The new data capitalism
Steve LeVine
Axios
Around the world, companies big and small are feverishly plotting our future lifestyle — smart cities, driverless vehicles, wearable technology, internet-connected everything at home, and more, all activated by our voices and thoughts.
-- But behind these aspirations is a hidden aim: to know every possible thing, public and private, in real time, about you and every other reachable individual on the planet — where they go, what they do, say and feel. And, with that knowledge, to win entry to a fabulously wealthy new elite economy that has already assumed great power in the world. What's happening: For almost two decades, a tiny handful of companies — like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and China's Alibaba and Tencent — have created this new economy as a byproduct of their powerful platforms. With sky-high valuations, they have become the richest businesses on the planet, making billionaires of their founders and lead executives.
They're peddling certainty about what we will do next, often set in motion using techniques of behavior modification.
The overall effect is so big that it amounts to an entirely new strain of capitalism, argues Zuboff. She dubs it "surveillance capitalism."
-- Zuboff distinguishes this new economic order from the old industrial capitalism with its core aim not of producing a tangible good, but predictions that Big Tech can sell. -- Notwithstanding its eerie feel, many of the world's biggest legacy companies want in on the bonanza — the Detroit carmakers, banks, insurance providers, retailers, health care firms, educators, and anyone else who intersects with customer data -- The appeal is easy to grasp. Saddled with the low traditional multiples accorded by Wall Street to mere profitability, they are salivating at the possibility of data-driven Silicon Valley valuations. "It’s all over the place, embedding in every industry," Zuboff tells Axios.
The big picture: We have heard pieces of this thesis. At the Center for a New American Security, a new program tracks "High tech illiberalism," mostly in the form of state surveillance conducted by countries like China.
-- How we have been caught unawares: In the first half of the 20th century, Europeans and Americans, watching early totalitarian power, thought it was imperialism. Similarly, Zuboff argues, surveillance capitalism is so new that people are simply unequipped to comprehend what they are seeing. -- "We rely on concepts like 'monopoly' or 'privacy' to contest surveillance capitalist practices," she writes. -- But this is a deliberate strategy by surveillance capitalists, who need people to be unaware for data vacuuming to work best — "all obfuscated and covered in euphemism," she told me. What's next: What unnerves Zuboff is a future society — led by corporations concerned with guaranteed outcomes — that conditions humans to conform to a certain script. It would be a future "free of mistakes, accidents and random messes" — and also shorn of the primacy of individuality and personal agency at the heart of the Enlightenment.
"The goal now is to automate us." — Zuboff, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism"
But Zuboff says it doesn't have to be this way. "The big lie," she writes, "is that this is inevitable. We can easily imagine digital technology without surveillance capitalism."
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