Shoshana Zuboff’s 2017 tome, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, is a detailed denouncement of a growing infrastructure of data mining as a means of behavioral modification, orchestrated by technological entities she cumulatively refers to as “Big Other.” The book is one for our era: replete with chilling accounts of Big Other’s infringement upon the privacy, individuality, and autonomy of human beings and the role Big Tech’s representatives think data collection should play in a utopian/dystopian future dubbed “The Internet of Things,” in which technology’s reach is omnipresent and omnipotent. Zuboff is concerned about the future of humanity in a world that replaces reciprocity, spontaneity, and trust with the certainty of machine intelligence. She is particularly worried about the status of sanctuary for human beings in a digital future, as a world without sanctuary is a world without self, and a world without self is not one for autonomy (self-rule). Zuboff’s work is a well-researched and eye-opening work of political theory and social critique, but it takes several points for granted that require further argumentation and, more problematically, does not advance a meaningful plan by which we might overcome the pernicious infrastructure of Surveillance Capitalism.
To begin, Zuboff’s argument is predicated on her staunch belief in the inalienable individuality of human beings. She takes for granted that her audience shares her revulsion with the allotment of singular human beings as “things in the cloud” or “organisms as organisms.” This notion of the human being as organism was proffered by Max Weber, a psychologist who advocated that his colleagues detach themselves from their subjects of observation by learning to view them as others (Zuboff 363). This break was meant to detach lived experience from observable behavior. Zuboff takes issue with this practice, arguing that Instrumentarianism (the ideology of Surveillance Capitalism) utilizes the viewpoint of human as other to justify infringements upon the individual. The reification of human beings, though, has been a widespread practice for centuries. Long before human beings became so many data points in a cloud, they were essentialized by tribe, race, nationality, gender, and economic class in works of anthropology, sociology psychology, political science, and economics.
This is not to say that reification is not problematic, but that many scholars of social science utilize this practice to make universal claims about human nature and observe behavior by way of distance. The practice is not unique to Instrumentarianism. Zuboff herself harnesses an essentializing logic in her anthropocentric assumption that the human self is and should be the privileged unit of society, and that privacy and sanctuary are its inalienable rights. It was not a problem when we were tracking animals to monitor their behavior, but it is when the practice extends to humans. She does not argue this case compellingly. She writes that “even in ancient societies where tyranny prevailed, the right of sanctuary stood as a fail-safe” (478). In contrast, we live in an age of boundless digital conquest in which doors, locks, and walls are increasingly flimsy protections against a new market rationality that seeks to plunder our most intimate lived experience for corporate profit. Her arguing that the ubiquity of tyranny’s reach has newly disruptive consequences for human sanctuary constitutes the erasure of centuries of war, invasion, and colonialism. It overlooks slavery and internment. Importantly, it skips the Cold War era, in which technological advances made it possible to spy on enemies of the state in their very homes, and during which citizens might fear being dragged from their homes in the dead of night.
Zuboff did not convince me that sanctuary is inviolable and has always maintained a protected status. I could not agree more that the private home is a fundamental “backstage” for the growth of human individuality, and that we need “laws that assert the right to sanctuary and the right to the future tense as essential for effective human life” (471; 485). But for being so concerned with the increase of antidemocratic public opinion, Zuboff spends relatively little time explaining why autonomy and democracy are fundamental and deserve to be protected. She writes that “the combination of markets and democracy has served humanity well,” despite the fact that a majority of people disagree: myriad western democracies “fall at or below the thirty-eight country median of 37 percent that are committed to democracry” (517). If democracy has inarguably served humanity well, then why do so many people in democratic countries disagree? This does not have as much to do with Big Other as with “social degradation and climate chaos” as a result of “nearly four decades of neoliberal policy and practice.”
Zuboff’s argument is that the certainty and lack of choice offered by Big Other could be an appealing balm to masses grown weary of a ceaseless struggle for self-determination. As people grow increasingly disillusioned with political bodies and institutions that do little to protect their agency and creativity (Zuboff’s “means of an effective life”), and with few clear sources to blame for the impacts of globalization and neoliberalism (an ideology that posits the only freedom as economic freedom), they turn to individuals and movements that promise to protect their rights as a sovereign individual. The rise of antidemocratic sentiment in western democracies to which Zuboff alludes is due in large part to parties that answer the masses’ cries of economic and cultural insecurity with sovereign (control-oriented), xenophobic rhetoric. The certainty and inevitability of surveillance capitalism may be yet another balm for our political woes, but they are not the (only) source of the trend toward illiberalism.
The most compelling argument Zuboff makes about the anti-democratic nature of Big Tech and its mining of our data is that the practice creates new asymmetries of knowledge and power: knowledge, because few of us understand the machinations of a consumer industry we are very much a part of and power, because the potential to extract our data for behavioral modification and profit rests in the hands of a select few tech executives. The practice of behavioral-control-driven data extraction is decidedly undemocratic in the inequality it breeds. But neither asymmetry—of knowledge or power—is entirely unique to surveillance capitalism. Zuboff argues, for example, that the “uncontract” hastens the division of learning in our society.
The uncontract, christened by Zuboff, shapes user agreements based on data extraction and prediction, catering the details of the contract to a consumer’s observable behavior, unbeknownst to the consumer herself. Zuboff posits the uncontract as a “final solution to the enduring uncertainty that is the raison d’être of ‘contract’ as a means of ‘private ordering’” (219). In other words, managing uncertainty is the very reason that contracts exist, and a(n) (un)contract that advances perfect knowledge of the consumer by the corporation is the perfection of the contract form, at least as far as corporations are concerned. The uncontract “desocializes the contract,” bypassing “social work in favor of compulsion” (220). In this manner, it effectively breeds the inequalities of knowledge and power that challenge democratic equality.
What Zuboff describes as the uncontract is not novel to surveillance capitalism. She considers the practice Spanish soldiers once adopted of reading a Monarchical edict called the Requirimiento that declared indigenous peoples as subordinate to the conquistadors, who were imbued with the authority of “God, the Pope, and the king,” before attacking them (177). The Requirimiento, written and read in Spanish, was unintelligible to indigenous peoples who were left uninformed of their sanctioned slaughter and conquest, under the guise of informative declaration. Thus the Requirimiento—and myriad subsequent legitimizations of violence in conquest, genocide, war, and slavery—represent sinister antecedents to the uncontract of Big Tech. While we do not have perfect knowledge, we do at least know that we do not before we consent to another lengthy set of “terms and conditions.” What is new about the uncontract is not its manipulation of the division of knowledge, but its proliferation and perfection in the form of “terms and conditions” and “privacy agreements.” We are volitional beings who sacrifice our knowledge and data security for the use of the internet. Though Surveillance Capitalism is a form of conquest in this era, we can obtain the knowledge necessary to resist if only we seek it out. But Zuboff is not satisfied with technologies that circumvent the incursions of Big Other, she is seeking a social movement for the regulation of Big Tech and its mechanisms of extraction and control.
Zuboff’s favorite example of the uncontract is the notion that a car might be automatically turned off when the driver fails to make payments on it. She tells the story of a repo man who was sent to repossess a car and, upon discovering it belonged to a kindly older couple, waived the repossession fees and “did the human thing,” calling the credit company to pay off the couple’s debt (334). This heartwarming anecdote valorizes the breach of contract, and through it Zuboff essentially argues that the “reciprocity” she describes as inherent to contracts makes them liable to be broken, and that “the human thing” is to circumvent the contract when one party cannot hold up its end of the bargain. This is not a compelling reason for companies, who act primarily in their own financial interest, to favor the old contract over the new. The primary issue with the uncontract, about which all parties should be concerned, is that the lack of knowledge on behalf of the individual erodes her autonomy and that the lack of clear information given by the corporation creates grounds for legal dispute.
Finally, Zuboff’s work—though a master feat of research and social theory—is too long and complex to achieve its stated aim of turning the tide of public opinion against the pernicious machinations of surveillance capitalism to enact lasting legal change. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is not an accessible book. Beyond Zuboff’s constant introduction of new terms and theories, she harnesses theories like individualism and democracy that she does little to defend, and she decries theories like neoliberalism and panopticism, which she does not sufficiently explain. She might have accomplished her aim in 200 pages instead of 500, and perhaps to better effect. The book could have offered truly collective avenues for change, abandoning the cult of liberal individualism that spurred the rise of surveillance capitalism in the first place. Instead of a meaningful social critique that defines the stakes of this new market form for ordinary people and advances avenues for their collective liberation, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is, tragically, a well-crafted and deeply disturbing assessment of our technological predicament that lacks scope. Zuboff’s critique of Big Other is limited by its adherence to the principles of liberal individualism and confined by its form to academics and enthusiasts.
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