The concept of surveillance capitalism is an important one in helping us to better understand our relationship with big technology companies like Google and Facebook. But although its explanatory power has an allure for many people, it’s important to explore what surveillance capitalism is in more depth.
This is because the genealogy of the concept and the way in which different people have explained and defined it – most significantly Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff – has serious implications for how we understand ‘big tech’ and the problems it is causing. More importantly, it could also help us identify what we need to do to solve them.
What is surveillance capitalism?
Surveillance capitalism is an idea that has been developed to explain how technology companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon are able to successfully monetize the information and data they collect about us.
This is ‘surveillance’ insofar as the data that they collect lets them ‘watch’ users on their platforms. It allows them to build a picture of our preferences and our behaviours. The ability to build up this picture gives them a significant commercial advantage, and significant power within the digital ecosystem. It doesn’t allow them to sell products – it makes them a critical part of the infrastructure of the digital economy.
The means through which this surveillance can take place is constantly evolving. Think, for example of Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Such products allow big tech to gather data on our everyday lives even when we are away from our screens. This allows them to better understand these domains, and they will likely eventually find a way to exploit them commercially.
When did surveillance capitalism begin?
In historical terms, surveillance capitalism aligns with the growth of the internet. More specifically, however, it was the emergence of Web 2.0.
The dominance of platforms like Facebook and Google is an important characteristic of Web 2.0. Rather than enabling passive information consumption, Web 2.0 facilitates active engagement, whether that’s between people or between people and companies. Because activity is a key element of web 2.0, this means not only is more data produced, it’s also much richer as well. It is able to capture more complex relationships within a given network.
The story could be put like this: as the world became more digitized throughout the 2010s, with consumers both more comfortable with digital life and better digitally connected than ever before (think, for example, of the number of devices used in daily life), the huge amounts of data that such an environment produced became a useful commodity for the companies whose platforms were such an integral part of this digital ecosystem.
Digital advertising
It’s hard to separate surveillance capitalism from digital advertising. Facebook and Google, for example, are fundamentally advertising platforms. What makes them particularly effective is that they have huge amounts of data that makes them exceptionally good at targeting advertising and other types of messages to very specific groups of people.
Many people forget this but it’s important: these companies don’t sell to consumers, they sell to organizations that sell to consumers. This is where the idea that ‘if it’s free, you are the product’ comes from. Companies like Facebook and Google are selling access to users – you – to other businesses and organizations.
Why are we talking about surveillance capitalism now?
The business models of large technology platforms didn’t emerge in the last couple of years. They were in place more than a decade ago; they have simply evolved to become increasingly more powerful and pervasive. You might even say that there has been a lag between the embrace of digital technologies and the awareness that they might be problematic.
But where has this awareness come from? What’s changed? Well, there are a couple of important things throughout the last decade that have given a different complexion to the tech industry.
First, high profile data leaks have made people more aware of the ways in which their data is vulnerable online. This issue doesn’t strictly relate to the concept of surveillance capitalism but it has nevertheless been an important subplot in the narrative of digitization. It has encouraged many people to question the assumption that the digital revolution is unequivocally good.
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The Cambridge Analytica scandal
Second – and more significant – was the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Although Cambridge Analytica wasn’t really doing anything radically different from any other digital marketing company, the fact that it appeared to be working with political actors that wanted to ‘manipulate’ citizens in some way added a new dimension to the public’s perspective on this actually rather mundane reality of the digital economy.
It’s in this context of confusion and cynicism about the way that actors are using platforms that the most popular account of surveillance capitalism was given by Shoshana Zuboff. Her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism was published in 2019. Its success indicates that the has been looking for a way of explaining something so perplexing and complex yet significant.
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Shoshana Zuboff’s definition of surveillance capitalism
Zuboff’s definition of surveillance capitalism doesn’t rest simply on the collection of data. Instead, she asserts that surveillance capitalism is unique because of the way in which it uses data to modify and manipulate behaviour. “When a firm collects behavioral data with permission and solely as a means to product or service improvement” she writes, “it is committing capitalism but not surveillance capitalism.”
To emphasise this point, she develops a concept she terms ‘behavioral surplus.’ This is, Zuboff tells us, data drawn from a domain beyond a product or service. Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff explains, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data” – it turns supposedly non-digital aspects of life into this ‘behavioral surplus’.
This ‘behavioral surplus’ powers growth. It helps tech companies to modify human behaviours in a way that is commercially useful. Think for example, of the way Google Home products turn domestic life into a vast treasure trove of data for the company.
Zuboff contrasts the drive to extract behavioural surplus with something she calls the ‘behavioral value reinvestment cycle’. It sounds complicated, but it’s really just a feedback loop. For Zuboff it’s a consumer-friendly way of using data to improve the customer’s experience of a product or service.
Advocacy-oriented capitalism
‘Behavioural value reinvestment’ is something done by a different type of capitalism. This is what Zuboff calls ‘advocacy-oriented capitalism’. In Zuboff’s narrative of the evolution of capitalism, this is the hero at our current historical and economic juncture: it represents the forces of good, while surveillance capitalism is decidedly evil.
As the name suggests, advocacy-oriented capitalism is exemplified by companies that leverage the possibilities of the digital revolution to ‘empower’ consumers. Zuboff explains this in more depth by describing surveillance capitalism as “instrumentarian.” This means it is geared towards the modification of behaviour in a way that establishes certainty and predictability that is commercially beneficial. Advocacy oriented capitalism, meanwhile, is far more democratic – it uses data to better respond to consumer needs and demands, not to shape and determine those needs.
An aberration of capitalism
So, for Zuboff, surveillance capitalism is an aberration or mutation of capitalism.
In a contemporary context it differs from advocacy oriented capitalism in the way that it attempts to colonize and commodify human experience in order to manipulate and shape it. In a historical context, meanwhile, Zuboff argues that it differs from industrial capitalism because it undermines the “institutionalized reciprocity” that was part and parcel of the Fordist era.
To put it another way, the age of industrial mass production ensured both stable profits for capitalists, stable employment for workers, and affordable products for consumers.
Essentially, surveillance capitalism doesn’t find success by responding to the needs and demands of customers like other forms of capitalism. It finds success by manipulating them.
Criticism of Zuboff
Zuboff’s argument that surveillance capitalism is an aberration of capitalism has come in for significant criticism. Perhaps the best critique of her book comes from Evgeny Morozov in The Baffler.
Over the course of more than 10,000 words, Morozov takes Zuboff to task for failing to properly interrogate the assumptions on which her conception of surveillance capitalism rests. Zuboff, Morozov writes, “outlines what she believes to be a unique phenomenon, describing it in depth, but without building any bridges (if only to burn them) to the alternative conceptions of that same phenomenon.”
To put it another way, Zuboff fails to be rigorous in her construction of the concept. By isolating it, she naturalizes it. In turn, this allows it to be used as a validating framework for her implicit theory about the evolution of capitalism.
The consumer
There’s a lot to cover if you want to properly engage with Morozov’s review. However, the one of the key takeaways from Morozov is that Zuboff is in thrall to the idea of ‘the consumer’ as a sovereign, power from which capitalism takes its cue.
This is something discussed above. In Zuboff’s view, ‘normal’ capitalism is when consumer demand is met and satisfied effectively. Surveillance capitalism is when the consumer is manipulated and exploited through the extraction of their ‘behavioral surplus’.
The problems with such an argument are easy to spot. For example, the idea that ‘normal’ forms of capitalism are founded on some degree of reciprocity is at best naive if not disingenuous. While Zuboff wants to present capitalism as a kind of impartial technology that evolves to meet the needs of consumers, the truth is that capitalism has been shaped by power and struggle. Industrial capitalism wasn’t a polite agreement, but rather an equilibrium between different parties that was achieved through the exercise of political action.
Similarly, the notion that advocacy oriented capitalism is innocent of the misdeeds of surveillance capitalism is hard to take seriously. Morozov notes in relation to Zuboff’s suggestion that Apple is an example of advocacy oriented capitalism:
“To contend that the absence of behavioral surplus means that the relationship between Apple and its customers is free from the dynamics of unequal exchange is to ignore all the ways in which Apple regularly pushes its customers around, even preventing them from using third-party repair services.”
In other words, just because Apple doesn’t use data in ways that are visibly exploitative l;ike Google and Facebook, it doesn’t follow that the company doesn’t exploit consumers in other ways. Ultimately, the effort Zuboff has to put into her argument for her narrative to work could be minimized with a far simpler explanation that focuses on the universal capitalist need for growth.
Sure, the way this plays out might differ from company to company, but the imperatives remain the same. “By seeking to explicate and denounce the novel dynamics of surveillance capitalism,” Morozov writes, “Zuboff normalizes too much in capitalism itself.”
A lack of academic rigour
One of the central problems of Zuboff’s book is that is that it simply lacks the necessary rigour. Morozov demonstrates this throughout his essay, but it is a point that has been argued up by other critics, such as Blayne Haggart. In a blog post, Haggart explains that he won’t be teaching The Age of Surveillance Capitalism in his classes because “it falls far short of the standards to which we should hold ourselves.”
Elsewhere, Professor Kirstie Ball also criticises Zuboff’s book for failing to critically engage with the theoretical concepts that form so much of milieu in which Zuboff is trying to stake an intellectual claim. She writes:
“It is intended as a wake-up call for the educated business reader to recognize the massive power of the tech platforms. The book deploys the term surveillance in its popular form as a sensitising device. It has been written by someone who has spent their working life at an elite business school, and it reflects both the US business context and the form of critique that arises in the vernacular of the US business school.”
This shouldn’t be seen as a sniffy or elitist criticism. Ball’s point highlights an essential contextual element of the book that could easily be missed by casual readers.
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Surveillance capitalism before Zuboff
Shoshana Zuboff has managed to make “surveillance capitalism” a concept inextricably tied to her intellectual project and, indeed, her personal brand. Of course, Writing an international bestseller called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism helps.
However, it’s wrong to view Zuboff as the originator and sole owner of the concept. It was, in fact, used elsewhere in a 2014 article in The Monthly Review by John Bellamy Foster and Robert McChesney.
Foster and McChesney approach the notion of surveillance capitalism from a completely different angle to Zuboff. Rather than focusing on the economic changes of the last couple of decades, they instead present and define the concept in the context of much broader changes dating all the way back to the Second World War.
In their view, the evolution of the U.S. economy since the 1940s has required different forms of surveillance. This was facilitated by the close relationship between various institutions, with the military industrial complex lying somewhere at the centre of everything throughout numerous structural shifts and changes in emphasis.
From Madison Avenue to financialization
Foster and McChesney describe the emergence of the advertising industry in the 1950s as “a highly organized system of customer surveillance” designed to encourage consumption after a period of stagnation during and immediately after the war. Interestingly, Zuboff has little to say about advertising despite making consumer manipulation a key element of her theory of surveillance capitalism.
But they point out that surveillance continues later in the twentieth century. Financialization, a consequence of Reaganite economics in the eighties, they write, “had an insatiable need for data.” They explain further:
“[Financialization’s] profitable expansion relied heavily on the securitization of household mortgages; a vast extension of credit-card usage; and the growth of health insurance and pension funds, student loans, and other elements of personal finance. Every aspect of household income, spending, and credit was incorporated into massive data banks and evaluated in terms of markets and risk.”
Over time, the digitization that propelled financialization has become embedded in our lives to an even greater extent. The consequences are far greater than the practices of a couple of companies. We are “now facing a military-financial-digital complex of unbelievable dimensions, data mining every aspect of life”
The importance of interrogating theoretical concepts
Surveillance capitalism is undoubtedly a useful concept. If it can gain a foothold in the popular imagination it could be instrumental in shaping demands for substantial improvements to our digital rights and maybe even deeper democracy. This would give people greater power over their lives.
However, the story of surveillance capitalism also underscores the importance of interrogating the context in which concepts are developed, and the ways in which they are presented. These issues aren’t academic. They have a very real impact on the things we can see and our ability to question them.