet Zuboff insists that the latter still proves Facebook can manipulate people’s moods. I’m no great statistician, but I know that two percent is within the margin of error and otherwise is too small a percentage to be regarded as anything other than random chance so maybe this isn’t the best evidence that could have been used. This leads to two more problems. The ethical issue that Zuboff raises is that since the end of World War II, experimentation on humans is considered, under international law, to be illegal without the informed consent of the participants. Therefore, behavior modification experiments conducted clandestinely by big tech might be a violation of human rights. Second is that Zuboff does not provide an abundance of compelling evidence that big tech behavior modification is in any effective. With such paltry evidence it could be written off as tin foil hat paranoia and yet there is abundant testimony from big tech insiders that behavior modification is the goal of digital technology. Zuboff’s argument has some shortcomings that should not be there.
In conclusion. Shoshana Zuboff has written a compelling argument detailing what surveillance capitalism is and why it needs to be resisted. Some of the support she offers to defend her argument is not strong, but with easily gathered information coming from outside her writing, it remains intact. Then, it is important to remember that her grievance is not with the technology of the internet itself, but how it is being used by the ideological leadership of Silicon Valley. While they are motivated by a philosophy of libertarianism, radical individualism, and anarcho-capitalism, we should note that ultimate freedom for those at the top of society’s hierarchy means totalitarian oppression for the rest of us. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism details an aberration from the original intent of the internet and resistance to big tech is necessary for us to maintain our rights, our freedom, and our dignity. The fact that things like VPNs, ad blocking apps, and the dark web are widely used indicate that massive amounts of people are resistant to internet surveillance and the nightmarish visions of the future promoted by Silicon Valley. Of course, the masses will most likely continue on their path blindly as unthinking cell phone zombies, but others like hackers, luddites, and various strains of progressive thinkers will continues to eat away at the barriers to our freedom. Only time will tell if our future will be one of the internet’s Panopticon prison or one of freedom for all.
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