The irony of posting this online and advertising it via Facebook is already a significant problem—and I’m concerned that I’m succumbing to the “inevitabilism” of simply accepting exploitation at the hands of corporations, recognizing that they’ll use my information as they see fit. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, she explores how corporate interests have established a system to exploit us for information. There’s the phrase that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product,” but Zuboff suggests that surveillance capitalism goes even further: not only does it render us and our information products, but it uses our information to modify our behaviours and enact corporate interests on the world.
The three guiding questions of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism are: who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? Those three questions are a mantra that repeats throughout the book. In every situation, we need to think about what information is out there, who decides how that information is collected and distributed, and who decides who decides to entrust with our data. It’s surveillance, data-driven capitalism all the way to the top and Zuboff outlines the different layers of how we are consistently categorized.
In the book, there is a broad overview of data surveillance and, I’d say, it reads as a little repetitive. The big picture is not exactly revolutionary: we all know that we’re being spied on constantly. What I would like to hear more about is how to resist. What are the precedents we have to look to for how to prevent exploitation by corporations and resist their manipulation.
Where The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines is in the examination of specific egregious actions by corporations. If you ever needed a reason to hate Google, one of the most resonant anecdotes from the book is about Google Earth. When Google Earth and Street View were taking off, there were a number of controversies, including them being blamed for aiding in a deadly terrorist attack in Mumbai. The Google representative “cleverly equated any resistance to Google’s incursions with the anti-freedom of expression interests of authoritarian governments and their closed information societies.” Resistance, though, persisted. The citizens of Broughton, a small village in England, blocked a street view car that tried to breach the village perimeter. It was an “unwelcome intrusion. Privacy International then submitted a complaint to the U.K. authority, “citing more than 200 reports from people who were identifiable on street view images and demanded that the service be suspended.” The Google rep defended the use of Google’s street view and said that their information was good for the economy and good for people as individuals. He voiced the classic defence that “it’s about giving people about powerful information so that they can make better choices.”
Zuboff offers the counterpoint: “the firm wants to enable people to make better choices, but not if those choices impede Google’s own imperatives.” She continues, “Google’s ideal society is a population of distant users, not a citizenry. It idealizes people who are informed, but only in the ways that the corporation chooses. It means for us to be docile, harmonious, and, above all, grateful.” It’s a poignant phrase that returns to the questions: who knows? who decides? who decides who decides? Essentially, it’s all about what information corporations want us to have—and we see that all across politics. Which platforms offer which information? How do TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and so on, decide what to show you? It’s the classic problem of the subaltern speaking: can we ever actually hear the voice of others? There always seems to be a barrier there.
Zuboff continues on to discuss the idea of Google’s street view as a camouflaged and covert datasweep. The street view cars were secretly collecting personal data from private WiFi networks. Despite Google denying the charges, “insisting that it was gathering only publicly broadcast WiFi network names and the identifying addresses of WiFi routers, not not personal information sent over the network.” However, an independent analysis by German security experts “proved decisively that streetview’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes” They intercepted and stored payload data: personal information, entire e-mails, URLs, passwords, names, telephone numbers, credit information, chat transcripts, records of online dating, pornography, browsing information, medical data, photos, videos, and audio files. The information could all be stitched together for “an identifiable profile of a person.”
We’ve all had the experience of having a personal conversation and then all of a sudden you start getting ads on your phone for the very thing you were talking about. It’s so difficult to parse how much of those ads are the result of companies spying on us vs. how much of what we talk about is already influenced by the profiles companies have on us. The cycle is such a challenge to unencrypt, as it were.
Overall, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a reasonably good overview of the problem of data collection on consumers. While it’s a bit too broad to feel impactful, the specific moments are worth examining. I’d like to learn more about how to resist, especially because surveillance capitalism is such a rapidly accelerating beast to contend with.
After opening this you’ll probably get all kinds of new ads about books to buy and whatever. You’re welcome.
Happy reading; unhappy Googling!
