Shoshana Zuboff's new book on “surveillance capitalism” emphasizes the former at the expense of the latter
I.In a series of remarkably prescient articles, the first of which was published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the summer of 2013, Shoshana Zuboff pointed to an alarming phenomenon: the digitization of everything was giving technology firms immense social power. From the modest beachheads inside our browsers, they conquered, Blitzkrieg-style, our homes, cars, toasters, and even mattresses. Toothbrushes, sneakers, vacuum cleaners: our formerly dumb household subordinates were becoming our “smart” bosses. Their business models turned data into gold, favoring further expansion.
Google and Facebook were restructuring the world, not just solving its problems. The general public, seduced by the tech world’s youthful, hoodie-wearing ambassadors and lobotomized by TED Talks, was clueless. Zuboff saw a logic to this digital mess; tech firms were following rational—and terrifying—imperatives. To attack them for privacy violations was to miss the scale of the transformation—a tragic miscalculation that has plagued much of the current activism against Big Tech.
This analytical error has also led many clever, well-intentioned people to insist that Silicon Valley should—and could—repent. To insist, as these critics do, that Google should start protecting our privacy is, for Zuboff, “like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand or asking a giraffe to shorten its neck.” The imperatives of surveillance capitalism are almost of the evolutionary kind: no clever policy, not even in Congress, has ever succeeded in shortening the giraffe’s neck (it has, however, done wonders for Mitch McConnell’s).
Zuboff’s pithy term for this regime, “surveillance capitalism,” has caught on. (That this term had been previously used—and in a far more critical manner—by the Marxists at Monthly Review, is a minor genealogical inconvenience for Zuboff.) Her new, much-awaited book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism exhaustively documents its sinister operations. From Pokemon Go to smart cities, from Amazon Echo to smart dolls, surveillance capitalism’s imperatives, as well as its methods—marked by constant lying, concealment, and manipulation—have become ubiquitous. The good old days of solitary drunken stupor are now gone: even vodka bottles have become smart, offering internet connectivity. As for the smart rectal thermometers also discussed in the book, you probably don’t want to know. Let’s just hope your digital wallet is stocked with enough Bitcoins to appease the hackers.
No clever policy, not even in Congress, has ever succeeded in shortening the giraffe’s neck (it has, however, done wonders for Mitch McConnell’s).Zuboff’s book makes clear that the promises of “surveillance capitalists” are as sweet as their lobbying is ruthless. Tech companies, under the pompous cover of disrupting everything for everyone’s benefit, have developed a panoply of rhetorical and political tricks that insulate them from any pressure from below. It helps, of course, that the only pressure coming from below is usually the one directed at the buttons and screens of their data-sucking devices.
Had Donald Trump not been elected president—reportedly by that accidental data wizard of Steve Bannon, his hapless colleagues at Cambridge Analytica, and a bunch of Russians who managed to use Facebook as it was always intended to be used—the power of Silicon Valley might have remained a niche topic: good for nerdy Twitter banter on the renegade think-tank circuit but pretty useless for anything else.
Zuboff stepped into this global conversation five years ago, just as the first signs of discontent about the power of Big Tech began to bubble up. Silicon Valley was no stranger to criticism, but Zuboff was no ordinary critic. One of the first female professors to receive tenure at Harvard Business School, she has also worked as a columnist for Fast Company and Businessweek, two bastions of techno-optimism not exactly known for anti-capitalist sentiment. If members of the establishment were beginning to bash Silicon Valley, something, it seemed, was truly rotten in the digital kingdom.
What was it?
II.While Zuboff’s use of the phrase “surveillance capitalism” first appeared in 2014, the origins of her critique date further back. They can be traced to the late 1970s, when she began studying the impact of information technology on the workplace—a forty-year project that, in addition to leading to several books and articles, has also inundated her with utopian hopes and bitter disappointments. The mismatch between the possible and the real has framed the intellectual context in which Zuboff—previously cautiously optimistic about both capitalism and technology—constructed her theory of surveillance capitalism, the darkest and most dystopian tool in her intellectual arsenal to date.
The depressing conclusions of her latest book are a far cry from what Zuboff was saying just a decade ago. As late as 2009, she argued that the likes of Amazon, eBay, and Apple were “releas[ing] massive quantities of value by giving people what they wanted on their own terms in their own space.” Zuboff arrived at this sunny diagnosis via her overarching analysis of how information technology was changing society; in this respect, she was one of a cohort of thinkers to argue that a new era—some called it “post-industrial,” others “post-Fordist”—was upon us.
It is from within that analysis—and the initial positive expectations it engendered—that Zuboff’s current critique of surveillance capitalism has emerged. It’s also why her latest tome often ventures, in content and language alike, into the turf of the melodramatic: Zuboff, together with the entire American business-managerial establishment, besotted with the promises of the New Economy, had hoped that something very different was in the offing.
Her first book, In the Age of the Smart Machine, appeared to much acclaim in 1988. In it, Zuboff laid out a conceptual apparatus and a set of questions that would resurface in all her subsequent writings. Drawing on years of ethnographic work in industrial and office settings, the book painted an ambiguous future. Information technology, argued Zuboff, might exacerbate the worst features of automation, strip workers of their autonomy, and condemn them to undignified tasks. But when used wisely, it might have the opposite effect: boosting workers’ capacities for abstract and imaginative thinking and reversing the de-skilling process decried by many Marxist critics of work under capitalism.
Stitched together by information technology, modern enterprises, in Zuboff’s account, had to choose between “automating” or “informating.” The latter was her term for their novel ability to gather data—the “electronic text”—related to computer-mediated work. Under the prior era of Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management, such data was gathered manually, through observation and time-motion studies. By extracting workers’ tacit knowledge about the work process, managers, abetted by engineers, could rationalize it, dramatically lowering costs and raising living standards.
Thanks to advances in information technology, the writing of the electronic text was becoming cheap and ubiquitous. Were this text made available to workers, it might even undermine the foundation of managerial control: the assumption that the manager knows best. The electronic text begat what Zuboff, following Michel Foucault, described as “panoptical power.” Wedded to authoritarian practices of the earlier, heavily centralized workplace, this power was likely to entrench existing hierarchies; managers would hide behind numbers and rule remotely instead of risking the ambiguity of personal communication. Amplified by workplace democracy and egalitarian rules of access to the electronic text, however, this power might enable workers to challenge managers’ interpretations of their own activities and grab some institutional power for themselves.
In the Age of the Smart Machine, a book about the future of work and also, inevitably, about its past, was remarkably silent about capitalism. Its extensive bibliography aside, this ambitious tome of nearly five hundred pages mentions the word “capitalism” only once—in a quotation by Max Weber. This seems odd, given that Zuboff was hardly an apologist for the firms that she studied. She harbored no illusions about the authoritarian nature of the modern workplace, rarely a place for workers’ self-realization, and she delighted in bashing self-obsessed and power-hungry managers.
The depressing conclusions of her latest book are a far cry from what Zuboff was saying just a decade ago.Despite such occasional critical notes, Zuboff trained her analytical lens on the institutional conflicts over knowledge and its role in perpetuating or undermining organizational hierarchies. Private property, class, the ownership of the means of production—the stuff of earlier conflicts related to work—were mostly excluded from her framework. This was by design rather than oversight. The goal of the study, after all, was to understand the future of the workplace mediated by information technology. Zuboff’s ethnographic approach was simply better suited to interviewing managers and workers about what drove them apart than to sketching out the economic imperatives that connected each enterprise to the whole of the global economy. So the smart machine of Zuboff’s imagining operated largely outside the invisible constraints that capitalism imposed on managers and owners.
While “capital” fared better—the book did mention it a dozen times—Zuboff did not see it, as many on the Marxist left are wont to do, as a social relation or an eternal antagonist of labor. Instead, she followed neoclassical economists in viewing it as machinery or money tied up in investments; “labor,” in its turn, was mostly treated as a physical activity. Even though Zuboff also mentioned the historical role of the trade unions, her readers would not necessarily grasp the antagonistic character of “labor” and “capital”—instead, they heard mostly about situational conflicts within individual workplaces, between workers and managers....MUCH MORE
That was scarcely surprising: Zuboff was no Marxist. In addition, she was an aspiring professor at Harvard Business School. However, her advocacy for more equal and dignified workplaces suggested that she might be, at least on some issues, a fellow traveler to leftist causes. What set her apart from the more radical voices in these debates was her continued insistence on the ambiguous effects of information technology. The choice between “automating” and “informating” was not just an analytical byproduct of her framework or a mere rhetorical prop. Rather, she presented it as an actual, existential choice facing modern firms struggling with information technology....
Previously on Zuboff:
Dec. 2018
"The Datafication of Employment"
Nov. 2015
HBR: Ad Blockers and the Next Chapter of the Internet
And on Morozov:
May 2018
"High-Tech Bildungsroman: The Hysterical Optimism of Silicon Valley"
January 2017
"Moral Panic Over Fake News Hides the Real Enemy – the Digital Giants"
March 2014
Current So-called High Tech Are Only Financialization By Another Name
May 2013
Feel the force: Three new books look at power in the digital age
