Re: <nettime> James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 08.02.19 03:27, Brian Holmes wrote:

> That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth 
> reading. It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but
> it's fascinating at points and hopefully gets better as you go.
> Morozov has written the perfect intro for a critical read of what
> might become a landmark book- if the situation it describes does not
> again suddenly change beyond recognition, as it easily could.

I've read bit and pieces by now, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't
get better and is in line with her earlier articles and talks you can
find online.

Mozorov highlighted many of the problematic aspects of her approach,
which he boils down to her claim that the imbalance of power between the
individual user and corporations is a novel thing, and that prior to the
current phase, capitalism worked by making transparent offers to
rational consumers who would choose from these offers based on their
own, genuine needs and desires.

Thus her proposals to change the situation are all about restoring this
individual autonomy, through what she calls "right to the future" (aka
the ability to change ones life without being restricted by predictions
based on past behavior) and "right to sanctuary" (which, basically,
is an elaborate version of 'my home is my castle').

Mozorov puts lots of emphasis on her lack of engagement with other
theories of contemporary capitalism and her unwillingness to considers
options beyond the market. And, really, not even Wikipedia is ever
mentioned (expect as a source once) and Free Software only in relation
to Android and Google's strategy to dominate it. Thus, she never asks
why such alternatives exist and what could be done to support them. So,
the only alternative we get is Apple, the company, as Richard Stallman
famously put it, that "made prison look cool".

But not only does she barely engage with capitalism, she also does not
engage with the surveillance as a feature of contemporary life that
preceded "surveillance capitalism" by decades, if not centuries (a line
of thinking that stretches from Foucault to David Lyon et al). Strangely
enough, she also doesn't engage with the history of "behavioral
modification", which has played a major role in the history of
capitalism in the last 100 years. This ignorance is necessary to keep
her basic premise, about the sudden undermining of individual autonomy
alive.

Of course, there is much to like on the book as well, particularly her
claim that what we are living through is really a "coup from above: an
overthrow of the people’s sovereignty." But is this really the result of
"surveillance capitalism" or, more broadly, of neo-liberalism, as
post-democracy theory has been arguing since the late 1990s?

Nevertheless, it puts this again into the table and connects it to some
of the most powerful actors in the economy and it highlights the demands
for regulation. Which leads Mozorov to the following question:

> Should we accept the political utility of Zuboff’s framework while
> rejecting its analytical validity? I’d argue that we can proceed down
> that path only if we understand the price of doing so: a greater
> sense of confusion with regard to the origins, operations, and
> vulnerabilities of digital capitalism.

No. We need to come up with a better reading of the current situation
regarding informational capitalism.

Both Zuboff and Mozorov mention in passing Polanyi, though don't make
much of it. I think that concept of a fictitious commodity can be
usefully expanded. So far, this has mainly been done in relation to
knowledge [1], but this does not work well.

It works better with "engagement" as the commodity form of
"communication". I tried to develop this idea in a talk recently and
posted the relevant segment to nettime recently as "Engagement, a new
fictitious commodity"

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1901/msg00039.html

To expand a bit on this post: the old settlement between communication
as a social (non-market) activity and engagement as a commodity, created
by laws and ethical standards, broke down as new set of corporations
established a radical market-system for communication. Initially, this
was seen as a liberation, because the old settlement was unable to cope
with the rising diversity of cultural/political positions seeking new
forms of expression. But over time, the pressure to increase profits by
focusing solely on commodity production, and the pressures to operate in
such an environment placed on everyone, began to undermine communication
(as negotiation of shared meaning) more and more, to the degree that
within these radical market systems, almost all non-market element have
been destroyed, and hence, undermining societies ability to communicate.

Hence, we need to ask, what kind of resistance (aka double movement) and
new institutional arrangements do we need to protect and expand our
collective capacity to communicate. There are lots of possible answers
to this, ranging from regulation of social media companies to the need
develop communication infra-structures outside the markets.


Felix



[1] Jessop, Bob (2007): Knowledge as a Fictitious Commodity: Insights
and Limits of a Polanyian Perspective.


















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