Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims
human experience as free raw material
for translation into behavioral data.
Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary BEHAVIORAL SURPLUS, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as "Machine Intelligence" and fabricated
into prediction products that anticipate what you will
do now, soon, and later.
SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISTS have grown
immensely wealthy from these trading operations,
for many companies are eager to lay bets on
our future behavior.
The goal is to eliminate the uncertainties that define democratic life—debate, disagreement, dissent—and replace them with automated processes of behavioral modification that ensure outcomes aligned with commercial goals.
This is THE COUP OF CERTAINTY: a transformation that subordinates the democratic experiment to the authoritarian logic of prediction and control.
Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to
resist its bold incursions.
Eventually, SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM discovered
that the most-predictive behavioral data come
from intervening in the state of play in order
to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes.
Online ‘contracts’ such as terms of service
or terms-of-use agreements are also referred to as
‘click-wrap’ because, as a great deal of research shows,
most people get wrapped in these oppressive contract terms
by simply clicking on the box that says ‘I agree’ without
ever reading the agreement.
Adding insult to injury, TERMS OF SERVICE
can be altered unilaterally by the firm at any
time, without specific user knowledge or consent.
Thanks to a perceived emergency, a new mutation began to gather form and quietly slip its moorings in the implicit advocacy-oriented behavioral surplus of the firm’s
original relationship with users.
BLIND SPOT
Finally, these PREDICTION PRODUCTS
are traded in a new kind of marketplace
for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets.
Some data would continue to be applied to
service improvement, but the growing stores
of collateral signals would be repurposed
to improve the profitability of ads for
both Google and its advertisers.
These behavioral data available for uses beyond service
improvement constituted a surplus, and it was on the strength
of this behavioral surplus that the young company would
find its way to the ‘sustained and exponential profits’
that would be necessary for survival.
Machine intelligence processes behavioral surplus
into prediction products designed to forecast
what we will feel, think, and do: now, soon,
and later. These methodologies are among
Google’s most closely guarded secrets.
The nature of its products explains why Google repeatedly
claims that it does not sell personal data. What? Never!
Google executives like to claim their privacy purity because
they do not sell their raw material. Instead, the company
sells the predictions that only it can fabricate from its
world-historic private hoard of behavioral surplus.
Prediction products reduce risks for customers,
advising them where and when to place their bets.
The quality and competitiveness of the product are
a function of its approximation to certainty: the
more predictive the product, the lower the risks
for buyers and the greater the volume of sales.
Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power
reduces human experience to measurable observable behavior
while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of
that experience. I call this new way of
knowing radical indifference.
Surveillance capitalism’s economic
logic is directed through Big Other’s vast
capabilities to produce instrumentarian power,
replacing the engineering of souls with the
engineering of behavior.
I now name the apparatus Big Other:
it is the sensate, computational,
connected puppet that renders, monitors, computes, and modifies human behavior.
They nudge, herd, and shape human behavior
in ways that align with the economic imperatives
of surveillance capitalism.
What was once unimpeded motion morphs into
deliberate action, a metamorphosis unseen
by those conforming to the parameters of
these digital frameworks.
INVISIBLE DIGITAL FENCES represent
a new form of enclosure, where human autonomy
is systematically curtailed by the imperatives
of behavioral modification.
In this way, SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first-century individuals should not have to make, and its normalization leaves us singing in our chains.”
It disposes us to rationalize the situation in
resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate
like defense mechanism (‘I have nothing
to hide’), or find other ways to stick
our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance
out of frustration and helplessness.
SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us. They predict our futures
for the sake of others’ gain, not ours.
INSTRUMENTARIAN POWER cultivates an unusual
‘way of knowing’ that combines the ‘formal indifference’ of the neoliberal worldview
with the observational perspective
of radical behaviorism.
Thanks to BIG OTHER’s capabilities, Instrumentarian
Power reduces human experience to measurable observable
behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent
to the meaning of that experience.
Consider that the internet has become essential
for social participation, that the internet is now saturated with commerce, and that commerce is now subordinated to SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM.
Big Other combines these functions of knowing
and doing to achieve a pervasive and unprecedented
means of behavioral modification.
As we shall see in the coming chapters,
the competitive dynamics of these new
markets drive surveillance capitalists
to acquire ever-more-predictive sources
of BEHAVIORAL SURPLUS: our voices, personalities, and emotions.
replaces the brother with a computational other whose objective is certainty, not relationship. Surveillance capitalism is the puppet master that imposes its will through the medium of the ubiquitous digital apparatus.
Big Other
Terms of Service
Legal experts call these ‘contracts of adhesion’
because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions
on users that stick to them whether they like it or not.
Psychic Numbing
This“ conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified.
Asymmetries of Knowledge
As long as surveillance capitalism and its behavioral
futures markets are allowed to thrive, ownership of
the new means of behavioral modification eclipses
ownership of the means of production as the
fountainhead of capitalist wealth and power
in the twenty-first century.
Radical Indifference
Radical indifference is the hallmark of Big Other’s methodology. It is uninterested in the meaning of our lives.
Privatization of Learning
Surveillance capitalists now command the division of learning
in society, shaping its purpose toward commercial ends.
Faustian Bargain
Connectivity lures us into a Faustian Bargain, sacrificing autonomy for fleeting convenience.
Coup of Certainty
Instrumentarian power replaces the uncertainties of democracy with the certainties of markets. The competitive dynamics of these new markets drive surveillance capitalists to acquire ever-more-predictive sources of BEHAVIORAL SURPLUS.
Invisible Digital Fences
Actions are confined and shaped by invisible digital fences.
These fences are not physical but algorithmic, embedded
in the infrastructures of everyday life.
knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instrumentarian power cultivates an unusual ‘way of knowing’ that combines the ‘formal indifference’ of the neoliberal worldview with the observational perspective of radical behaviorism.
Instrumentarian Power
Machine intelligence processes behavioral surplus
into prediction products designed to forecast what
we will feel, think, and do: now, soon, and later.
These methodologies are among Google’s most
closely guarded secrets.