peterhowellSumming Up: Can Single Nations Counter the Threat of Surveillance Capitalism?
We’re on our own, with the possible support of government, in any efforts to counter the effects of surveillance capitalism. It’s only natural that businesses today use big data to track and predict our actions. Some of the media (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) they employ, however, represent a threat of monopoly that should be addressed by the very governments that, ironically, could turn big data against us. So say respondents to this month’s column.
Phillippe Gouamba put forth the most pessimistic viewpoint, saying there is no antidote to Surveillance Capitalism. “If your competitors use Surveillance Capitalism, you are forced into using it as well,” he wrote, continuing that there is no going back. “If you think you can ‘fly under the radar’ in the era of 5G, cellular phones, and Surveillance Capitalism, you are fooling yourself.”
David Wittenberg stated the case for the position that the source of the problem is us. “No matter how much businesses know about us, they cannot sell to us unless their products make our lives better,” he wrote. “Any information they gather is provided by us willingly.” George Yurieff put it this way: “If you are concerned about your privacy and want to somehow protect yourself to some extent, start paying for services which you want to use… stop posting (send directly to your addressees), drop Facebook, do not provide correct sensitive information … not addressed to anyone specific. As the saying goes, ‘The only thing free is the cheese in the mouse trap.’”
Government was cited as both an antidote to surveillance capitalism and a threat because of its possible deployment against citizens. As an antidote, Roger Stirling said, “The big trusts like Standard Oil were busted by President Theodore Roosevelt. They were the Big Tech of their day. Where is the outrage today?” Facebook should be broken up, he added. Wildebeest proclaimed, “The best approach is to break up the big companies thru antitrust … But this happens only if we, the people, have the will to confront Google, Facebook, Amazon and the like.”
On the other hand, Wittenberg stated, “What should be feared most is government colluding with the surveillance capitalist companies—all in the name of ‘security.’” He added: “I’m far more worried about how governments use data than how businesses use it … That same monitoring capability (used to fight terrorism) could be turned against American citizens if the regime ever lessened or abandoned its commitment to personal civil liberties.”
Asher Rospigliosi suggested a more expansive approach to regulation. “I can only see inter-governmental regulation as powerful enough to offer some hope of containing the excesses of surveillance capitalism. When industrial capitalism was moderated … we lived in a world where nation states still had much autonomy… confronted by global corporations we need the EU, the UN, and perhaps in some brighter future a UFP (United Federation of Planets) to fight back against the FAANGs.”
His comment suggests a question: Can single nations counter the threat of surveillance capitalism? What do you think?
Original Column
George Orwell, in his book 1984 painted a dystopian picture of the eventual control of human behavior by totalitarian government, replacing human hopes, emotions, and even relationships with an “inside out” dominance over human thought and behavior by an all-seeing entity called Big Brother.
In the recent book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, author Shoshana Zuboff identifies surveillance capitalism as the danger in our midst—not totalitarian government or even business institutions that practice surveillance capitalism.
She presents surveillance capitalism as “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales,” “a parasitic economic logic,” “a rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth,” “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,” and “an expropriation of human rights.”
The book is both a cri de coeur and a call to arms in the context of a rich, well-documented history of the development of capitalism.
We know who you are
Surveillance capitalists are familiar to us. They include the founders and leaders of organizations such as Google and Facebook. Their business models are centered around the exchange of a “free” service for free information about us that can later be combined with other data and sold. They regard users not as consumers but as sources of data. Unlike Henry Ford, their creation of profits and firm value employs relatively few, very well-paid people, exacerbating income inequality in our economy. They have relatively few expenditures for control over the quality of the information exchange that they offer or the uses to which the exchange is put.
As Zuboff puts it, “our lives are scraped and sold to fund their freedom and our subjugation, their knowledge and our ignorance about what they know.”
“Surveillance capitalists are familiar to us... They regard users not as consumers but as sources of data."
Zuboff believes that the “darkening of the digital dream” began with the founding of Google, “the pioneer of surveillance capitalism,” during what can be characterized as a naïve global environment that allowed it to capture and organize much of the world’s information royalty-free, making it seemingly accessible for free to unsuspecting users of its search engine.
We know now (and probably knew then but chose to ignore it) that the products of our searches are not free. They provide the basis for identifying our interests, potential purchasing behaviors, and even preferred method of becoming pregnant. With the advent of 5G wireless networks and cloud technologies, advertisers and others can predict our future behavior, often before we realize what we are going to do. It’s a short step from prediction to thought control (through vehicles such as fake news and control over its distribution) and control of behavior—from the user as the customer to the user as the product.
The best defense against any form of totalitarianism is, as Zuboff puts it, “naming and taming.” Her book does the naming. She believes it’s up to each of us, our children, and their children to do the taming. As she puts it, “it is up to us to rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us.” This prompts the questions: How? And then what?
The prescriptions for change
The first antidote to surveillance capitalism that comes to mind is government. European governments and courts are seeking to place controls on how the Googles of the world use our information. The primary goal is the protection of privacy. Unfortunately, as we are seeing in the Facebook controversies, this is difficult to implement even by well-meaning business leaders.
Others have suggested a market approach. They describe a future in which a value is placed on information we provide to the practitioners of surveillance capitalism. If required to buy personal information, the argument goes, it will alter business models, requiring practitioners to think twice before sweeping up every bit of information users make available to them free on a daily basis. A hacker-to-hacker market exists for information today, with values placed on various types of information about us. The question remains how a market for such information could be created between individuals and legitimate businesses.
In a perfect world, Google and Facebook managers would implement safeguards against uses of their output intended to degrade privacy, the reliability of information, independent thought, and user behaviors. Shareholders would step forward to demand changes in the way information is deployed to ensure the long-term viability and profitability of their companies’ business models. But perhaps we shouldn’t count on it.
As individuals, we can control our behaviors and our use of new technologies, even dropping out of sight of surveillance capitalists. But at what price?
Finally, the ultimate antidote to surveillance capitalism might be surveillance capitalism itself. As Zuboff says, “the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live… Surely the Age of Surveillance Capitalism will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live.”
What’s the antidote to surveillance capitalism? What do you think?
References:
George Orwell, 1984, (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1949)
Shoshanna Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019)