Surveillance Capitalism Pandemic Marshall Soules—[email protected]

Vol 1 No 2 (Autumn 2020) Online: jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj Visit our WebBlog: newexplorations.net Surveillance Capitalism Pandemic Marshall Soules—[email protected] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism By Shoshana Zuboff New York: Public Affairs, 2019 Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?—Shoshana Zuboff (2019) Under the Wire In Talking to Strangers (2019), Malcolm Gladwell tells interesting stories to explain how, when we meet strangers for the first time, we should try to understand where they are coming from, the wider context of our encounter. Just so you know, I have written what follows as in a fevered dream of discovery where timing is of the essence. The context? An unprecedented alignment of events. On January 15, 2020, my partner and I flew from Vancouver, changed planes in Seoul, and flew into Hanoi. Preparations were underway throughout Southeast Asia for Chinese New Year and the Vietnamese Tet Festival (coinciding on January 25th) and the streets of Hanoi were kaleidoscopic with preparations for the popular celebrations. There were flowers everywhere. Tourists from China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere merged with the Vietnamese to honour cultural traditions dating back millennia. We were swept along through crowded streets with their hectic celebratory atmosphere. We celebrated Tet in Hoi An on the central Vietnam coast on January 25. By this time, news of Wuhan and the spreading coronavirus had been widely circulated, and its threat confirmed—it had become a global pandemic. Increasingly, people wore masks, but social distancing was impossible in the chockablock streets. Within days after the celebrations, the number of Asian tourists declined noticeably; hotels and restaurants faced cancellations and rapidly declining numbers. Traveling through Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the following five weeks, we witnessed plunging tourist numbers, and talked to service industry workers facing job losses. Growing 201 Marshall Soules paranoia about social distancing and news of exploding infection rates elsewhere around the world bloomed along with the Spring flowers. While traveling, we use the internet to reserve hotels, schedule buses and planes, discover restaurants and places to visit. Every search query is accompanied by recommendations of what to do, see, and buy. We are often surprised by the alignment of our preferences with recommendations dished up by TripAdvisor, Google, and Booking.com. Google kept us current with the global pandemic while recommending what we must experience in our final week in Southeast Asia not far from the Chinese border. Our flight back to Vancouver through Hanoi and Taipei on March 1 was not difficult or stressful, just strange. We passed through numerous medical checkpoints by following the arrows, and saw groups of travelers quarantined in the airports, but there were no long lineups passing through security. There was not an empty seat on our airplane from Taipei to Vancouver. We were returning home just under the wire. The pandemic soon caught up with us. Measures for social isolation and distancing, frequent handwashing, and wearing masks were successively rolled out by health officials. By mid-March, with lockdowns and quarantines increasingly imposed, we were plunged into uncertainty, isolation, and confusion. International and local news sources served up a torrent of data about the coronavirus pandemic. Unprecedented Events and the Black Swan Into this disorienting series of events, Shoshana Zuboff’s equally disturbing The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019) arrived in the mail. The book is a hefty read, compelling and challenging on many fronts, and compulsively researched. I read it with a sense of compulsion, just as the coronavirus lockdown tightened its screws. Social isolation suddenly felt ominous and threatening. Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School and Associate Professor at Harvard Law School, knows her way around technology, capitalism, and the law. Previous books explore the impacts of computers on business practices (In the Age of the Smart Machine, 1988) and the role of “digitally distributed capitalism of services tailored to the individual (The Support Economy, 2002).” In her exposé of surveillance capitalism, Zuboff is on a mission and she is relentless. She names her villains, heroes, and victims and tells us what they are creating, even as they try to keep their true activities obscure. She repeats her arguments and concerns to make them indelible, to make us pay attention and remember. She wants us to know how our inner psychological resources are transformed into massive profits under ambiguous circumstances by the planet’s largest tech corporations. You may not always appreciate her self-assured and indignant tone, but her detective work is compelling and of global import. (Today, as I write this, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are testifying before the US Congress to defend their 202 Surveillance Capitalism Pandemic enterprises against charges of excessive market dominance.) Zuboff’s text will put you squarely in the moment, and for years to come. Think, for a moment, of a viral pandemic: the importance of information, data, prediction, social control, surveillance, all on a global scale, and you will find yourself at the intersection of surveillance capitalism and Covid-19. In this maelstrom of powerful currents, we find ourselves wondering how to navigate in a game-changing media ecology. To make sure we understand her subject off the top, Zuboff begins with a description of her many-headed Hydra. She defines surveillance capitalism in her Preface: A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty. (p. v) An imposing agenda, one she holds to with dogged tenacity. In her view, the word unprecedented fuels the sense of urgency and significance for both surveillance capitalism and Covid-19. Nassim Taleb’s widely circulated analogy of the black swan expresses how unprecedented events create uncertainty, anxiety, and confusion before forcing us to reconsider our assumptions. If we believe all swans are white, the discovery of a black swan will shake confidence in our beliefs. If we believe the market will always correct itself, a dot-com bubble bursting will make investors question their assumptions and force tech capitalists to re-evaluate their business models. As with the 9-11 attacks, unprecedented events force a recalibration of risks and opportunities, new calls to action. Almost universally, Taleb explains, these calls to action are delivered in stories: “You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas (Taleb 2007, xxvii).” What are the stories that swirl around surveillance capitalism, around Covid-19? Which stories are supported by evidence, and which are persuasive attempts to move the masses? This is not to suggest that surveillance capitalism is analogous to Covid-19 in every respect. Their origin stories are quite dissimilar, but the speed of their emergence and transmission contributes equally to the climate of uncertainty and anxiety they generate. Zuboff frequently asserts that 203 Marshall Soules surveillance capitalism is “unprecedented,” a “pandemic.” As the quote above suggests, both are “parasitic,” “rogue mutations,” “foundational framework[s] of a surveillance economy.” Both predict the possibility of a “new instrumentarian power” imposing a “new collective order based on total certainty,” and perhaps “an expropriation of critical human rights” and “an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.” While the process of using algorithms for resource extraction differs from collecting data to contain a biological contagion, the impacts of these events on human society have too many parallels to ignore. So, just what is Zuboff warning us about? Extracting Behavioral Data “Surveillance capitalism is not technology; it is a logic that imbues technology and commands it into action (Zuboff 2019, 14-15”; subsequent references to this text will include only page numbers.). We need to look at the puppet masters and not the puppets. Google, incorporated in 1998, was first and foremost involved in information capitalism which relied on the value of information collection and retrieval subsidized by advertising. Ad revenues financed new information services, from Google Earth to Translate and Voice Recognition. Data mining was always central to this enterprise; total information dominance the goal. Google co- founder Larry Page pursued the dream

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