This book details how, in the first two decades of the 21st century, major tech companies have developed tools to gather data about our lives, then use it to offer their clients products that direct us towards their goods and services. The author delivers a timely warning of the danger we are facing from this new power, which she labels instrumentarianism.
Today those wielding this power are portrayed as brilliant people, a positive force shaping our future society, yet their corporate empires have been built in secret, beyond regulatory control, generating unimaginable wealth and influence.
The reader gradually understands what instrumentarianism is. At first it seems similar to totalitarianism, but the table Two Species of Power (p. 396-397) shows how different they are and provides context and clarification. Instrumentarianism, Zuboff argues, is an unprecedented threat in our history, but we can learn from how the world countered totalitarianism as a previous unprecedented threat.
Behavioural surplus
The start of the 21st century saw Google on a mission to develop the capability to:
“…deliver a particular message to a particular person when it would have a high probability of actually influencing their behaviour.” (p.77)
Google’s search engine had given it a dominant position on the internet. The company learnt how to deduce information about their users based on what they searched for. So, for example, someone searching for “prostate cancer” may be a male in a specific age range. Using this information, called behavioural surplus, allowed Google to build comprehensive profiles of users and conferred the ability to target them with appropriate marketing messages. By 2008, Google had created records on 230 million US citizens. (p.122)
In the early 2000s, the authorities started to look into the amount of data they were collecting. Google argued that there was no point regulating tech as it moves too fast (p. 103-7). They started to fund their own political candidates and lobbied to protect their rights to this data. The neoliberals, profiting from targeted advertising, also came to their defense. Then, on 11th September 2001, the world changed with the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. Overnight, Google became mission critical to the war against terrorism, and interest in challenging the legitimacy of the amassing of data evaporated.
Google’s Annual Revenue 2000-2004
(based on figures given on page 87)
- 2000: $86m
- 2002: $347m
- 2003: $1,500m
- 2004: $3,200m
The business models of the tech giants depend totally on increasing the scale and scope of the behavioural data collected. Zuboff claims that:
“Over 15 years Google has done incrementally and furtively what would plainly be illegal if all done at once.” (p.161)
The dispossession cycle used to gradually acquire our data is explained in detail and illustrated by the development of Google’s Street View, this is summed up as: (p.138)
- Incursion: The process of taking data without permission.
- Habituation: While legitimacy is questioned the community progressively accepts and becomes used to it.
- Adaption: If pushed, limited changes to mitigate any concerns are applied.
- Redirection: Focusing attention on one aspect, but not the underlying tech.
The book introduces the myriad of methods used to collect data from devices such as watches, children’s toys, the cars we drive, and appliances. We learn of the lengths people have gone to discover who is taking our data and where it is going.
Declaration
“’A declaration is a way of speaking that establishes facts out of thin air.’ John Searle.” (p.176)
Google made the following declarations to lay the foundation of surveillance capitalism: (p.178)
- We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking.
- We assert the right to take the individual experience for translation into behavioural data.
Others include: the right to own the behavioural data; the right to decide what data to disclose; the right to decide how to use our knowledge; the right to preserve the right to take, own, know, and decide.
The division of learning
The division of learning, described below, is a vital key to power: (p.180)
- Who knows? The distribution of knowledge and who is included/excluded from learning.
- Who decides? Which people/institutions decide who can learn what? How are they able to act on the knowledge?
- Who decides who decides? The source of power, the authority to share/withhold knowledge.
Georgia Tech’s Aware Home project undertook early work towards creating a digital future in 2000 (p.5). At that time, the assumed division of learning was that it is the individual who knows, decides, and decides who decides. Today, nothing could be further from the truth.
The scope of what a few unaccountable corporations control is unprecedented in our history. We have become indifferent to the giant tech corporations accumulating vast knowledge. The ever-increasing amounts of data enable their corporate clients to tune and modify our behaviour and herd us towards their products and services. At election time, we’re steered towards those political parties and candidates that will protect tech corporate power.
Rendition
The data collected by the sensors we carry and those that surround us are rendered – processed, indexed, and combined with other data – to create behavioural datasets that digitise our lived experience. As Zuboff puts it:
“There can be rendition without surveillance capitalism, but there is no surveillance capitalism without rendition.”
Instead, we find ourselves in the world of surveillance capitalism where rendition is unauthorised and secret. Google just decided to render the streets and buildings where we live and work – they sought no consent, nor did we grant it. Facebook is rendering as many of us as it can. These corporations claim “the right to rendition”, lobbying to weaken any laws that seek to reign them in (p. 250).
“In 2017, two billion Facebook users uploaded 350 million photographs every day. This data has allowed them to recognise faces with 97.35% accuracy.” (p.251)
Research in fields as diverse as computing, zoology, psychology, and sociology has advanced the scale of rendition. The technology used in sensors to monitor animals in the wild has been incorporated into phones, watches, and clothing. Personality profiles can be derived from the Facebook app (p.274). A facial action coding system enables expressions to be read and used with other sensors to detect tone of voice and body gestures that reveal our emotional state. All of this is incorporated into a personal digital assistant integral to smart phones and tablets.
The major tech companies are rendering our lives, so that their clients can anticipate and modify our behaviour. Vendors of financial services, trades, entertainment, restaurants, and travel now know the best time and method by which to approach us based on our location and mood, all derived from rendition of our behaviour.
Social media
Social media platforms have been developed to feed the demand for behavioural surplus. Software is designed to hold people to a screen; it is now possible for the application to check the emotional state of the user – and even whether a user is looking at the screen – and take steps to bring their attention back (p.281-4). Social media has become:
“…a toxic milieu threatening the course of human development for today’s young.” (p.449)
In the six years since this book was published politicians, who increasingly depend on social media campaigns to be selected and elected, have shown no interest in the suggestion that there needs to be an agency, as there is for drugs, “to oversee the development, distribution, sale and use of these complex algorithms”. (p. 484)
Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, accepts that in connecting people, Facebook may save or cost a life. Regardless, they strive to connect more people. It seems that content doesn’t matter as long as it drives Facebook’s growth. Efforts towards content moderation are best understood as defensive measures, not acts of public responsibility (p.505-6). This has been illustrated perfectly most recently in the scrapping of fact checkers at Meta as soon as the tech and political landscape became hospitable for such a move.
A few years ago, I caught up with an old college friend who had served for many years as a coroner. He commented that every suicide case he had examined had involved social media to some degree.
The democratic recession
The neoliberal vision of Hayek and the drive of Thatcher continues. It is the markets that decide how much and on what a government can spend, rather than a representative and accountable parliament. Hayek chose the market over democracy, claiming that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market” ensured fairness as it was an unsurveyable pattern. But surveillance capitalism is now making the market predictable so:
“…market democracy is no longer viable.” (p.517)
We are, it seems, firmly on the road to instrumentarian power, where anything can become right or wrong if those in power declare it so. The author concludes by urging the reader to:
“Demand that digital capitalism operate as an inclusive force bound to the people it serves… Defend the division of learning as a source of democratic renewal… use our knowledge, regain our bearings and stir others to do the same.” (p524-5)
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