Surveillance Capitalism

This post is another Things My English Degree Taught Me instalment. I’m aware that this has the potential to be quite a depressing topic, but it’s very interesting and necessary to talk about in the time that we are currently living; I will also try and give it a positive twist. The topic is Surveillance Capitalism, a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, to describe the fast-emerging socio economic global situation in which human behaviour is claimed as data for corporations seeking to make profit. This data is obtained from the digital surveillance that we willingly partake in as we use our devices, from FitBits and Alexas to Facebook and Google.

This behavioural data is analysed and used to predict, and therefore influence, our future behaviours, as online advertising increasingly shapes our existence. In other words, we, and more specifically our behaviour, are the products being sold. Our individual agency is being threatened as our actions are reduced to data and analysed, predicted, and moulded by corporations for their profit.

Human behaviour, within this system, is therefore valued primarily for the profit that it can generate, as a means to the ends of corporate money making. Our existence has become increasingly rendered in terms of the digital world, and can thus be mapped, surveilled, and predicted by those who hold power globally (the surveillance capitalists). Zuboff emphasises the secrecy through which this occurs, where the intentions of surveillance capitalists are veiled behind hyper-friendly corporate jargon and discourses of connectivity and progress. Through this observation, prediction, and control of personality, surveillance capitalism prioritises and moves towards the notion of ‘absolute certainty’ which subverts free will by attempting to channel our future actions within its intents.

Zuboff’s argument also covers something that I am interested in: the blurring of public and private brought on by this digital era. She emphasises that this technology dissolves the privacy of the home’s walls, invading private life to the extent that emotion and personality are ‘summoned into the light for others’ profit’. She emphasises: ‘That our walls are dense and deep is of no importance now because the boundaries that define the very experience of the home are to be erased. There can be no corners in which to curl up and taste the pleasures of solitary inwardness. There can be no secret hiding places because there can be no secrets’. In other words, the surveillance that our devices facilitate means that we are never truly in private in our homes; we are always being surveilled, and influenced, in some way by our personal technologies.

Zuboff also interacts with Erving Goffman’s theory of the ‘backstage’ behind the performance of life: the places where we can be our private selves, where we can shelter from the demands of other people and societal norms. But she brings this theory into the digital era, emphasising how the digital threatens the very existence of the backstage. She quotes one of her students about this:

The difference is that Goffman assumed a backstage where you could be your true self. For us, the backstage is shrinking. There is almost no place left where I can be my true self. Even when I am walking by myself, and I think I am backstage, something happens – an ad appears on my phone or someone takes a photo, and, I discover that I am onstage, and everything changes.

Often, in conversations about digital surveillance, people claim that they feel neutral about how much digital corporations are monitoring us, that they aren’t bothered because they have ‘nothing to hide’. But this isn’t the whole issue. The issue, as Zuboff emphasises, is that this loss of privacy is so pervasive and secretive that we are giving up our experiences without fully realising how this can threaten our agency. She concludes: ‘What is at stake here is the human expectation of sovereignty over one’s own life and authorship of one’s own experience. What is at stake is the inward experience from which we form the will to will and the public spaces to act on that will’. So, as corporations know our behaviour, as they reduce it to data and use that data to become the new authors of our future behaviour, we sacrifice our self-determination.

So how to give this a positive twist. It’s quite hard, in all honesty. What Zuboff describes is such a huge and insidious threat; its secrecy makes it all the more scary, as does our increasing dependence on technology. The obvious answer seems to be to shut ourselves off, to live without any social media or online interaction. In reality, this is not so easy. But, Zuboff’s work is important because it marks a change, an increased awareness, and a refusal to let these corporations have the last word. The more we research, read, and educate about these issues, the better equipped we are to tackle them head on.