‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ Review: The New Big Brother
‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ Review: The New Big
Brother
Tech companies have shown themselves to be increasingly
cavalier with our personal data. Are we handing over too much information?
Frank Rose reviews “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff.
By Frank Rose Jan. 14, 2019 6:49 p.m. ET
According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, which measures the
appearance in books of a given phrase over time, the word “surveillance”—from
the French sur + veiller, “to watch over”—saw relatively little use until about
1960. At that point, sparked perhaps by the Cold War, it started turning up
more and more frequently, a trend that continues to this day. Expect that trend
to kick into overdrive now that Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism” is out, for hers is the rare volume that puts a name on a problem
just as it becomes critical—in this case, the quandary raised by Google and
Facebook when they figured out how to fashion the data exhaust of our everyday
lives into, as she puts it, “prediction products”: little oracles that
anticipate our intentions and offer them up to anyone willing to pay.
“Surveillance capitalism,” in Ms. Zuboff’s scheme of
things, is what happens when companies scoop up the data we leave behind as we
go about our digital lives and use it to their own commercial ends. Our
leftover data trails make up the resource she calls “behavioral surplus,” a
by-product that’s key to the success of two of the world’s most highly valued
companies, Alphabet (Google’s parent) and Facebook, and increasingly Amazon and
Microsoft. This is not news to anyone who reads the papers.
What has become news is the shockingly cavalier manner in
which these companies (Facebook in particular) tend to treat this resource and
the blatantly insincere apologies they offer in response. Ms. Zuboff, a retired
Harvard Business School professor, assumes the role of social anthropologist,
arguing that this scheme of surveillance and the marketplace it serves pose a
threat not just to conventional notions of privacy but to our autonomy as
individual beings, and ultimately to a democratic society. And yet, she
asserts, it doesn’t have to be like this.
Along the way, she calls on pioneers of the industrial
age—including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and the sociologist Emile Durkheim—to
show that, like them, we face a situation in which there are no earlier parallels,
only unprecedented circumstances. What remains constant is the fundamental
human dynamic: a drive for power, profits and success on the part of those
lucky enough to have stumbled across a winning formula and smart enough to
recognize it.
In today’s world, three of the smartest and luckiest of
all are Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who 20-odd years ago had a
brilliant idea for searching the then-nascent Web but had no clue at the time
how to monetize it, and Mark Zuckerberg, who registered their astonishing
success a few years later and adapted it to Facebook’s burgeoning social graph.
While Apple prospered by making must-have products and wrestling the music
business into the 21st century, Google and Facebook got nearly 60% of the U.S.
market for online ads by using surveillance techniques to take the guesswork
out of advertising. In place of the “spray and pray” approach that prevailed in
mass media, advertisers could, at least theoretically, reach only those
consumers who were predisposed to buy their wares.
Never underestimate the appeal of certainty—or the
propensity for hubris. Google’s stated mission is to “organize the world’s
information.” A top Facebook engineer talks about “trying to map out the graph
of everything in the world” and how it all relates. The grandiosity of such
statements should be a tipoff—as should tech billionaires’ susceptibility to
Ray Kurzweil’s singularity cult, which promises immortality to anyone willing
to merge with the machine.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have grown habituated to our
role as passive participants in tech’s predictive marketplace. Take, for
example, Amazon’s Echo products and Alexa, the disembodied intelligence that
can play music, manage your alarm system, adjust the thermostat and listen to
anything and everything said within your walls. Many people I know keep not one
of these devices but three or four, just to make sure Alexa is always around.
Questioned about this, or about why they use Gmail or Google Maps knowing that
Google mines them for data, they offer one of three defenses: (1) They already
know everything about me anyway; (2) I’m not doing anything wrong, so what do I
have to hide? Or (3) Nobody cares about me personally, and they couldn’t
possibly pay attention to all this data even if they wanted to.
The first two responses suggest a level of profound
resignation. The third betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the whole
thing works: Yes, these companies do care about you personally—that’s the whole
point, privacy rhetoric notwithstanding—and not only can their machine-learning
systems absorb everything about everyone, they get smarter the more they have
to work on.
As with any Faustian bargain, the short-term benefits of
submitting are more salient than the long-term sacrifice. Who doesn’t want a
magical digital assistant? Who doesn’t want to know the quickest route home?
Sure, the user agreements are opaque and the default settings easy—but what do
we have to lose?
What indeed. In a TV interview last week, the primate of
the Russian Orthodox Church warned that the proliferation of personal data and
its potential for misuse could trigger the coming of the Antichrist. There are
times when Ms. Zuboff seems almost as melodramatic. Her case is stronger when
she marshals facts—like the tale of Facebook’s 2007 launch of Beacon, a feature
that automatically shared information about users’ purchases with their friends
until it was shut down amid widespread outrage—than when she ratchets up the
rhetoric. Yes, we stand to lose a lot. But this book’s major contribution is to
give a name to what’s happening, to put it in cultural and historical
perspective, and to ask us to pause long enough to think about the future and
how it might be different from today.
Mr. Rose is the author of “The Art of Immersion” and a
senior fellow at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
Appeared in the January 15, 2019, print edition as 'The
New Big Brother.'
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