“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power” by Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, was an exhausting read. Hitherto, I had not read any book by the author. And even as I appreciate, with the benefit of hindsight of course, how well grounded the book and the author are, I got exasperated at some point to be honest. I wondered about the myriad abstractions and theorizing by the author. But it was worth it in the end.
This is not an attempt to preach patience as virtue. Zuboff could not have been extremely convincing as she was without the firm foundation, she laid for making her point. And in the end, you are left with no doubt, you are compelled in fact, to accept all she wrote as truth. And quite frankly, I am yet to find a convincing rebuttal to her assertions.
Zuboff’s principal argument is that big tech wants you. All of you. Everything. You, the individual, are neither the product nor the customer. You are raw material. Yes, you. According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism is “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.” She provides eight definitions and is most damning in the eighth: surveillance capitalism is “an expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.”
By her own admission, Zuboff’s life work has become about finding the answer to the question “Can the digital future be our home?” She contrasts the hitherto industrial future of yore that left many victims in its wake from pollution, climate change, and so on, because voices were not raised on time or high enough. Her main argument is that unlike the carte blanche that industrial capitalists literally had, surveillance capitalists must not be similarly watched in silence.
Zuboff’s conclusion is instructive: “The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, but above all it was because the people of East Berlin said, ‘No more!’. We too can be the authors of many ‘great and beautiful’ new facts that reclaim the digital future as humanity’s home. No more! Let this be our declaration.” In other words, the digital future will not be our home without a fight. But is this a fight Africa should join?
Knowing you pays
To properly put Zuboff’s views in proper perspective would require defining a lot of terms. Not that she didn’t throw in simplifications here and there. But quite frankly, her tome was not an easy read. To simplify, I present her logic as she did and then simplify it based on my own understanding: “Google [and other surveillance platforms like Facebook and Microsoft]…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.”
Put simply, big tech or surveillance capitalists’ profit from the human experience. To this end, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other surveillance platforms seek and store behavioural data in excess of that ordinarily required for the products and services they purport to provide. The suggestion is not that Google does not provide a search service or Facebook a social media platform. Of course, they do. What Zuboff asserts it that these are not the real ends of surveillance platforms. Instead, they are means to the end of what she termed “behavioural surplus;” that is behavioural data beyond what is ordinarily required in the normal course of their businesses as we know it.
In other words, surveillance platforms are simply that: surveillance platforms. They gather data on everything about you. And because of their scale, they are thus able to gather data on virtually everyone. Consequently, over time they know you well enough to predict your future decisions and actions with almost perfect accuracy. As firms would be willing to pay for such knowledge to better sell their products, surveillance platforms are thus able to earn “surveillance revenues” that translates to “surveillance capital,” the logic of which is “surveillance capitalism,” which thus underpins the “surveillance economy.” (Now I am not so sure this is even a simple enough explanation.) Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others make money from knowing you. That is simple enough, I think.
RAFIQ RAJI
