Padmaja Challakere
“Increasingly we communicate with our family, friends, co-workers, and casual acquaintances via computers using email, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, and whatever else is hot right now. These systems don’t just transfer data; they also create data records of your interactions with others . . . . The GPS receiver in your smartphone pinpoints your location to within 16 to 27 feet . . . . Data is the exhaust of the information age . . . . It spells the end of the ephemeral.
Schneier, Bruce, Data and Goliath (2015)
“Facebook’s single most momentous innovation in behavioral engineering is the ubiquitous “Like” button adopted in 2009 . . . . On the supply side, the “Like” button was a planet-size one way mirror capable of exponentially increasing raw- material supplies. The more that a user “liked,” the more she informed Facebook about the precise shape and configuration of her “hand,” thus allowing the company to continuously tighten the glove and increase the predictive value of her signals. (p. 457)
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
S
hoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is without a doubt, one of the most significant books of 2019. It is one massive book, but its key argument is that we are now living in a new mode of extractive economy in which our digital behavior (the words we type into Google, the ads we click on, our online browsing and shopping, our Facebook likes, posts, blogs, videos, our cell-phone photos, our WhatsApp conversations, music stories, searches, tweets) is tracked, stored, and sold; and constitutes the principal raw material of a new digital capitalism unprecedented in its scale (p.186). As we busily, rather compulsively, move about our digitized lives, we are constantly producing data, or rather, giving away intimate personal data about what we love and fear; not to mention, what we buy, watch, and listen to. As Bruce Schneier observes in an earlier book about invasion of privacy, Data and Goliath (2015), “Google knows more about us than our partners or family do.” The Google search box is like an intimate personal repository where we ask any question we wish, one we would not share with our parents, partners, or our closest friends. Our medical information is out there, not just because we search disease symptoms on WebMD or take quizzes on BuzzFeed, although millions of people do both, but rather because our search history on Google is never really deleted, and provides a deeply revealing profile that no personal diary can match’ (p. 26, Schneier). Google, the tech-giant, has seduced us with free email and free storage in so bountiful a fashion that now all our secrets are sealed there. Anything that we type online is archived, and can be retrieved and used. There is no expiry date. We may delete our history, but all it means is that we do not see it. Whatever we input online is never really deleted; it never vanishes. ‘There is no ephemeral’: this could be Google’s motto!
The data that we, wittingly or unwittingly, produce is not only mined for commercial purposes by corporations and sorted into marketable categories by data-brokers, it is available to law enforcement. Our texts and messages and online statements can be used against us in a law-suit. There is no dodging what we put out there online as a written text. Then there is the ubiquitous cell phone–a hand-held computer–that gives up a complete sketch of our interests, our friends, and opinions. Despite marketing assurance by Apple and Google about new encryption features that protect our privacy by making our phone data illegible to others without access to our password, Google servers have all of decrypted data in hand. Privacy is long gone; all we can do is block access.
This is not to say that we live in the realm of Total Recall or the Bourne films where cell-phone filaments surgically implanted in his hand have to be removed in order to prevent remote tracking by signal or webcams embedded in walls are hooked up to CIA in Virginia and connected to weapons guidance systems! Digital surveillance today should not be mistaken for the gamut of computerized surveillance and spyware machinery we see in Sci-fi movies. That is the whole point. There is none of the dread of Big Brother watching as in Orwell’s dystopia. No TV watching you. No webcam watching you in a dark room. Surveillance today is no longer about being watched but about being recorded. The terror of data surveillance today is that nothing vanishes. But make no mistake, surveillance today is not blind; it is governed by very specific purposes.
What is recorded is not the stuff of our conversations but, what is called, “metadata” for purposes of latent surveillance. As Schneier puts it, “the data or the content of our conversations is not as revealing or significant as we might want to believe!” Rather, it is the metadata that does all the telling: “this is data that records the time-stamp, location, phone-number, duration and frequency of our conversations. It is the metadata which reveals our relationships with others, who we are interested in, and what is important to us” (p.24).
Ubiquitous surveillance creates conditions for continuous latent surveillance that becomes available for active or “on-call security” capturing the Stalinist logic of “show me the man, and I will show you the crime” (p. 108). Since the Edward Snowden disclosures revealed the power of surveillance in relation to the Patriot Act, which made bulk-collection of metadata legal: collection of phone numbers of parties in question, banking details, International mobile subscriber identity, and time and length of calls through authorization by the FISA Court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), the onus of data-collection is now placed on private tele-communication corporations and this kind of surveillance is ordinary, automatic, and omniscient. More dismal still, it is liable to data-breaches and hacking. Governments and corporations form alliances and work with each other to deploy the same model of blanket, wide-spread mass surveillance.
It may look like we can hide somewhere in this sea of big data; that there is a passivity space, so to speak, within the anonymizing gaze of surveillance power. But as Schneider Insists, there is no space for hiding and “surveillance data can be retrieved all too easily when necessary, and de-anonymized pretty easily” (p.108). So, we cannot exactly tranquilize ourselves to the power of Big Tech which has insinuated itself in every aspect of our lives. We must look reality in the eye! This is what both Schneier and Zuboff seem to be suggesting that having turned our bodies and behavior into data, we cannot wallow in justification of information technology as being inevitable and natural.
The first step is to believe in the right to privacy, and to refuse privacy intrusion. There is nothing rational about accepting the flawed arguments being thrust on us which insist that surveillance is pervasive and inevitable. Big data is getting bigger but that does not mean that it is big enough to provide a cover or a hiding place for us. Big data is ever more purposeful about clustering, patterning, analyzing, aggregating and drawing cross-connections between sets of data so that it can be de-anonymized as quickly as possible.
Zuboff reveals the “auto-magic” of the secret formula invented by Google that ceded the old model of advertising relevacy to click- metrics or whatever receives the maximum clicks (p. 546). The algorithm invented by Google, two decades ago, is primarily trained on “click rates,” “supplanting earlier approaches to align advertising placement with content” (p.546). Within this model, there is nothing but profit whatever manipulation option is chosen: whether generating click-and-bait sensational news to get people to click on a link with the most alarmist title: the subject of “fake news” and its link to the election of Trump or an interest category that lures a click. For example, if you are very anxious about Coronovirus, you do not have to go looking for news about it. Articles about Coronavirus will pop up everywhere for you, and whatever information you hoover up is returned to you in ways that incite new fears and anxieties.
What is undeniable is that we should not be subject to surveillance. Surveillance puts everyone at risk for abuses by those in power. As Schneier puts it, “the debate is falsely characterized as “security vs privacy” suggesting that if we want some level of privacy, we must sacrifice some security in order to get it” (182). Either this data-invasion is marked as techno-liberation or framed as a choice between privacy and security. But privacy and security are not at opposite ends but are instead fundamentally aligned. When we store our mail in Gmail, we have lost our constitutional protection over it, nor can we alter any of the data that we put online so the question of security is completely out of our hands, and can only be decided behind closed doors of Google. Google now controls 92% of the online search engine market, and given that it has acquired YouTube, our viewing habits can be tracked . Orkut and Google Connect archive our social networks, the writing we produce is on Google Docs. Our credit card numbers are on Google Checkout; the photos of family and friends and family are on Google Picassa, and our daily activities on Google Calendar. Our place history and travel are on Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View. Our medical conditions, medical history and prescription drug use are on Google Health.
Security is not having to worry about how our private conversations, our Facebook posts, our online behavior, could be misinterpreted by big data, which has the authority of abstract knowledge for government intelligence agencies and corporations who can secretly decide what level of surveillance can be made default on our cellphones.
Zuboff’s book is indebted to Schneier’s Data and Goliath but it is not about mass surveillance or the violation of our privacy through data-extraction, or about the backstage operations of Google and Facebook. Nor is it a book about Good Tech and Bad Tech. It is a book about the power of surveillance capitalism as a tool of “behavior modification.”
Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) proposes that big-Tech has become in the ‘global knowledge economy “indistinguishable from the fabric of our life.” But right now, it is no longer a question Google’s power to stake claim to all knowledge, or to pull off the successful ideological trick of making information seem like knowledge, or even “data-mining and extraction of user-data for commercial profits.” For Zuboff, the most destablizing effect of big-tech has to do “behavior modification.” According to her, behavior modification is the simple and unabashed goal of surveillance capitalism.This is justified through the language of “inevitabilism” where “individual autonomy, moral reasoning, social norms and values, privacy, decision rights” are inverted to make us believe that a data-driven society serves the interests of individuality and freedom. Facebook’s Zuckerberg presents Facebook as “the social infrastructure to build a global community but with predictive data-mining and context-sensitive advertising nudging, what is happening is the dispossession of individuality by data. Zuboff rightly names Silicon Valley as the axis mundi of inevitabilism where digital “ubiquity and its consequences are an article of faith” (p.223).
Zuboff explains the story of surveillance capitalism as a story with “a problem of two electronic texts wherein “everything that we contribute to the public face of the text we author online” becomes the “the supply chain for a second text: a shadow text” that is accumulated as data to be observed, measured, catalogued, and profiled. Zuboff’s book divides its attention between the commercial goals of the online world, about persuading us to give back feedback “I want more of that” and “I want none of that.” We swaddled in digital devices that further anticipate what you will do or want today, tomorrow, and the day after. For example, wearable emotion trackers have sensors which measure the wearer’s biometric signals like heart-rate, temperature, pulse, and blood volume. This is marketed as consumer wellness, and perhaps the next technical innovation will involve little blasts of prescription drugs like OxyContin into the wrist, with every time-saving or bio-medical gizmo addicting us further!
What is terrifying is that somewhere along the way, we have accepted the inevitability of zero-privacy as a trade-off for the convenience of pulling out our cell phone at any place on the planet and talking to anyone in any other place on the planet. Maybe, the cell-phone service through which we have bargained away our location data is fatally suited to our world where the next digital fix holds more value than change. No targeted surveillance carried out in the past could have located us with the speed of our own location trackers on our cellphones.
The system that is remaking us is based on the data generated by us–our free labor- which is creating billions in profits for Google/Alphabet, Facebook, and Microsoft. It is a business model built on our personal data, and built on depriving us of privacy and autonomy. Then there is the unquestioning belief among the high-tech leaders that “everything will be connected, knowable, and actionable” so that every human can be turned into a predictable economic unit, a “bot” whose behavior can be tracked, manipulated, and controlled for profit.
Zubboff’s book takes a different route in that it chronicles not only Google and Facebook’s power of “conditioning” to change people actual behavior at scale” but also chronicles the political muscle used by Google and Facebook to “preserve their freedom in this lawless space, pushing the boundaries of existing regulations and vigorously opposing even the whisper of a new law” (p. 273).The Age of Surveillance Capitalism chronicles the legislation by which these corporations wrested the right to unaccountable powers of surveillance and “behavioral conditioning.” In what is perhaps the most significant moment in the book, Zuboff offers us Google’s “critical declarations,” six declarations asserted by Google, stunning in the confluence of the metaphorical and the commercial, and terrifying in their implications for the theft of our personal data (p.179). Here is the first declaration, for example: “We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking. On the basis of this claim, we can ignore considerations of individual rights, interests, awareness, or comprehension.” This declaration puts us in mind of the 1999 film Matrix, in which all people are mired in a virtual slumber with “their brain in a vat,” hooked to authoritarian machines streaming entertainment directly into the nuerons. Neo, the hero, has to make the impossibly difficult choice of unhooking the connecting cables that supplied his brain with simulated inputs. In our case, the red pill is the super-structure of fast internet that allows entertainment to be streamed simultaneously on all of our internet devices:cell-phones, tablets, TV, and laptops. We are not merely seduced by these technologies, we are enslaved by them.
Zuboff’s goal is precisely to trace this history of, what she calls “economies of action” put in place by Google and Facebook to achieve our consent to “surveillance” which has turned human behavior into raw material of a new mode of digital capitalism “which is based not on production or creation of value but on extraction of value:”
The idea here is that highly predictive, and therefore highly lucrative, behavioral surplus would be plumbed from intimate patterns of the self. These supply operations are aimed at your personality, moods, and emotions, your lies and vulnerabilities. Every level of intimacy would have to be automatically captured and flattened into a tidal flow of data points for the factory conveyor belts that proceed toward manufactured certainty. (253)
Facebook’s ‘Beacon’ enabled advertisers to track our searches across the internet without permission,” enabled by “weightless terms of service” digital contracts with no value in court. We are now to keep calm and carry one because as Zuckerberg points out that “this is the new social condition!” We are to believe that tracking personal user-data is really about democracy and about unlocking our voices, and going by Facebook’s profits in 2019 (6.88 billion), also a tremendously profitable enterprise!
Maybe this is something you already recognize about data-breaches, and about data extraction, or maybe this is the last thing you expect but I was shocked to learn, on reading Zuboff, that “of the 1 million top websites, 90% of the data was leaked to external domains that track, capture, and expropriate user data for commercial purposes, and 78% of those initiate transfers to domains owned by Google, and another 34% of these transfer data to domains owned by Facebook” (Shoshana Zuboff talk delivered at CUNY School of Labor).
The question of “could we sell this information” Zuboff shows, is spread across the entire economic sector: insurance industry, finance, entertainment industry, and goes far beyond the terrain of economics or, what is called, “market democracy.” To see surveillance capitalism led by Google and Facebook only as a commercial profit, Zuboff argues, is like seeing the telescope from the wrong end. Rather, it is a twenty-first-century means of behavioral modification. As Zuboff points out, “the aim of this undertaking is not to impose behavioral norms, such as conformity or obedience, but rather to produce behavior that reliably, definitively, and certainly leads to desired commercial results” (p. 222).
As a teacher, I also see daily how often and how compulsively students scroll through images on Instagram or the latest sports scores while in the classroom or while walking the corridors as if in response to uncontrollable subconscious urges.When I see my students scrolling through their cell phones addictively while they walk, spending more time on the cell-phone than with their friends, when I see them stealing screen-time on cell-phones in the classroom as if possessed, I nag at them, try to get them to put it away. I don’t want to be morbid and tell teenagers that their cell-phones are spying on them! I wish I could bid them to “break free of this,” to break bad out of this and be bored or daydream or talk to each other. But using cell-phones for talking is the smallest proportion of cell-phone use among young people, and that is why young people are generating more data about themselves, data with more predictive value, or what is called “behavioral surplus.” Using websites and apps puts teenagers more in danger of behavior modification.
Young people today, and not just the young, are in the unenviable position of having to create their own engines of entertainment-whether it is Instagram or SnapChat, or YouTube videos, iTunes, Games or gambling– and being managed, monitored, and controlled by their internet-connected possessions. It is superficial, more adsorption (as in loosely taking up) rather than absorption (immersive experience). This is the story that Zuboff tells, of “the metamorphosis of the digital infrastructure from a thing that we have to a thing that has us” (p. 204). We are not automatons, and we do not need every choice and action of ours to be hooked up to a giant analytic machine.
*******
I owe thanks to Mihir S. Sathuvalli and Usha MA who went out their way to answer irritating questions. Padmaja Challakere
Padma Challakere teaches high-school English in St.Paul, MN. She has taught literature and writing in liberal arts colleges in Minnesota for two decades. In the last few years, she has published essays in Counter Punch, The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and The Wire on topics such as the Afghanistan war novel, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Kishori Amonkar, V.S Naipaul, and Bret Easton Ellis.
More by this author in The Beacon:
https://www.thebeacon.in/2019/07/30/ettu-brute-turning-assange-into-outcast/
Leave a Reply