10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17472
application/pdf
2038-3460
17472
1
en
Jaqueline de Godoy
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future: at The New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
11
Book Reviews
2020-11-12
2023-06-27
2020-11-12
2023-10-12
109-113
TS
Jaqueline de Godoy
2020/11/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17472
109
Aalborg University
2038-3460
1
en
113
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future: at The New Frontier of Power, Profile Books, 2019
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17472/16321
11
Book Review                                                             109
        Feminism in the Late Twentieth century, in Haraway, D., Simians, Cy-
        borgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York, Routledge,
        pp. 149-181.
Wajcman, J. (2004) TechnoFeminism, Cambridge, UK, Polity.



                                    ***
   Shoshana Zuboff
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future: at
The New Frontier of Power, London, Profile Books, 2019, pp. 704

Adrienne Mannov, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen and
Jaqueline de Godoy Aalborg University

    Authors: Alexa, who is W. H. Auden?

    Alexa:        Winston Hugh Auden was a British American poet.
                  Auden’s poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical
                  achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love,
                  and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content.
                  By the way, you can now ask another question, without
                  having to first say Alexa. Enable this feature by saying
                  turn on follow-up mode.

     It is not customary that books reviewed in an academic STS journal
have been translated into 17 languages only one year after publication.
Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a
Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, published in 2019 by Pro-
file Books, is not a customary book. Zuboff’s story is both personal –
each chapter begins with an excerpt of W.H. Auden’s poetry – and draws
on her work as a scholar of social psychology, but the book is not a scien-
tific publication. For that reason, we approach the book as a quasi-
scholarly work and as an object-phenomenon that exists within the
broader field of contemporary computing and those concerning science,
technology and society. This makes it worth reading for STS scholars for
reasons we will elaborate upon shortly.
     Daily press reviewers have qualified The Age of Surveillance Capital-
ism as “a scaffolding of critical thinking“ (Silverman 2019), offering “in-
depth technical understanding and a broad, humanistic scope” (Bridle
2019) and that Zuboff’s life-work and “merciless analyses peak”(Jakobs
2018) in this publication. But scholars whose areas of expertise are Or-
ganization Studies, STS, Law, and critical journalists have criticized the
110                                                          Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

book for not citing contemporary, relevant literature (Ellinger 2019), for
circular argumentation (Morozov 2019) and for hyperbole (Cuéllar and
Huq 2019). In what follows, we offer a summary of the almost 700 page
“brick”, critical reflections on Zuboff’s arguments and the ways in which
it presents as a social and material phenomenon in and of itself. We close
with how we envision the kind of field that Zuboff carves out for scholars
of science and technology studies.
    Zuboff’s central claim is that surveillance capitalism and its societal ef-
fects represent an unprecedented threat to Enlightenment values of hu-
manity (p. 323). Zuboff begins with eight definitions for Surveillance
Capitalism. The first is: “A new economic order that claims experience as
free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, predic-
tion, and sales”. The last is: “An expropriation of critical human rights
that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the peo-
ple’s sovereignty”. In what follows, we attempt to summarize her path of
argumentation between the two.
    Part I begins with a re-telling of a Marxist narrative in which assembly
line workers are “individualized”, having distanced themselves from the
“traditions of village and clan”(p. 33). This leads us to neoliberalism,
which “reverses (…) claims to self-determination” (p.37) and “thwarts
our pursuit to effective life” (ibid). In this atmosphere and with the in-
troduction of the internet, individual users’ “data exhaust” could be seen
as an untapped resource for tech companies, rebranding this as “the dis-
covery of behavioral surplus”(p. 74). This holds the promise of an “advo-
cacy-oriented capitalism”, enabling consumers’ search queries to be tai-
lored to their interests. But the “dot-com bubble” at the dawn of the new
millennium pushed budding tech companies to re-think their avenues to
profit, leading first Google, then others, to the realization that “data ex-
haust” could be used to sell ads. This “mutation” (p. 76) saved the big
tech companies financially, and according to Zuboff, kick-started surveil-
lance capitalism. Referencing the well-worn capitalism-critical story about
how “human life” came to be redefined as “labor” for capitalist endeav-
ors, and “nature” to “real estate”, Zuboff draws a line from Marx’s no-
tion of “primitive accumulation” and “original sin” (citing Arendt, p. 99),
to David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession”, arriving at her own
“digital dispossession”. Thus, “human experience” becomes a source of
profit, free to be taken by tech companies, repackaged as prediction
products, and sold to advertisers (p.100). Having discovered this gold
mine, Zuboff details how big tech companies protect their treasure with
claims of “freedom of speech” (p. 106) and the seduction of a neoliberal
state (the US) impressed by new surveillance capabilities in a post-9/11
era. This included deeply entangled relationships with state actors. Part I
ends with the “division of learning”, a contemporary riff on the division
of labor (p.181), in which “a new priesthood” is lured away from academ-
ia to lucrative positions in big tech companies (p.189). Surveillance capi-
Book Review                                                              111
talists' power is consolidated because they now know a lot about us, but
we know little about them.
    In Part II, Zuboff painstakingly and convincingly documents the his-
tory and methods with which “ubiquitous computing” (p. 199) moves
from exclusively online fora (defined as “virtual”) to public and private
physical spaces (consistently referred to as “real”). The introduction of
Internet of Things (IoT) technologies ushers in the goal of “digital om-
niscience” (p. 207-208). Zuboff identifies developments in “telemetry” or
animal tracking devices, as the beginning of this trend, implying that they
are the inspiration for “wearables” and other devices that move with us
through the physical environment, documenting – and later, modifying –
our behavior. Leaning on metaphors of territorial conquest, Zuboff ar-
gues that, with these connected and “smart” devices, surveillance capital-
ists conquer our “still wild spaces” (p. 238). This includes details such as
facial expressions, social media posting patterns, voice recognition, per-
sonality traits, floor plans of a home and “block-by-block map data” (p.
317) detail, including your backyard. Under the guise of “personalization
and customization”(p. 256), Zuboff explains that innovators wish to cre-
ate products that “nudge” the citizen toward certain behaviors, often us-
ing “gamification” tools (p. 313) in a “living laboratory” (p. 312), generat-
ing a market utopia with “guaranteed outcomes”(p. 214). These innova-
tions are presented as intentionally misleading, likening them often to the
Trojan Horse. Surveillance capitalists make strategic use of “lawless
space” because technology tends to develop faster than the regulations
meant to govern them (p. 105). Zuboff shows how “consent” is a Kafka-
esque exercise in futility, privacy and anonymization are moving technical
and legal targets, and these changes are framed as inevitable anyway.
Technology giants like Google and Facebook use their power to redefine
social norms, to dodge privacy activists and to pay off government offi-
cials. For Zuboff, nothing less than free-will and democracy are at stake.
    In Part III, Zuboff outlines her theory of the power that underpins
the age of surveillance capitalism, and the consequences it has for human
society and social relations. The vision of surveillance capitalism, accord-
ing to Zuboff, is that machine processes replace human relationships so
that certainty can replace social trust and democracy. She dubs this pow-
er “instrumentarian”, and defines it as “the instrumentation and instru-
mentalization of behavior for the purpose of modification, prediction,
monetization, and control” (p. 352). Using it as a foil, she explains that
totalitarianism worked through ideology, seeking to gain and modify
souls; it was a political project that operated through the means of vio-
lence. Instrumentarian power, in contrast, does not seek to modify souls
but human behavior; “to achieve its own unique brand of social domina-
tion”, Zuboff locates the roots of instrumentarianism in the intellectual
field of “radical behaviorism”, pioneered by the psychologist Barrhus F.
Skinner (p. 353), whose classes Zuboff followed at Harvard when she was
112                                                         Tecnoscienza – 11 (1)

a young graduate student. Skinner held that human behavior could be
studied, known and even engineered through thorough observation of
external action. For the behaviorist, the human could be objectively ob-
served as “the Other-One". Here, the human was seen as an organism,
with no free will to make choices. Freedom was considered an illusion,
and thus also democracy. Big Other is the name that Zuboff gives to this
instrumentarian form of power. As a hybrid concept that brings together
Big Brother – that fictional character and figure symbolizing totalitarian
power from Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 – with “the Other-One” from
radical behaviorism. Zuboff warns that surveillance capitalism is breaking
down the walls of our homes as sanctuary, and, ultimately, risks the right
to a human society in which we are free to decide our future, threatening
the very right to a “future tense”(p. 329).
    As should be clear, Zuboff is outraged. The text is maddeningly repet-
itive, and we miss more detail and reflection about her role and research
methods. Almost no contemporary, critical work in this field are cited,
such as that of Paul Dourish, Mary Gray, Ian Lowrie, Nick Seaver, Lucy
Suchman, Peter-Paul Verbeek and many more.
    In addition, Zuboff’s analysis is highly US-centric. In fact, she situates
herself as a product of the immigrant, capitalist American Dream, where
hard work can earn you “the good life”(p. 34), including physical com-
forts, education, the arts, and civic engagement. This is perhaps why she
is so enamored of the poet W. H. Auden. We prefaced this review
Alexa’s explanation of Auden’s work, because Zuboff’s prose can, despite
her critique, read as manipulative as the prodding of a digital assistant.
    But perhaps we are not the audience meant to be nudged. In a review
in Surveillance and Society, Kirstie Ball suggests that “this book was not
written for us. It is intended as a wake-up call for the educated business
reader to recognize the massive power of the tech platforms" (Ball 2019,
253). As a professor emerita from Harvard Business School, Zuboff's cri-
tique comes from within this community, not as an outsider.
    If Zuboff’s intended audience is “the educated business reader”, then
it may be useful for STS scholars to think about this tome as an event, a
material phenomenon and a public debate. Despite the book’s shortcom-
ings, Zuboff makes surveillance capitalism a dinner table conversation,
rather than an esoteric realm reserved for math geeks. We understand
that this dinner table is likely located in a wealthy, white, suburban one-
family house, and that might be the point. The wide-spread use of contact
tracing apps in connection with the current Covid-19 pandemic suggests
that engagement with broader publics about surveillance capitalism and
digital trust (Bruun et al. 2020) are timely. Thus, the book’s physical
presence and its language can be re-positioned as boundary objects, tools,
and powerful actors and interlocutors. This is an approach inspired by
Annelise Riles’s (1998, 378) suggestion to consider documents as “aes-
thetic objects”, where form itself has meaning. Continuing in this vein,
Book Review                                                                   113
what insights might be won by interacting with The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism as an event and gift, as a performance of relations (Sansi and
Strathern 2016) at the dinner table? Zuboff’s work may also inspire an
inward dialogue (Kumar 2019) with our own sociotechnical tools. The
Age of Surveillance Capitalism will exhaust you, but it does not exhaust
all that there is to be said. On the contrary, it is a public door to debate
through which STS scholars should enter with our detailed, nuanced and
in-depth analyses of the digitization of social relations and its conse-
quences.

References
Ball, K. (2019) Review of Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, “Surveil-
        lance and Society”, 17 (1/2), pp. 252–256.
Bridle, J. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff review –
        we are the pawns,“The Guardian”, February 2nd, 2019.
Bruun, M.H., Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen, and Adrienne Mannov (2020) In-
       frastructures of Trust and Distrust. The Politics and Ethics of Emerging
       Cryptographic Technologies, “Anthropology Today”, 36 (2), pp. 13–17.
Cuéllar, M.-F and Huq A. Z. (2020) Economies of Surveillance, “Harvard Law
        Review”, 4 (133), pp. 1280-1336.
Ellinger, E. W. (2019) Book Review:The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The
        Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, “Organization
        Studies”, December 2nd.
Jakobs, H.-J. (2018) Das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus – Wenn Kun-
       den zu Datenquellen werden, in “Handelsblatt”, October 25th.
Kumar, P. C. (2019) A Post-Humanist Take on Surveillance Capitalism, paper
      presented at the CHI 2019 Conference, Glasgow, Scotland, May 4th, 2019.
Morozov, E. (2019) Capitalism’s New Clothes, “The Baffler”, February 4th.
Riles, A. (1998) Infinity within the Brackets, “American Ethnologist”, 25 (3), pp.
        378–398.
Sansi, R. and Strathern, M. (2016) Art and Anthropology after Relations, ”HAU:
        Journal of Ethnographic Theory”, 6 (2), pp. 425–439.
Silverman, J. (2019) How Tech Companies Manipulate Our Personal Data, in
       “The New York Times”, January 18th, 2019.
