Author : Shoshana Zuboff
The book is very insightful and explains in great details the process used by companies such as Facebook or Google to:
- Collect as much personal data as possible from unsuspecting users
- Process the data in vast pipelines
- Operate predictions to serve the right person with the right add at the right time to maximize the conversion chance (certainty of outcome)
- Eventually even push clueless users to actions they would normally not do
While keeping asymmetries of knowledge and preventing any legislation or changes to the status quo.
The book is excellent content wise, but too long, with a lot of repetitions and also written in a heavy style which makes the reading difficult to enjoy. But the message is absolutely crucial to anyone willing to understand what is going underneath the hood at big internet companies.
Notes :
- 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. Finally, these predictions products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral future markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.
- Schmidt’s statement is a classic of misdirection that bewilders the public by conflating commercial imperatives and technological necessity. It camouflages the concrete practices of surveillance capitalism and the specific choices that impel Google’s brand of search into action. Most significantly it makes surveillance capitalism’s practices appear to be inevitable when they are actually meticulously calculated and lavishly funded means to self – dealing commercial ends. Despite all the futuristic sophistication of digital innovation, the message of the surveillance capitalist companies barely differs from the themes once glorified in the motto of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair : “Science finds – Industry applies – Man conforms”
- We explore the reality business, as all aspects of human experience are claimed as raw-materials supplies and targeted for rendering into behavioral data. Much of this new work is accomplished under the banner of “personalization”, a camouflage for aggressive extraction operations that mine the intimate depths of everyday life.
- As the great clinician of identity, Erik Erikson, once described it, “The patient of today suffers most under the problem of what he should believe and who he should – or .. might – be or become; while the patient of early psychoanalysis suffered most under inhibitions which prevented him from being what and who he thought he knew he was”. This new mentality has been most pronounced in wealthier countries, but research shows significant pluralities of second-modernity individuals in nearly every region of the world.
- Hal Varian has been described as the adam smith of the discipline of googlenomics and the godfather of its advertising model. It is in Varian’s work that we find hidden-in-plain-sight important clues to the logic of surveillance capitalism and its claims to power. In two extraordinary articles in scholarly journals, Varian explored the theme of “computer-mediated transactions” and their transformational effects on the modern economy. Both pieces are written in amiable, down to earth prose, but Varian’s casual understatement stands in counter-point to his often-startling declarations : “Nowadays there is a computer in the middle of virtually every transaction.. now that they are available these computers have several other uses”. He then identifies four such new uses: “data extraction and analysis”, “new contractual forms due to better monitoring”, “personalization and customization” and “continuous experiments”.
- During the early period, behavioral data were put to work entirely on the user’s behalf. User data provided value at no cost, and that value was reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services : enhancements that were also offered at no cost to users. Users provided the raw material in the form of behavioral data and those data were harvested to improve speed, accuracy and relevance and to help build ancillary products such as translation. I call this the behavioral value reinvestment cycle, in which all behavioral data are reinvested in the improvement of the product or service.
- People often say that the user is the product. This is also misleading, the users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply. As we shall see, surveillance capitalism’s unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behaviour. its products are about precicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us.
- Fortifications have been erected in four key arenas to protect Google, and eventually other surveillance capitalists, from political interference and critique : (1) the demonstration of Google’s unique capabilities as a source competitive advantage in electoral politics; (2) a deliberate blurring of public and private interests through relationships and aggressive lobbying activities; (3) a revolving door of personnel who migrated between Google and the Obama administration, united by elective affinities during Google’s crucial growth years of 2009-2016; and (4) Google’s intentional campaign of influence over academic work and the larger cultural conversation so vital to policy formation, public opinion, and political perception. the results of these four arenas of defense contribute to an understanding of how surveillance capitalism’s facts came to stand and why they continue to thrive.
- Political correspondent Jim Rutenberg’s New York Times account of the data scientist’s seminal role in the 2012 Obama victory offers a vivid picture of the capture and analysis of behavioral surplus as a political methodology. The campaign knew “every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race,sex and income” and it had figured out how to target its television ads to these individuals. One breakthrough was the “persuasion score” that identified how easily each undecided voter could be persuaded to vote for the Democratic candidate.
- Google won the right to put its self-driving cars on the road after enlisting Obama officials to lobby state regulators for key legislation. Both Google and Facebook currently lead aggressive state-level lobbying campaigns aimed at repelling or weakening statutes to regulate biometric data and protect privacy. As one report put it, “They want your body”.
- Schmidt was, in fact, merely paraphrasing computer scientist Mark Weiser’s seminal 1991 article, “the computer of the 21st Century”, which has framed Silicon Valley’s technology objectives for nearly three decades. Weiser introduced what he called “ubiquitous computing” with two legendary sentences: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”. He described a new way of thinking “that allows the computers themselves to vanish into the backround… Machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the wood.”
- Economies of scale were implemented by machine based extraction architectures in the online world. Now the reality business requires machine based architectures in the real world. These finally fulfill Weiser’s vision of ubiquitous computing, with a twist. Now they operate in the interests of surveillance capitalists.
The Dynamic of behavioral surplus accumulation :
- Surveillance capitalism’s master motion is the accumulation of new sources of behavioral surplus with more predictive power. The goal is predictions comparable to guaranteed outcomes in real-life behavior. Extraction begins online, but the prediction imperative increases the momentum,d riving extraction toward new sources in the real world.
- Auto insurers are besieged by consultants and would-be technology partners who proffer surveillance capitalistic strategies that promise a new chapter of commercial success. “Uncertainty will be strongly reduced” intones a McKinsey report on the future of the insurance industry. “This leads to demutualization and a focus on predicting and managing individual risks rather than communities”. A report by Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services counsels “risk minimization” – a euphemisms for guaranteed outcomes – through monitoring and enforcing policy holder behavior in real time, an approach called “behavioral underwriting”. “insurers can monitor policy holder road conditions when they drive, whether they rapidly accelerate or drive at high or even excessive speeds, how hard they brake, as well as how rapidly they make turns and whether they use their turn signals. ” Telematics produce continuous data flows, so real-time behavioral surplus can replace the traditional proxy factors, such as demographic information, that previously been used to calculate risk. This means that surplus must be both plentiful (economies of scale) and varied (economies of scope) in both range and depth.
- No one has expressed this with more insight and economy than John Steinbeck in the opening chapters of his masterwork, The Grapes of Wrath, which describes the dust bowl farmers who are thrown out of their Oklahoma homes during the Great Depression and then head west to California. The families are forced off the land that they have tended for generations. They plaintively argue their case to the bank agents sent to impress upon them the facts of their helplessness. But the agents respond with “The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”
- A paper published in 2015 broke fresh ground again by announcing that the accuracy of the team’s computer predictions had equaled or outpaced that of human judges, both in the use of Facebook “likes” to assess personality traits based on the five-factor model and to predict “life outcomes” such as “life satisfaction”, “substance use”, or “depression”. The study made clear that the real breakthrough of the Facebook prediction research was the achievement of economies in the exploitation of these most intimate behavior depths with “automated, accurate and cheap personality assessment tools” that effectively target a new class of objects once knows as your personality.
- That year, the refashioning of the soul as the hallmark of the totalitarian impulse was immortalized by Stalin on a glittering, champagne soaked Moscow evening. The setting was an auspicious literary gathering hosted by a compliant Maxim Gorky in the sprawling mansion that Stalin had presented to the revered author upon his return to Russia from a self-imposed Italian exile. Stalin took the floor for a toast as the room fell silent. “Our tanks are worthless if the souls who must steer them are made of clay. This is why I say : the production of souls is more important than that of tanks.. Man is reshaped by life itself, and those of you here must assist in reshaping his soul. That is what is important, the production of human souls. And that is why I raise my glass to you, writers, to the engineers of the soul”.
- Honorable mention: I really enjoyed the passage in the book referring to the Pokemon Go topic. Where we learned that Pokemon Go was created and developed by Google staff in order to have a great interactive tool to make unsuspecting users gather behavioral surplus from walking around with theirs phones in their hands filming the inside of buildings and parks. Sponsors could pay to host in their real world business digital Pokemon services where users would have to go to heal their Pokemon or interact with game functionalities, finally demonstrating how it is possible to MAKE people go to specific places or businesses versus payment, economies of action in full glory.
