Product or Raw Material? Thinking about Surveillance Capitalism

Tonight, after a work-through of act one (the act that came off OK in last night's stumble-through), I went to the gym. Late-night gym is my favorite gym, usually because it's the emptiest gym. There were only a few guys there, one of whom just had to boast loudly to strangers about how this was his first time in a gym in eight years but he still went such-and-such distance on various ellipticals and treadmills.

I mean, good for him, but his loud triumph sort of harshed the vibe of late night gym. Luckily for me, I had my earphones in, and the other gentlemen at the gym were much more "bro" fodder than I. He left me alone to my weight machines and my podcast.

Tonight's selection, prepping for my deepfakes presentation in October, was Intelligence Squared, featuring an interview with Harvard professor Shoshanna Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. As the title suggests, Zuboff advances a model, "surveillance capitalism," to describe how internet companies like Google mobilize micro-targeting and micro-tracking tech to, well, capitalize on our human behavior. So far, so normal for capitalism. The difference, Zuboff warns, is that surveillance capitalism exploits not just labor per se but our attention and behavior online generally.

Interviewer Rosamund Urwin brought up the old adage about how, if an entertainment product seems free, you the consumer are in fact the product. After some research, Urwin says, she finds that that bit of wisdom came not from the internet age but from 1970s studies of television (likely along the lines of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death).

Zuboff, however, tweaks the adage somewhat. We are not, she insists in the interview, products. That formulation implies too much care by the company in question. We are instead raw materials, parts or aspects of which may be refined by the company into a product. Surveillance capitalism cares not about our overall being, just our attention. Getting us to click through, look at, scroll through, and retweet--these are the aspects of us Google cares about. Zuboff compares the situation (not lightly) to how elephants are slaughtered solely for the ivory in their trunks.

I'm only halfway through the interview (weight days are shorter for me than running days), but the picture Zuboff paints so far inspires dismay. Google and associated companies, in her view, have so far well outpaced the clunky democratic mechanisms that the West (at least) has at its disposal to check their power. Such mega-corporations have the resources to delay action, sow distraction, and put on a show of reform--all while never actually altering their behavior. Before long, acts of incursion into private liberties get naturalized as "just the way things are," the inevitable price of same-day shipping or Google mapping.

I'll have to think through the ins and outs of being raw material rather than a refined product before I can write more on this blog, powered by mega-corporations that track and influence my every move online...

More tomorrow,

JF