In this capitalism, your data is their profit
A specter is haunting the American business model. And that specter is surveillance capitalism.
According to Shoshana Zuboff, an emerita professor of business at Harvard University, the problem associated with the business model at Microsoft, Google and Amazon is not capitalism per se, but its unsettling offshoot — surveillance capitalism.
Zuboff’s new term is defined as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.”
“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” by Zuboff is indeed eye-opening because she raises questions about businesses that mine personal data, manipulate our desires for instantaneous information, and encourage us to narcissistically display our egos and foibles on social media platforms.
Those mining our personal information are market-driven surveillance capitalists who have “discovered that the most predicative behavioral data come from intervening in the play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes.”
In other words, all the information people post online, every search on Google, all the items ordered and bought from Amazon, all the data given to DNA testing labs and from grocery scans — not to mention every private conversation listened to by Alexa — becomes a commodity that is recorded, stored, saved and sold to the highest bidder. Your new home security software right now is mining your behavioral habits and aligning predictive traits that will be cataloged for future access. In fact, you probably signed off on it when you registered online.
Zuboff provides countless examples of how a simple app that monitors your health can be stealthily downloading your pictures, recording your voice, and transferring personal data, phone numbers, text messages and emails because it is building a portfolio of you — the raw material that constitutes you as a person has become raw data that can be sold in a free-market economy. The selling point is that being safe requires more information than living in fear and feeling vulnerable.
The effects of 9/11 and domestic terrorism have allowed surveillance capitalists to chip away at individual freedoms because living in a country with security walls and a digital panopticon assures safety and security.
The “panopticon” was a theoretical construct created by 18th century British theorist Jeremy Bentham as a prison house where one overseer could watch without being watched. The metaphor intrigued French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose “panopticism” in “Discipline and Punishment” is closely aligned to our digital technology, where it is a symbol of power in a society dominated by surveillance technology.
Democracy is slowly reaching a breaking point and outlasting its function with the governing elites. A 38-nation survey by the Pew Research Center in 2017 reports “49 percent of respondents say that ‘rule by experts’ is good, 26 percent endorse ‘rule by strong leader’ and 24 percent prefer ‘rule by the military.’ ”
A recent New York Times article reports “Zuckerberg to Integrate 3 Apps Used by Billions.” It lists WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook messenger in that integration of data. And right below that article is Kevin Roose’s piece “The Automation Agenda Hidden by the Davos Elite” that begins, “They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.”
It gets worse: There are 2,200 observation satellites, and “a growing number of start-ups are turning it into a business, aiming to sell insights gleaned from cameras and other sensors installed on small and inexpensive ‘cube satellites.’ ”
Without governmental oversight, strong regulatory laws that forbid the accumulation of personal data without permission, the door for action may be closing. Unfettered digital technology run amok may be the perfect storm of the century.