Excerpts from Evgeny Morozov's review of Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers a thorough examination of how advertising-supported firms have incentives to extract ever more data, harming users, democracy, and much else in the process. What Zuboff doesn’t offer is an account of how value—all of it, not just those parts accruing to behavioral surplus—is produced in the digital economy. In its absence, Zuboff’s earlier assumption about surveillance capitalism being the worst of all possible information capitalisms is hard to evaluate, let alone justify.
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Beyond demanding new rights and laws, Zuboff—a reformist, not a revolutionary—offers little by way of a concrete agenda. This policy lacuna might stem from how surveillance capitalism and its primary fictious commodity, human experience, are defined. Clearly, no one advocates socializing human experience. But if we were to define the fictitious commodity as data, sensible political demands, such as those for new kinds of data ownership, become possible. In dismissing such demands as merely reinforcing the status quo, Zuboff refers only to plans, such as those of the World Economic Forum, to treat data as an asset class. But what about proposals for more egalitarian regimes of data ownership, which, transcending private property, do not even appear on the corporate radar?
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Contrary to the expectations of the Italian autonomist theorists—who foresaw the coming of emancipatory futuristic feudalism, with its cognitive workers reclaiming the means of production while watching capitalists lose their collective grip on value extraction—the capitalists did not disappear. They just took a brief sabbatical to invent subtler forms of Taylorism. Steve Jobs promised us computers as “bicycles for the mind”; what we got instead are assembly lines for the spirit. Is it worth remaking these assembly lines into artisanal workshops? In writing of “mutation” within “information capitalism” and of a “vaccine” to be applied against surveillance capitalism, Zuboff clearly believes that a more humane capitalist alternative is possible. We just need to ditch behavioral modification. Would a healthcare system furnished by Apple—expensive but data-secure—be better than a healthcare system furnished by Google—free but data-leaky? Perhaps. But must we really choose between the two? Or can our institutional imagination chart other alternatives? The choice between Google and Apple rests on an earlier choice between capitalism and non-capitalism, which Zuboff’s Chandlerian gaze does not often register. Since the firm is the basic unit of analysis, seeing beyond capitalism is difficult, even if double movements are allowed to modify capitalism’s operations. Besides, Zuboff has long reached the conclusions that there’s no meaningful zone outside the commodity form. The commodity, as The Support Economy argued, is no longer something to fear; “everything that can be commoditized,” it proclaimed, “will be commoditized.”
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Lacking a theory of what institutions and practices ought to lie outside the logic of capitalism, Zuboff can only turn to individual rights and consumption. Defined so narrowly, her preferred double movement will surely be hijacked by Apple’s Tim Cook. Should we give Apple a pass just because its “advocacy” involves an overpriced device which, while offering a modicum of privacy, also leads to its inevitable commodification? Do we not care if strong encryption is a universal right or a commercial service? Is behavioral modification through monetary imperatives less evil than oppression through data-related ones? If so, our problem is with “surveillance dataism,” not surveillance capitalism.
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Zuboff’s Copernican revolution is much easier to explain by its debt to Chandler than Foucault. Chandler’s own prescriptions were usually limited to demanding that managers be more responsible. Zuboff transcends such defeatism. But her double movement will not win before both managerial capitalism and surveillance capitalism are theorized as “capitalism”—a complex set of historical and social relationships between capital and labor, the state and the monetary system, the metropole and the periphery—and not just as an aggregate of individual firms responding to imperatives of technological and social change. That the latter, miniaturized account of competitive enterprise is the working definition of “capitalism” in American business schools is no reason to impoverish the broader discussion of the system’s rationales and shortcomings.