I have been averse to technology for a while; like many “tech-hesitant” twenty-something women, the initial trigger was social media. For several varied and unsurprising reasons, mainly time-consumption and vanity, I deleted my accounts in an impulsive moment of annoyance about three years ago. The “What have I done?” feeling that quickly followed left me riddled with agitating questions. For although it might seem excessive or even foolish, I doubted whether or not I would still function normally without access to these platforms. They entered into my life at the influential age of thirteen and had unquestionably left their mark: Would I be able to maintain distant friendships without “liking” pictures on Instagram? How would I stay politically up to date without Twitter? Did I need SnapChat to stay connected? Etc., etc. For nearly a decade, this was how I had interacted with many of my peers; conceivably, by removing the tool I was functionally removing myself. Understandably, I felt trepidatious.
To my surprise and delight, however, this modest step in digital asceticism offered me a new, refreshed perspective on the broader digital world. I found myself noticing an increasing number of problematic themes, largely exemplified by my iPhone: the functional invisibility of digital devices (they’re always there, mediating our lives, but do we notice them?); their mindless irresistibility (mechanically scrolling online while waiting at the doctor’s); and the frictionlessness to which they habituate us (intent and action uniquely become one in digital devices; we are now aggrieved by a seconds-long wait time). A litany of impressive scholarship exists on this topic of technology and its influence on our social life; in terms of the practical threat it poses, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power offers a remarkably incisive exposition of the system to which we are subject. No less relevant today than it was following its 2019 publication, the work explores recent social and economic developments that have contributed to the rise of what she coins “surveillance capitalism”—a new economic system that presupposes and necessitates a conception of man whereby he is primed for predictive control.
The new economic system initially, according to Zuboff, appeared to fill a “social justice” void created by the free-market capitalism of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. Apple, Google, and Facebook seemed to offer a corrective to the supposed social and economic inequalities of capitalist systems: singular maximization of shareholder value, wealth accumulating to “the few,” and an undermining of the general welfare in favor of private advantage. With “an advocacy-oriented digital capitalism,” by contrast, the new tech giants promised a market economy that would ensure equal access, control, and information for all. As Zuboff expounds, the barrier to entry for the new system, afforded by what is now Alphabet and Meta in particular, was free of monetary constraints: one need only accept the “terms-of-service” agreements to participate. But, infamously long, dull, and complicated, these agreements are designed to disincentivize careful, or any, consideration of the text: we are meant to scroll, submit, and use. The hidden cost of this consent, as Zuboff details with chilling clarity, is nothing short of our lives: we surrender ourselves to the new barons of surveillance capitalism.
Zuboff defines surveillance capitalism as “[a] new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales,” wherein “the product of goods and services is subordinate to a new global architecture of behavior modification.” The system’s market is “behavioral futures,” and it trades in “surplus behavioral data” reaped from the countless hours of the countless people who have ever once used Google, logged onto Facebook, liked an Instagram post, or purchased an iPhone. It parasitically renders our experiences, emotions, desires, interests, and insecurities into binary data, which is then sold to those who are willing to pay for a chance to read our minds and influence our lives.
When man is viewed from behind the veil of binary uniformity that now shrouds the world, the gulag archipelago becomes unnecessary; man has become an island unto himself, and the fragility found in this isolation suffices to ensure conformity.
Tracing the history of this development, Zuboff notes that this surplus behavioral data was first discovered, somewhat accidentally, by Google in the early 2000s when analysts noted a correlation between keyword searches and developments on a television show. This binary arena remains surveillance capitalists’ stronghold; our communications, searches, purchases, movements, appointments, photos, likes, and connections are its principal resources. But knowledge has quickly become power in this new system; the “extraction imperative demands that everything be possessed,” and in recent years, the horizon of influence has moved beyond the digital and into the real world.Our biological data—faces; voices; heartbeats; sleep-wake cycles; workout duration, frequency, and intensity; hydration and hormone levels; ailments and medications—is extracted by increasingly common wearable devices that are designed to be a technological extension of the self, while our homes and cities are datafied by iRobot vacuums, smart home devices, surveillance cameras, and Google maps.
The data culled from surveillance capitalism’s digital dominance and expansion into the real world is what Zuboff calls the “shadow text”: the “burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus” acquired from our “experiences as we engage in the normal and necessary routines of social participation.” Individual privacy is a myth; we are socially, financially, and practically compelled to sacrifice the particularities of our lives as fodder. As Zuboff takes pains to emphasize, we are neither the customer nor the product; “[we] are the abandoned carcass. The ‘product’ derives from the surplus that is ripped from [our lives].”
Customer satisfaction in this economic order is closely tied to risk minimization. Our data is sold at a premium, and direct results are expected. The corporations and governments who purchase the shadow text want to know their influence is secured, and surveillance capitalists must anticipate the success rates of their “suggestions”: Did we buy the product, or merely click the link? Did we attend the rally, or just like the post? Did we read the article, or simply repost it? Did we vote the right way, or only comment on the videos? But predicting human action, even with these vast swaths of data, still leaves revenue on the table; why bother predicting what you can control?
The incursion of digital apparatuses into our lives is threatening generally, but the theoretical reduction of man presupposed by this system and the conception of man it has actualized are diabolical, for when Google rediscovered human life as “raw material supply,” Meta replaced human community with online connection, and Apple invented a digital organ, man became little more than “the user.” Here, what Zuboff calls the “instrumentarian” logic of the surveillance capitalist system comes into view.
Instrumentarianism is defined as “a market project that converges with the digital to achieve its own unique brand of social domination.” It is, in other words, a logic of accumulation that informs a power that seeks to attain panvasive control of human action. The tech giants only beat the behavioral futures market if their subject is entirely predictable—there is no room for the uncertainty and randomness of human action. To illustrate the attraction of the “digital nudge” designed to alter our behavior, Zuboff offers the following remark given by the chief data scientist at a drugstore chain: “You can make people do things with this technology. Even if it’s just 5% of people, you’ve made 5% of people do an action they otherwise wouldn’t have done, so to some extent there is an element of the user’s loss of self-control.” This usurpation of our freedom, Zuboff argues, is informed by the conditioning logic typically associated with B. F. Skinner, who believed human behavior could be altered as a result of the application of various reinforcements.
Man, in the narrative terms set and presupposed by the behaviorist logic of surveillance capitalism, is algorithmicized: he is exhaustively defined as an isolated, impotent, instantiation of the random, quantifiable process which purportedly produced him. He is conceptually reduced to “the lowest common denominator of sameness—an organism among organisms.” True human action and individuality give rise to ineliminable errors; action must become behavior, and the individual, mere organism.
Beyond the obvious technological wizardry, the real novelty of this instrumentarian power is the sheer breadth of its scope and the potency with which it effects its ambitions. It pervades all aspects of existence, and no facet of life is concealed from its penetrating gaze. Through its omnipresence and omniscience, its invisibility and intangibility, its complexity and elusiveness, it has woven itself so perfectly into the fabric of our lives that it has nearly vanished from sight. We, the users, fumble about at this precipice of power, with nary a thread to grasp.
Zuboff emphasizes, at length, that this new “instrumentarian” power is different in kind (not merely degree) from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The latter, as Hannah Arendt notes, effected behavior by means of “handmade terror” that forced people into a social and spiritual homelessness wherein “ordinary human bonds” were destroyed. In contrast, physical violence is not perpetrated by surveillance capitalists; they instead employ “prediction products designed to forecast what we will feel, think and do; now, soon, and later.”
But it seems to me that the difference between these two systems is one of practical necessity, not kind, for not only the end but also the presuppositions of both are undeniably related. In each instance, absolute control of human action is the goal; to do this the system must be capable of perfect “modification, prediction, monetization, and control.” It is the means necessary to bring about these conditions wherein a difference is found. The brute power typified by totalitarian systems is unnecessary when the internal control exemplified by instrumentarianism is perfected. Coercion, in other words, is dispensable when individual action has given way to conditioned behavior; herein lies the radicality of instrumentarian power. When man is viewed from behind the veil of binary uniformity that now shrouds the world, the gulag archipelago becomes unnecessary; man has become an island unto himself, and the fragility found in this isolation suffices to ensure conformity. Though her work is in many ways exemplary, Zuboff fails to fully expound upon just how far this system of control has penetrated the human person.
Of course, this begs the question: “What can we do?” In a way, the answer must be the usual: “Very little.” Digital technology has implicated nearly every facet of our lives in a potentially irrevocable manner, to say nothing of the destructive technocratic logic which undergirds modernity itself. To think these far-reaching consequences can be successfully parried by new (albeit laudable) legislation is to misunderstand the gravity of what we face. That said, I remain hopeful; “very little” is not nothing. And unlike many scholars on the topic, Zuboff is surprisingly encouraging—particularly where the younger generation is concerned.
For starters, we can, and should, delete our social media. Not only does it expose us to endless behavioral “nudging,” but it also abstracts us from the context of our existence. Examples of this abound; while dining out, it is not uncommon to see both children and their parents mutely transfixed by screens. Similarly, we can spend more time in silence; it does not do to constantly consume. Intentionally transitioning away from shopping online is also a fabulous way to both invest oneself more fully in local communities while reducing consumerist urges. Modernity is filled, as Lewis Mumford perceptively noted, with individuals who have endless possessions, but no self-possession; practicing acts of self-denial is a good way to combat this.
We should also be living a liturgical life. In times of joy and celebration, feast! Throw dinner parties, go dancing, spend time enjoying this wondrous world within a community. And in times of penance, deny a worldly desire or two. This, of course, leads to the most obvious salve: going to Mass, where we’re safe from the greedy panopticon of surveillance capitalism and surrounded instead by a sympathetic cloud of witnesses beckoning us along our pilgrim way. Catholicism, in its sacramentality, is far more efficacious than any system we men could produce; we only need to open ourselves to its graces. These might seem like small acts and of course, in a way, they are. But they are nevertheless capable of filling life with immeasurable joy and beauty; in this, there is much hope to be found.
