This week my company officially got into the business of surveillance. People will pay us to surveil their home and business computers to protect them from rogue computer software, from losing data resulting from defective or aging components in their computers, and from misguided management of their computers themselves.

Going forward this will be a growing and lucrative business segment because people rely on their computers to do so many important things for them, because they feel inadequate keeping up with changes in the computing environment, and because they justifiably fear cyber crime.

It doesn’t mean they like it. I sure don’t.

Being in retail business as I have for almost 25 years I have learned how to surveil myself, to protect my assets, and my employees. It is an ongoing challenge and it changes. I surveil for shoplifters, for currency and credit card counterfeiters, for daylight and after hours thieves. I surveil for dishonest employees, for honest mistakes, for poor buying decisions, and for the obsolescence of the products on my shelves. I surveil how the bank handles my money. I surveil my suppliers to prevent them from shipping me incomplete or broken goods. And I pay attention to my customers, to save them from making poor purchasing decisions.

And when I am not surveilling, I am surveying. All the time. How were my customers’ experiences? What new products are on the horizon? How can I protect my liquidity, my profitability, and lastly, my sanity.

I especially surveil myself, because I make mistakes, and because I too am growing old.

These are some of the risks of operating a business.

Then there are the people who surveil me. They include thieves looking for a weakness in my security. Government agencies to make sure I am paying the eight or ten different taxes I pay on an ongoing basis. Credit card companies surveil my transactions to make sure somebody hasn’t stolen my credit card, or that I am spending no more money than I can afford to pay back. My suppliers make sure I am paying them on time. Some manufacturers visit me in person or electronically to make sure I am representing their product lines fairly. They send me electronic training, and tests, and they regularly measure the efficiency and quality of our repair facilities. The utilities tell me when my operations (and home) are inefficient. And there are my landlords.

Finally, we surveil at home. We surveil our daughter to make sure she is doing her homework and not falling in with the wrong crowd. My wife surveils me to make sure I’m not overeating, overspending, or being overly attentive to other women. I surveil my dog Seamus just in case he poops on the neighbour’s lawn so I can pick it up before someone notices. And Seamus surveils the front window and barks whenever a neighbouring dog saunters by.

Last and not least are the gargantuan corporations who are watching what I do online. People like facebook, Google, amazon, and many, many more.

So when somebody writes a book to tell me I live in an Age of Surveillance Capitalism...I GET IT! REALLY, I GET IT!

But is it uniquely capitalist, or more generally an age of surveillance?
And if it is more general to our society, where do we go from here?

One thing for sure: it isn’t going away anytime soon.

Shoshana Zuboff concentrates her guns on Google and facebook. She’s concerned that these companies are inherently different from the companies that came before it and they set a new standard for egregious capitalism. They are companies in the prediction business, predicting human behaviour and right now largely predicting purchasing behaviour by accumulating, as she called it, “surplus behaviour,” which kinda sounds like an oxymoron.

She believes they abuse the freedoms of the marketplace to frustrate privacy, that they are built to enrich few and sidestep the traditional workplace which pays many employees fairly and creates consumers, and she argues that they are indifferent to social ills.

She argues that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” doesn’t operate in this marketplace because the new knowledge capitalists know everything happening in the market.

A close reading of Andrew Carnegie’s life and legacy, perhaps John D. Rockefeller as well, could lead you to a similar conclusion, even though both men turned to philanthropy later in life. For sure, these men affected the course of capitalism.

Is this a turn away from “good” capitalism toward an inherently evil capitalism?

And if it is evil, can we create some rules for the big guys that us little guys can live with?

Let’s take a step back and look at things in context: Google’s revenue is about $25 billion, Facebook’s $17 billion. The entire US economy is about $25 trillion and the world economy upwards of $107 trillion.

Most of Google’s and Facebook’s revenue is advertising. The US advertising market is upwards of $80 billion so it is fair to say these two firms command quite strong positions in this industry. If you make the argument that America’s advertising industry is too concentrated then you’d have a pretty good argument to break up these firms which combined represent about 50% of all advertising dollars in the US. By comparison, Standard Oil at its peak commanded 88% of the market for processing crude. In its first year of operation, US Steel produced 67% of steel produced the the US.

And they exhibit the classic behaviour of monopolists by dominating the markets for search and for social media on a global scale.

In the US a case for breaking up the firms traditionally would have to be made that consumers are paying too much for their services or that competitors are being kept out of the market. Maybe breaking up these firms is a good idea, maybe it isn’t, but either way the technologies they employ for gathering, and analyzing, data isn’t going away.

When I worked as an auditor, we used to gather lots of data, too, but what we eventually learned was that we could make assumptions about its meaning by sampling the information; that is, we cut down our work by only looking at some of the data. We tried to cut down on the wasted time. I sometimes wonder how much of what Google does is a total waste of time because the answers it seeks can be found in much faster time using much less data. And how much of “Big Data” is in fact a “Big Waste of Time.”

Zuboff doesn’t consider that these firms may still be just in the early stages of figuring out what they are supposed to be doing. I think about it because so much time and resources are wasted paying attention to wholly irrelevant stuff.

But we would do well to consider the affect of these companies on our freedoms and our government partially because they aren’t just national problems. They are transnational problems. What happens in China, and the extreme kind of surveillance practiced there on ethnic minorities like the Uigers, affects or will affect us here.

They are transnational because the data collection is transnational and the very same data collected for the purpose of selling advertising is probably being used to develop artificial intelligence. The fastest developer of AI whether they be Chinese companies, transnational companies like Google or Facebook, or companies directly financed by government will have a big say in who has a job in the coming years and who doesn’t.

No country on its own can hope to curb data collection and aggregation or perhaps more importantly, the control of what search results reveal on this scale any more than a country can curb money laundering, tax avoidance, or climate change without coordination between many if not all nations. Contemporary politics seems to be going in the opposite direction if Trump’s “America First,” Brexit, and Russian adventurism are any indication.

If we are divided and our attention fractured we are susceptible to the influence or real or imagined “experts.” (To firms like Facebook I think we all have ADD, attention deficit disorder...they can never get enough of our attention!) That doesn’t mean we cannot continue to make decisions affecting our government, it more likely means that the decisions we make will more commonly resemble the imperatives of those desiring more of the same, read: the status quo.

And that turns us to the question of how good is the status quo. If you believe that the universe ultimately bends toward the dilution of energy, total entropy, then the status quo is not too good. If you believe the status quo to be a teleological evolution toward a great singularity, perhaps a union with God, and a progression toward greater complexity in the universe, the status quo looks pretty good.

Business executives, in my experience, tend to be of the more optimistic latter type of people. Like the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and other people who have become incredibly wealthy in a short period of time.

In the meantime, some of us have rather pedestrian concerns like the security of really private information. While convincingly arguing that there is insufficient transparency over who handles the big data and how they handle it, I think Zuboff fails to sufficiently weigh immense risk that the data will fall out of control of the aggregators and into the hands of rogue individuals.

The hacking of credit card databases is one thing, and I think it a bigger risk than the hacking of a database which tells people how I like my hotdogs dressed. People made a big deal of the Cambridge Analytica scare. In the end, those people sold bogus claims to naive political organizations. The data predicted nothing and was of no use to anybody. And it didn’t get Donald Trump elected.

Certainly big data aggregation has concrete effects on the economy. You get “free” Google searches. I get a cheaper smart TV because the data guys get first dibs on my TV watching preferences.

This book is not the best guide for the good works these technologies enable (ie crowd sourcing, scientific research, epidemiology, etc). Self-driving cars benefit by machine learning. The acceleration and reductions in the friction in electronic commerce are generally good things.

I don’t agree with Zuboff that the behavioural science behind the new data aggregation firms promotes a radical indifference to the lot of the common person. Nor do I agree that hyperscale doesn’t require competitive markets or for that matter democracy.

This has yet to be proven.

We all need participatory democracy, and more than ever on a global scale. Let’s make these damn machines work for us, not agin us. ( )

I was most interested in how personal data is located, captured, and sold. This didn’t appear until the beginning of Chapter 5. You need to know what this chapter says! It’s impossible to keep your personal information from being gathered, but there are some things that you can do to safeguard it. ( )

Audible ebook | Like amoral sales people, the commercial surveillance of customers has morphed into highly covert and silent actions which when married with sophisticated statical analysis renders a complete profile of a userships’ life. ( )

I think the ideas are must-reads. However, this is an extremely long book and it feels like she has introduced new words that she thinks should be part of a new lexicon. Instrumentarian is the one that stood out to me, but I'm pretty sure there were others. It was just so long that I don't want to go through it again to find them. Listening on audiobook was probably a mistake and I may have liked it more in print. ( )

Dense. The premise is that Google and Facebook are collecting data about everything people do and in many ways without their knowledge. They then sell this information to advertisers which then get people to behave in certain ways. Facebook has done experiments where they place particular items in people's feed -- your friend has voted -- and then have measured how likely that is to get you to vote. And she references instances of the Google and Facebook lying about what their code does, dragging their feet in response public inquiries, etc. She ties it together with similar historical eras -- the gilded age -- and scientific philosophies -- BF Skinner's behaviorism. To me, what was new and alarming is the closed loop -- ultimately the data being collected is used to change people's behavior -- buy something, read something, stay on a website, etc. All without any regulation or over site by democratic institutions. All in all a grim view of what the future will bring. ( )

This book could have been condensed down to half its size and still clearly gotten its point across. It did have a number of interesting chapters that kept me in it for the long haul, but it wasn't easy. Overall, I enjoyed the majority of the content, minus one star for the writing. ( )

Ms Zuboff has a number of outstanding points to make in this weighty tome. Unfortunately she seems to have attempted to do it in Klingon. A 250 page book without the repetitive, dense, unnecessarily high-flown prose would have been perfectly okay. Now this book will go down as a laborious, soul destroying pile of paper. 5 stars for the content, deduct three stars for the writing style. ( )

I read it some time ago, borrowed from the university library.
The book moved me by the tone and the immense amount of repeated work (caused by fire destruction). ( )

This is an informative book and a frightening one. The book is heavy reading, so take your time to digest the matter contained within. Most of us know we are tracked by the companies that provide us with internet and social media services. In recent times, many of us have become concerned with the way these companies seek to manipulate our behavior and thinking.
Shoshana Zuboff lays bare the ruthless capitalist streak that all these business owners have. What becomes difficult to digest, but we must, is the concept of the "God View", and the work taking place to manipulate society.
This comes through clearly in the book.
Shoshana Zuboff blends historical trends in social development, with the theories of some behavioral scientists and what is happening today in her narrative.
It is a compelling narrative and must put us all on high alert if we are to preserve our own sense of individuality.

The book is about one hundred pages too long. She would have been more effective had the book been shorter.
Nevertheless, it is an important book, and one we must read and digest. ( )

Overly verbose. The ideas here are important & valid, but they're lost amidst an ocean of anecdotes and purple prose. I don't need to know about Zuboff's house fire, her ancestor's immigrant experiences, or the cozy bakery in Spain. The important work of dissecting surveillance capitalism gets lost in the pages and pages of fluff. If this book had been at least 1/3 shorter, it would have made a clearer and more effective argument. ( )

I struggled a bit with how I was going to rate this book. I do feel like I learned a lot from this book and it gave me a lot of ideas to chew on. I am the target audience for this book. I already agree with Zuboff on many of her ideas about the inherent issues when it comes to tech companies owning our data, even when that data is an essential part of our person. I don't like the idea that Facebook uses my face as data to be used in facial recognition software just because I put a picture of myself on Instagram. However, this was not a book that was "fun" to read. This isn't a devastating criticism. I've read a lot of very academic, hard-to-parse texts (Foucault comes to mind) and I understand that a lot can be gained from a book that is challenging to read. In this case though I felt that Zuboff did not always convey her ideas clearly and it was that and not the level of the ideas that made it hard to read.

This book reads a lot like theory and that's probably because it basically is. This book is very well researched with the last 30% being made up of all the notes and sources and Zuboff should be commended for this effort. This makes this book very dense but also very informative. Even when I disagreed with Zuboff, I was able to look at the notes and look further into her claims.

I do think Zuboff may overreach slightly in some of her claims, especially in the claim that tech companies and surveillance capitalists are trying to completely erase individuality and that they are already on the way to doing so. I actually don't think this is completely off base as those companies can make more profit if they know exactly how we will react and that is much easier to do if everyone acts the same. These companies also often discuss how the want to streamline our lives and this is much easier to do if they can stop us from making "bad choices." I think the problem with Zuboff's argument to this point is that she simply does not provide enough evidence to support her claim that tech companies are well on their way to controlling us to this extent.

I think Zuboff's stronger claim comes with her argument that these companies are eroding our belief in democracy. I think this has become clear with their insistence to stand by the policies of taking a completely hands off approach. Recently, after Jack Dorsey of Twitter made the decision to flag some of Donald Trump tweets for misinformation surrounding mail-in ballots, Mark Zuckerberg went on Fox news and said he did not think Facebook should be the arbiter of truth. Well, unfortunately they already are and it sucks. People will often talk about how people need to get out of their echo-chambers but these companies make that really hard because showing people things they disagree with but won't get angry at is bad for their bottom line. I think Zuboff does a good job showing the history of how and why we got to this point.

I was a little surprised at which social theorists and sociologists were not in this book. Zuboff does discuss Marx, Polanyi, and Goffman, all theorists I have read, and she does discuss Bentham's panopticon, but only cites Foucault once in this 704 page book. I don't understand how you write a book with this title and not address the ideas of the man who first explicitly connected surveillance and capital accumulation. I also think a discussion of how Louis Althusser's ideas of the ideological state apparatus applies to tech companies in their attempts to get us to act in a certain way would have added an interesting layer to her arguments. As a sociology student, I was left somewhat wanting for more sociological reasoning for her arguments and I think including more sociological theory would have strengthened her argument.

I also would have liked to see at least some discussion of the basic flaws in the data these tech companies may be gather to full their algorithm and new technologies. One area I thought about on this topic for a while is predictive policing. Any data put into a predicitive policing algorithm will be biased due to the fact that communities of color have been subject to higher rates of policing for years due to many different racist reasons. Because people of color tend to live in segregated communities due to red-lining and those communities are over-policed, more people of color are arrested. Even if the algorithm somehow doesn't pick up on the race disparities in current police data, it will likely pick up on the geographic differences and therefore, communities of color will continue to be over policed. Zuboff makes the claim that tech companies gathering our data makes them all knowing about our behavior but she does not acknowledge the ways that this data could be biased going in and therefore their conclusions could contain those biases. Even the data provided by the users can be biased because of systematic issues of racism that create differences in access to education and other areas of knowledge. Zuboff makes claims about the "division of learning." I think she should have addressed how not all people are given equal access to this domain to begin with.

This book also led to some ideas for me to think about in my own research and thinking as a sociologist. I really liked reading about Stanley Milgrams' breaching exercises and how it created such strong social anxiety because he was aware of the fact that he was breaking social norms. I think it would be interesting to think about and study how the increase of social norms related entirely to how we interact online and on social media adds to this social anxiety or transforms the sort of action we perceive as breaking social norms offline.

I think this is a great and well researched argument about some of the problems with the way we currently allow private companies to own data we have given them no right to. We are no longer the customer. Targeted advertising does not help me. It is not something that I want, it is something advertisers want and it helps the companies bottom line. I think we should acknowledge this book for what it is; an excellent start to theorizing about this topic. I expect in the future other theorists will flesh out, push back on, build on, and improve the ideas presented in this book, as is the tradition of social theory. ( )

For more reviews and bookish posts visit https://www.ManOfLaBook.com

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff analyzes the power wielded by companies who collect raw data about people, attempting to predict behavior. Ms. Zuboff is a published author, and a professor at Harvard Business School.

“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 transactions with its real customers: advertisers.”

I remember a few years ago, talking to a co-worker who was surely 15-20 years younger, complaining about fees (which I despise to this day). He just looked at me and said “how are they supposed to make money?”. Furthermore, thought of producing a good product for a fair price never occurred to him.
That’s when I knew we lost; fees have been normalized.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff could very well be the most important book written since the invention of social media, as well as the way Google changed the Internet. A word of warning though, this book is somewhat disturbing when you think about all the information you willingly give away to social media companies.

The author points out that we don’t’ realize what’s happening around us because we have no frame of reference. Above all, this level of surveillance has never been implemented. We think we’re getting something for nothing, but we actually supply tons of behavioral raw materials for advertisers to use. This data is used, as well as manipulated, in ways which we barely understand.
It’s not going to get any better.

This type of surveillance capitalism nudges people to behave the way advertisers want you. Whether its buying products you don’t want, or need, to make you afraid so you’ll vote against your interests, bypassing user awarness. Yes, this issue has affected democracy, not just spending habits.

Professor Zubooff also goes into detail on how the Internet of Things works in conjunction with other services to figure out future behavior. As an IT professional I knew of this aspect of social media (no the extent), but this book really put together all the pieces in the social context of our time. Narrator Nicol Zanarella read this book with careful consideration to the material. ( )

This s a brilliant and essential book. Do not be intimidated by the length. as Zuboff is a fine writer and her insights into the subtleties of our technocratic imprisonment in this all seeing, all knowing dystopia are revelatory. You could read the last 25 pages to obtain a crisp overview, but invest the time to allow Zuboff to take you on the full tour. ( )

There's a cliché that says if a company offers you something for free, you're the product. That's not quite true when it comes to the data driven technology firms reviewed in this book. What we are is the raw material, and the product is behavioral surplus--the corpus of data that the firms derive from our behaviors.

Shoshana Zuboff distinguishes surveillance capitalism from traditional capitalism through the use of behavioral surplus. In a traditional arrangement, money is exchanged for a product or service. While the company is interested in the behavior of its customers, that information is used to improve marketing and sell more product, and is not a product in itself. In surveillance capitalism, we trade our behavior for services, and the firm derives its profit from selling that behavioral surplus. In this arrangement, Apple is still largely traditional. Amazon is also still traditional, though it's expanding into surveillance capitalism through products such as Alexa. Google and Facebook are almost pure surveillance capitalism firms.

Surveillance capitalism operates through information asymmetry. Consumers may not be told about the information gathered, are given opaque terms of use (the average TOU should take 45 minutes to read; the average consumer takes 19 seconds--and if you don't really have a practical choice about using the product, what are you going to do?) and aren't aware of how much information can actually be extracted. For example, it's obvious that your shopping patterns can be used to form a picture of your tastes and spending habits. It's less obvious that your selfies and other pictures can be used to form a portrait of your personality.

The point, moreover, is not merely to analyze your behavior patterns, or even to use that data to make predictions. The ultimate goal is to use this data to shape future behavior, as Facebook did with its voting experiment--and then argued that it should be exempt from the laws and regulations surrounding psychological research. Pokémon Go functioned as both a collector and shaper of players' behavior, and the game was originally developed at Google.

The potentials for surveillance capitalism are worrying--applications already exist and are being developed for behavioral surplus. How will firms in other areas benefit from this, using surveillance techniques to determine creditworthiness, insurance, and health? Although in surveys people express a desire for strong privacy roles, we lack a robust regulatory framework to ensure this. The outcry over election manipulation also makes clear the potential (and reality) for large scale political disruption, which is particularly worrying given the dismissive attitudes of many tech titans towards democracy. Silicon Valley companies actively lobby against a regulatory framework that would protect consumers, instead arguing in favor of "the market" and claiming that behavioral surveillance is ultimately for the benefit of the consumer.

As a book, this is imperfect. Zuboff's language tends towards the hyperbolic, making it too easy to dismiss her as a conspiracy theorist. It's also a little long winded, rather than crisp and clear. None of this is enough to tank the book, but it keeps it from being quite as successful as it could be (were half stars allowed, I would have given this 4.5). That said, the content is worth ploughing through. ( )

中文:監控資本主義時代(上卷：基礎與演進；下卷：機器控制力量)(套書，上下冊不分售)

Summary: An extended treatise on the idea of surveillance capitalism, in which we are the “raw materials” for others economic gain and the object of instrumentarian control.

I heard about this book from an interview with the author. I wish I had been forewarned that the soundbite argument of a radio interview was a bloated treatise laden with abstraction, jargon, and a determination to “show all one’s work.” A much shorter work may have been more effective in making its point.

There are two major ideas in this book. One is that a new form of capitalism has arisen as companies like Google and Facebook have figured out how to monetize their platforms through the information that users willingly and sometimes unwittingly surrender that are used to generate the advertising revenues that really fund their enterprises. We are not the customer, we are the raw material, and these platforms have become increasingly skilled at “scraping” data from every aspect of our lives that may be monetized. Our posts, our likes, our searches, and via our smartphones, our locations, and all our app use are sources. So are the devices wired into our cars and our homes, and eventually, even into our clothes. All of this data is “behavioral surplus” about us enabling various entities to market to us and, less benignly, manipulate our perceptions and behavior.

This leads to the second and perhaps more sinister idea that the entities controlling these platforms are seeking to establish instrumentarian, not totalitarian control of society, working toward the idea of a “frictionless” hive mind, controlled by “Big Other.” The aim is total certainty in the control exercised and guaranteed outcomes to marketing efforts. Platforms own the means of behavioral modification, the use of which is concealed. Zuboff’s description of these efforts reminded me of Dave Eggers’ dystopian novel The Circle, a world in whose ideal is that nothing be hidden, nothing secret, and all transparent. For Zuboff, the greatest problem these platforms face is “friction,” in which individuals do not surrender privacy or information.

One idea introduced toward the end of the book is that of “equivalence.” Anything that produces more traffic, more engagement, and information is good. It struck me that this was the flaw in the supposed dream of a “hive mind.” This was amply on display in recent elections and efforts at social disruption. Platforms do have the ability to control these but tend to refrain, even though these promote conflicting rather than harmonious interests. My hunch is that capitalism is of greater interest than control and that these platforms are relatively indifferent to content as long as it is profitable.

The bigger problem I have is that this book is long on assertion and short on data or practical recommendations. The most she can offer is “be the friction.” I do believe she offers legitimate warnings about how unwittingly we yield up all kinds of information about ourselves. She doesn’t explore the networking of platforms, and how everything from what we buy at the grocery store to our credit records to our health records, the layout of our homes and our travel histories can be compiled. I’m not convinced that “Big Other” is the greater danger than “Big Brother.” What I do believe is that Zuboff raises a necessary warning that our democratic freedoms, including some measure of self-determination, may be lost. It may even be that they are not taken from us so much as willingly surrendered. ( )

An epic read, terrifying, and a relief that it's not just my imagination and that other people are taking it seriously. It will take me months to digest but the most immediate idea I take away is how all sorts of things like insurance of all kinds, travel and medical monitoring will compel us to allow our data to be taken, in the same way that opting in to social media and finding information on the internet already do, on pain of termination of service. It's a very big book although looks even bigger as there are 160 pages of notes and such, in addition to the 525 pages of text. I'm quite comforted that I was forced to keep going and finish it at speed as there were two other library readers waiting for it - I wish them luck. The writing was very academic (I think) and it took me a long time to get started and get comfortable with the prose. And there was a lot I didn't understand.... for example page 505 'Now the hive emulates the "termite state".....' Does anyone know? ( )

An excellent loom at the technology, companies, and advocates for surveillance capitalism. Detailled and rich, it should stand as a warning to this and future generations much like Arendt did for hers. Perhaps a bit overly long and occasionally repetitive, it is nonetheless an important work. ( )

In inglese "Big Brother" si trasforma in "Big Other" ... in italiano diventa "Grande Altro" ... Il Capitalismo che sorveglia. Non è quello vecchio, quello della rivoluzione, quello di Lenin o di Marx. È ben altro, è tutto quello che gli uomini hanno sedimentato sin dai tempi della Rivoluzione Francese, se non da quella inglese del secolo prima. Insomma il processo inarrestabile, imprevedibile e inconcepibile che dovrà avere luogo. Per ora è " work in progress".

L'autrice di questo grosso libro, che merita comunque le quattro stelle, le cose le sa e le scrive in maniera abbastanza chiara e documentata. Chi vuol capire, capirà che se la tecnologia non verrà imbrigliata dalla politica dei governi, e se il profitto personale, individuale, collettivo e dei popoli continuerà a manifestarsi come sappiamo e abbiamo sotto gli occhi, saremo tutti schiavi del "Grande Altro".

Un "Grande Fratello" con un nuovo nome e con una nuova, grande differenza: saremo noi stessi a crearlo, ad imporcelo senza rendercene conto. Quale soluzione propone la prof. di Harvard? Non mi sembra di averlo capito perché forse non lo dice. O, meglio, l'ho capito.

Dipende da me, da te, da voi, da noi, da Trump, da Merkel, da Boris Johnson, da Conte, da Salvini, dai cinesi ... Insomma da tutti gli abitanti del pianeta con i loro governi. Semplice. Basta metterli d'accordo ... ( )

The first half of this was more interesting for me to read, but I enjoyed it as a whole. This book dives deep into things that should be more front of mind for every tech user. ( )

The title “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” evokes a weighty subject, and the book’s subtitle purports to something menacing to the future of humankind. It is to be seen if its contents are as substantial as the book’s 700-page length would suggest.

The author, Shoshana Zuboff, is a professor emerita at Harvard Business School, not unimpressive an honor by any measure.

A summary of assertions made in the book is as follows:

1. Big technological colossuses (Big Techs), epitomized by Google and Facebook, operate their business models by extracting data trails of online users, and in turn selling the extrapolated results (what Zuboff calls behavioral surplus) to their advertising customers.

2. Sophisticated algorithms are deployed and constantly refined to increase the predictive value of profiling data. At the same time, online users are passively served with moderated searches, federated news feeds, suggested connections, etc., all under the coercive power of the Big Techs. Such duress is as severe as not only to affect, shape, and compel, but with the aim to modify and manipulate user behaviors.

3. With the proliferation of sensors and Internet connectivity, Big Techs extend their reach far beyond the virtual realm to the real world. Regarding the surveillance operated by these techno-capitalists, in the author’s telling, its presence so pervasive and its impact so complete that any human free agency has receded entirely to the background and is ineffective.

4. While the above are not new to anyone who has casual understanding of current economics and culture, what Zuboff strives to accentuate is their connection to high-order issues such as self, liberty, democratic values, and human nature. She compares the dangers posed by “surveillance capitalism” to that of fascism, totalitarianism, behaviorist utopianism, and the like, that once presented real or potential detriments to humanity.

For its thrilling effects, the agenda for the book is sweeping, even ambitious. Technological advancement, especially one that combines deep analytics, machine intelligence, and makes its ubiquitous presence in our intimate lives deserves a dispassionate evaluation as to its social impacts. Zuboff should be applauded for selecting this timely topic for her book.

Yet one cannot help but feel frustrated by the lack of thematic organization of the whole book. Instead of explicating the economics involved in this different “capitalism”, Zuboff is more concerned with weaving her own narrative of abstruse euphemisms about how grave a danger the human future is facing. Materials are regurgitated, often word for word from the earlier part of the book and throughout. As to what actions Zuboff suggests to “fight for a human future…”? The author offers an ill-defined “synthetic declaration” (p. 345), and a skimpy, equally obscure advice of “friction, courage, and bearings” (p. 524). Specifics are sorely lacking in allusions to democratic institutions, public opinion, legislative and judicial recourse (p. 520). A whimper of a solution indeed to a loud bang of such a doorstopper.

Zuboff obviously sets out to intend the book as a treatise that plumbs the depth of these to her as “unprecedented” developments in “surveillance capitalism”, and attempts to compare philosophically with past phenomena its manifold menaces to humanity. But it is exactly in such philosophizing that is the weakest of the book, for her arguments are at best tenuous and strained. On the other hand, the author wily limits her subject to mostly the socio-economic domain of the Western world, as is indicated in the book’s title. The picture would have been more complete if it had combined with surveillance authoritarianism. The “social credit” system practised unimpeded in China makes only passing reference in mere 6 pages (pgs. 388-394). Certainly, the threat to human liberty and dignity is far graver when the surveillance apparatus and capability are controlled by a police state, whereas in Western democracies competition among capitalists still exists.

What is most infuriating is Zuboff’s penchant for fabricating catchphrases. Smug expressions such as “dispossession”, “behavioral futures”, “cultural misappropriation”, “economy of action”, “division of learning”, “shadow text”, “uncontract”, “hive”, “coup from above”, “Big Other”, “instrumentarian power”, “right to the future tense”, “third modernity*” …., litter throughout the book. The meanings of many of these are poorly articulated. Although she attempts to provide a brief rationale to her epithetic acrobatic (p. 66), such twisting of language is unnecessary and far from successful. It is an act of throwing spaghetti upon the wall; hoping that somehow one such phrase may stick with posterity with reference made to the author. As stated, the impression appears that the writer is more interested in weaving an esoteric narrative than presenting facts.

Read a typical sentence on p. 488 of the book:
“No exit” is the necessary condition for Big Other to flourish, and its flourishing is the necessary condition for all that is meant to follow: the tides of behavioral surplus and their transformation into revenue, the certainty that will meet every market player with guaranteed outcomes, the bypass of trust in favor of the uncontract’s radical indifference, the paradise of effortless connection that exploits the needs of harried second-modernity individuals and transforms their lives into the means to others’ ends, the plundering of the self, the extinction of autonomous moral judgment for the sake of frictionless control, the actuation and modification that quietly drains the will to will, the forfeit of your voice in the first person in favor of others’ plans, the destruction of the social relations and politics of the old and slow and still-unfulfilled ideals of self-determining citizens bound to the legitimate authority of democratic governance.”

Long sentences can be beautiful in abler literary hands, but the above is downright egregious in form and meaning.

Zuboff’s writing style can be aptly depicted as beating around the bush, with hyperboles and a plethora of inapt metaphors that ill befits so serious a subject she wants to convey. At times, she relishes so much staying with her metaphoric vehicles that the intended tenors are nowhere to be found. Long, winding sentences with chained substantives also further hamper readability.

So, are readers more empowered at the end “with a more cogent and comprehensive understanding” (p. 18) of the menacing incursion exerted by the Big Techs? For the newly initiated, the writing style has done more to obfuscate than to illuminate. For the more inclined and those who look for some concrete societal antidotes, Zuboff has woefully under-delivered.

More clear-eyed analyses are still awaited on the technologies proffered by the Big Techs, on the associated data-driven economy, and their consequent impacts to individuals and society at-large.

* cf. Alan de Vulpian, 2003 (English , 2008) ( )

Long-winded and full of jargon. Might make a good essay, but I think the author doesn't understand her point well enough to be more succinct.
( )

Parts 1 and 2 do a good job at putting things I already knew together into a pattern. Part 3 gets a little wild at times, but all in all a good book. ( )

An absolute must-read of a book. If you think the tracking of Web searching/browsing and the secretive analysis of social-network usage (not to mention the astonishing abuses enabled by the smartphone) have been problematic for privacy, just wait until much worse horrors like the Internet of Things and inescapable "voice assistants" take full hold of us. Zuboff, eruditely and with careful scholarship, thoroughly elucidates our time's baleful trend using many coinages such as "behavioral surplus", the "extraction imperative", "prediction product", and the "dispossession cycle" (incursion --> habituation --> adaptation --> redirection --> incursion --> ...). Surveillance capitalism is not just technology gone wrong but an economic/sociological monster that threatens not just privacy rights but all freedom and democracy. The apparent destination is what she calls "instrumentarianism", an oppressive societal power structure that is importantly different from totalitarianism (with "Big Other" in place of Big Brother), is rooted in the "radical behaviorism" of BF Skinner, and has been elaborated by the "social physics" of Alex Pentland. Everybody should, I'd say, (1) have nothing to do with anything connected with Google or Facebook (or, preferably, Verizon or Microsoft or ...); (2) shun all products described or describable as "smart", especially smartphones; (3) try to get Zuboff to run for president.

Zuboff argues that our modern social media, Facebook on smartphones etc., are an unprecedented new form of power grab. She relates this to similar power grabs throughout history: the agricultural revolution, Columbus in the Caribbean, the Ford assembly line, etc. She sees the way we get embedded in the feedback loop of the news feed as being the fulfillment of the vision of B. F. Skinner.

Zuboff's diagnosis of the situation seems quite accurate. She doesn't offer much in the way of concrete ideas on how to avoid an irreversible slide into mass slavery. I would like to offer a step by step approach: 1) model the system, human psychology and deep machine learning and folks generating and targeting advertising, etc.; 2) measure what's going on, counting clicks, cookies, revenue, etc.; 3) analyze the evolution of the system, the cause and effect relationships, how new tracking improves click counts etc.; 4) with this knowledge, reasonably effective intervention methods can be engineered. It's a bit like e.g. financial derivatives. Hedge funds don't have to report holdings, so there is really no basis for regulation. Reporting is necessary before regulation can be put in place. Of course the FAANG gang will protest heartily at any requirement to report. They're too busy making money to understand what they're doing. But slowing down the innovation cycle to permit tracking the trackers, that's where the work has to start.

There's some limping poetry here. Durkheim's Division of Labor is already tricky verbage. The Division of Learning really doesn't work for me. Big Other instead of Big Brother... too cute and really a bit off target. Behavioral surplus, does that point back to Marx? I am no social scientist! Zuboff is correct that she does need to invent some new terminology. I found hers a bit clunky. But the concepts seemed quite on target, and that's what counts. ( )