The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
I cut Facebook, and all its applications, out of my life about 4 years ago. It was easy. With Google, it was more difficult. Part as an experiment, part for privacy reasons, I stopped using its Search engine, 3 years ago. Basically, I was tired of Google tracking me (you can also check your Google activity here) and frustrated by the amount of information that it had collected. It was creepy.
So no Chrome, and no Google search. Certainly no Google Home Speaker, or Alexa or any other smart assistant that are able to listen to our conversations.
Over the past few months I found that I am using my laptop less and less. Basically, only for work and for writing and reading articles and documents. I have removed a lot of apps from my phone, including all social media apps. I don’t keep everything on my phone. I rarely watch Netflix on my laptop. I am not always online. I read books, physical books that I usually borrow from my local library.
Am I becoming a Luddite?
Don’t get me wrong. Technology is cool and it helps us a lot in daily life. It has made us more productive but at the same time it has made life more complicated. We are bombarded from everywhere, media feeds, apps, notifications, everyone is vying for our attention. Predictive analysis combs through our calendars, pictures and posts, where you went last evening, what we did, and all this information is combined into prediction products that can serve an emerging marketplace in which every aspect of our daily reality is up for a bid.
Shoshana Zuboff calls this Instrumentarianism. It is the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behaviour for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization and control.
In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff examines the global system of behaviour modification that threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. What does this sea change means for us, for our children, for our democracies and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? In this book she is trying to answer these questions. “It is about the darkening of the digital dream,” she writes, “and its rapid mutation into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project,” that she calls Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff is sketching out the quiet emergence of a fundamentally anti-democratic new economic logic which is best demonstrated by Facebook and Google; it’s a dystopian business model in which the details of our lives are turning into corporate profit.
This is an important and powerful book and should be read. Zuboff’s research and analysis is truly impressive. I would like perhaps to read more about and understand why so many consumers enter and remain voluntarily in this universe of surveillance and monetised privacy. Is it just convenience, ignorance and laziness, fear of being excluded, indifference to privacy, or all these together.
Whatever it is, we need to give people control and ownership of their data. We need to push through years of free-market dogma and convince our governments to take action against corporations that are out of control.