Empowering Surveillance Capitalism
Who Is Profiting From Your Social Media Presence?
"Surveillance capitalism has a number of meanings around the commodification of personal information. Since 2014, social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff has used and popularized the term.” • Wikipedia
“Zuboff has been hailed as a “maverick management guru” and a “prophet of the information age.” A former columnist at Fast Company and Businessweek and one of the first women tenured at Harvard Business School, she has been a leading voice on information technology, business, and the workplace for over 30 years. She first gained wide attention for her 1988 book, In the Age of the Smart Machine, an early and influential study of how computer technology would affect the American workforce. This project was notable in its ambition, and Zuboff set an even larger goal for herself in a 2015 article that sketched the fundamentals of surveillance capitalism: “Just a moment ago,” she writes, “it still seemed reasonable to focus our concerns on the challenges of an information workplace or an information society. Now, the enduring questions of authority and power must be addressed to the widest possible frame…information civilization.” In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which runs over 700 pages, she sets out to describe the dawn of a civilization—one that she argues will be dominated by Silicon Valley and its surveillance apparatus.“ • Katie Fitzpatrick, The Nation
“Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff wrote a monumental book about the new economic order that is alarming. "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," reveals how the biggest tech companies deal with our data. How do we regain control of our data? What is surveillance capitalism?” • vpro documentary
An Intensification of Connection At The Heart of The Digital Age
“Zuboff's new work explores a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation that she named "surveillance capitalism". She first presented her concept in a 2014 essay, "A Digital Declaration", published in German and English in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her followup 2015 scholarly article in the Journal of Information Technology titled "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization" received the International Conference on Information Systems Scholars' 2016 Best Paper Award.
Surveillance capitalism and its consequences for twenty-first century society are most fully theorized in her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Zuboff's scholarship on surveillance capitalism as a "rogue mutation of capitalism" has become a primary framework for understanding big data and the larger field of commercial surveillance that she describes as a "surveillance-based economic order". She argues that neither privacy nor antitrust laws provide adequate protection from the unprecedented practices of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff describes surveillance capitalism as an economic and social logic. Her book originates the concept of 'instrumentarian power', in contrast to totalitarian power. Instrumentarian power is a consequence of surveillance capitalist operations that threaten individual autonomy and democracy.
Many issues that plague contemporary society including the assault on privacy and the so-called 'privacy paradox', behavioral targeting, fake news, ubiquitous tracking, legislative and regulatory failure, algorithmic governance, social media addiction, abrogation of human rights, democratic destabilization, and more are reinterpreted and explained through the lens of surveillance capitalism's economic and social imperatives." • Wikipedia
A Novel Market Form
“In Zuboff's theory, surveillance capitalism is a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist accumulation. In her 2014 essay A Digital Declaration: Big Data as Surveillance Capitalism, she characterized it as a "radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism" based on the commodification of "reality" and its transformation into behavioral data for analysis and sales.
In a subsequent 2015 article, Zuboff analyzed the societal implications of this mutation of capitalism. She differentiated "surveillance assets", "surveillance capital", and "surveillance capitalism" and their dependence on a global architecture of computer mediation that she calls "Big Other", a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power which constitutes hidden mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that threatens core values such as freedom, democracy, and privacy.
According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism was pioneered at Google and later Facebook, in much the same way that mass-production and managerial capitalism were pioneered at Ford and General Motors a century earlier, and has now become the dominant form of information capitalism.
In her Oxford University lecture published in 2016, Zuboff identified surveillance capitalism's mechanisms and practices, including the manufacture of "prediction products" for sale in new "behavioral futures markets". She introduced the concept "dispossession by surveillance" and argued that it challenges the psychological and political bases of self-determination as it concentrates rights in the surveillance regime. This is described as a "coup from above"." • Wikipedia
