Guides: Digital Literacy and AI: Surveillance Capitalism

Defining Surveillance Capitalism

What is Surveillance Capitalism?

According to Harvard professor, Shoshana Zuboff, surveillance capitalism aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and control. The purpose and power of surveillance capitalism is not only knowing our behavior but also using that information to manipulate it for profit at a large scale.

Unlike traditional capitalism, which feeds on labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on human experience and behavior. Surveillance capitalists monopolizes this information (our private human experience) by acquiring, condensing, aggregating, analyzing, and packaging data into behavioral surplus to be traded and sold for future behavioral markets.

Why is it important?

In today's digital climate, information is seen as the supreme currency. Companies claim this currency (an individual's private human experience) as their own source of raw material (2019). This extraction process is a one-way transaction and not a consensual relationship, because it lacks dialogue and is often unknown to one party, the user. Zuboff compares this transactional relationship with that of the industrial era, saying that just as the industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, the information civilization will grow at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity (2019, pp. 11-12).

Surveillance capitalism monopolizes not only on our information, but also on the fragile relationship between our public and private spaces. This extraction and manipulation of information disregards social norms and invalidates the rights associated with our individual autonomy.

Source: Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

In this video, Harvard professor Shosana Zuboff explains surveillance capitalism and why it is imperative we know what it is and how it effects our right to freedom and autonomy.

Resources

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
ISBN: 9781610395694
Publication Date: 2019-01-15
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
Silicon Values by Jillian C. York
ISBN: 1788738802
Publication Date: 2021-03-23
The battle for online rights and for the future of democracy Who decides what is permissible on the internet: Politicians? Mark Zuckerberg? Users? Who determines when political debate becomes hate speech? How does this impact our identity or our ability to create communities and to protest? Silicon Values reports on the war for digital rights and how major corporations--Facebook, Twitter, Google and Tiktok--threaten democracy as they harvest our personal data in the pursuit of profit.
Surveillance Capitalism in America by Josh Lauer (Editor); Kenneth Lipartito (Editor)
ISBN: 9780812299946
Publication Date: 2021-10-15
Surveillance Capitalism in America offers a crucial historical perspective on the intimate relationship between surveillance and capitalism. While surveillance is often associated with governments, today the role of the private sector in the spread of everyday surveillance is the subject of growing public debate. Tech giants like Google and Facebook are fueled by a continuous supply of user data and digital exhaust. Surveillance is not just a side effect of digital capitalism; it is the business model itself, suggesting the emergence of a new and more rapacious mode of capitalism: surveillance capitalism. But how much has capitalism really changed? Surveillance Capitalism in America explores the historical development of commercial surveillance long before computers and suggests that surveillance has been central to American capitalism since the nation's founding. Managers surveilled labor, merchants surveilled consumers, and businesses surveilled each other. Focusing on events in the United States, the chapters in this volume examine the deep logic of modern surveillance as a mode of rationalization, bureaucratization, and social control from the early nineteenth century forward. Even more, business surveillance has often involved collaborations with the state, through favorable laws, policing, and information sharing. The history of surveillance capitalism is thus the history of technological, legal, and knowledge infrastructures built over decades. Together, the chapters in this volume reveal the long arc of surveillance capitalism, from the violent coercion of slave labor to the seductions of target marketing.