Review by Choice Review
Zuboff (emer., Harvard Business School) offers a definitive, stunning analysis of how digital giants like Google, Facebook, etc. have single-mindedly pursued data on human behavior as fodder for generating predictions and shaping outcomes salable to advertisers and others. She calls this surveillance capitalism. The industry now produces not only phones and computers that collect digitized data about users but also "smart" data-gobbling TVs, Alexas, children's toys, clothing, medical monitors, and even stickers and Pokémon GO designed to capture data on an individual's location, language, voice, heartbeat, and emotion and use the data to predict and mold human actions, mainly purchases and political behavior. The author's research was thorough, and she documents it in 120 pages of notes. Zuboff stands on the shoulders of Frank Pasquale (The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information, CH, Jun'15, 52-5426) and Ken Auletta (Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, CH, Jul'10, 47-6349), among numerous others. The scope of her analysis is extraordinary; in addition to covering philosophical, social, and political implications she discusses needed privacy regulation. Undergraduates fascinated by technology will love the stories and get the points, but perhaps skip the more philosophical passages. This book is pathbreaking, illuminating, and unnerving. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Mehrene Larudee, Hampshire College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
CANADIAN POLITICIANS DON'T attract much notice this side of the border, but recently I've been heeding the words of Chariie Angus. A member of Canada's Parliament for the New Democratic Party, Angus is a longtime punk rocker and activist with ties to the Catholic Worker movement; he's also a sharp critic of the growing power of Big Tech. In late November, Angus attended a hearing in British Parliament in which representatives from nine countries took turns interrogating a Facebook vice president about the company's proliferating scandals (an empty chair sat before a Mark Zuckerberg nameplate, marking the chief executive's absence). For Angus, fake news and data-based manipulation - exemplified by the shadowy work of Cambridge Analytica, whose voter-profiling scheme is often cited as an important factor in Donald Trump's 2016 victory - were mere symptoms of a larger malady. "The problem is Facebook," he declared. "The problem is the unprecedented economic control of every form of social discourse and communication." It was one of Angus's colleagues, the Canadian member of Parliament Bob Zimmer, who may be the one who gave the problem a name: "Surveillance capitalism," he said, with its vast concentrations of data and influence over human life, required new laws and new forms of regulation. Both Angus and Zimmer were right, but before we can establish a firm legislative or regulatory agenda, we have to learn what surveillance capitalism is, as we come to terms with the novel form of economic and social power represented by Facebook, Google and a handful of other tech behemoths privy to our every click and utterance. Enter, as a critical guide, Shoshana Zuboff, who has emerged as the leading explicator of surveillance capitalism. A Harvard Business School professor emerita with decades of experience studying issues of labor and power in the digital economy, Zuboff in 2015 published a paper, "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization," which has since become an essential source for anyone looking to reckon seriously with what she described asa distinct, emerging economic logic. Now she has followed up that paper with a doorstop of a book, an intensively researched, engagingly written chronicle of surveillance capitalism's origins and its deleterious prospects for our society. According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism distinguishes itself from its industrial forebear as "a new economic order that claims human experience as a free source of raw material." We are the resource to be mined; the billion-dollar profits of Facebook and Google are built on a general accounting of our lives and everyday behavior. But surveillance capitalism is also many other things: "a parasitic economic logic... a rogue mutation of capitalism... a new collective order based on total certainty" and "an overthrow of the people's sovereignty." All this may sound a little heady, like perhaps an overseasoned stew of po-mo economic jargon, but Zuboff will have you asking for another helping long before the book's end. Surveillance capitalism depends on the constant gathering of "behavioral surplus," or the data exhaust that we produce as part of the normal course of web browsing, app use and digital consumption. All of it is potentially revealing, allowing companies to make sophisticated inferences about who we are, what we want and what we're likely to do. As the economist Hal Varian noted in 2002, "Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system." That means that there is potentially no end to a surveillance capitalist's extractive appetite, which is why - in the name of more efficient services and relevant ads - companies are constantly pursuing new, more granular data streams in our homes, workplaces and bodies. Unlike oil, to which it's often compared, personal data is potentially limitless, but its extraction and consumption may be just as toxic, as we're only beginning to understand. Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, it is not enough simply to gather in formation about what people do. Eventually, you have to influence behavior, beyond the simple suasion practiced by targeted ads. It's not about showing someone the right ad; you have to show it at the right place and time, with the language and imagery calibrated for precise effect. You have to lead people through the physical world, making them show up at the sponsored popup store or vote for the preferred candidate. Armed with a veritable real-time feed of a user's thoughts and feelings, companies are beginning to practice just this kind of coercion, which is why you might see makeup ads before a Friday evening out or why inducements from a personal injury lawyer might pop up on your phone as you sit in a hospital waiting room. When we want things - health information, travel schedules, a date - is also when we are most vulnerable, when intimate data yield themselves for corporate capture. "The result," as Zuboff notes, "is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment." We seem ever more exposed to and dependent on surveillance capitalists, our benevolent info-lords, but their operations are defined by opacity, corporate secrecy and the scrim of technological authority. in the face of all this, Zuboff sees a disastrous overturning of the traditional capitalist order. We are being pushed "toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions." With statements like these, Zuboff threatens to lose those readers who don't share her regard for a bygone halcyon era of industrial capitalism that produced what she calls "traditional reciprocities," defined by straightforward exchanges of money for goods and services, which in turn bound people together in ostensibly healthy social, economic and political arrangements. Zuboff's analysis would benefit from more emphasis on the role of deregulation, the declining power of organized labor and the gradual financialization of the economy. With its ability to create boutique investment products that are several degrees removed from any tangible asset, it's finance that seems like the most obvious ideological forebear of surveillance capitalism, which uses digitalization to render more of life as tradable commodities. But Zuboff's capacious book has room for minority opinions and other forms of dissent. "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" may lack a straightforward political program - Zuboff comes across as a liberal, albeit not one who slots neatly on the left-right axis - but it is loaded with useful economic, technological and anthropological analysis. (In this political vacuum, I'd recommend the work of Trebor Scholz, a New School professor who has made a winning case for what he calls platform co-ops - nonprofit, worker-owned tech platforms that would lack the perverse incentives of surveillance capitalism.) We should, after all, avoid a belief in tidy solutions. Works of technology criticism are often expected to provide a few hundred pages of doomsaying before providing a concise final chapter in which the Gordian knot of our problems is neatly and improbably cut. "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," with its near-700-page footprint, is thankfully not that kind of book. Light on prescriptivist notions, Zuboff does propose a "right to sanctuary," based on universalist, if ever more threatened, humanitarian principles, like the right to asylum. But she's after something bigger, providing a scaffolding of critical thinking from which to examine the great crises of the digital age. Through her we learn that our friends to the north were indeed correct: Facebook is the problem (along with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al.). This is the rare book that we should trust to lead us down the long hard road of understanding. Companies tire constantly pursuing new, more granular data streams in our homes, workplaces and bodies. JACOB Silverman is the author of "Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 31, 2019]
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An argument that Google and other internet-based firms are creating a new form of capitalism based on the monetizing of human experience."Digital connection is now a means to others' commercial ends," writes Zuboff (Business Administration/Harvard Business School; In The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power, 1988). In a 2014 essay, the author first described the "profoundly undemocratic social force" she calls surveillance capitalism. In this exhaustive, often repetitive elaboration, the author defines the concept as "a new market form that claims human experience as a free source of raw material for hidden commercial practices." Later in the book, she elaborates: "Every casual search, like, and click [becomes] an asset to be tracked, parsed, and monetized by some company." This relentless search for and use of personal data is not happenstance or an inevitable result of digital technology. Rather, it is a "calculated," little-noticed pursuit by commercial interestsacting under the guise of a utopian vision for the internetto create "prediction products" that "anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later" and are traded in the marketplace. Invented by Google, adopted by Facebook and Microsoft, and with evidence that Amazon engages in it, the "unprecedented" market form is poised to become the "dominant" shape of capitalism, abrogating "the peoples' right to a human future." The shift from "serving users to surveilling them" occurred at a time of diminished government oversight and regulation and the post-9/11 emphasis on security over privacy. Based on research and interviews, the author thoughtfully examines the economic and philosophical implications of surveillance capitalism; warns that our children, in their ceaseless quest for connectivity, are harbingers of what lies ahead; and urges public outrage over the theft of our humanity. Other topics include Pokmon Go and behaviorist B.F. Skinner and his acolytes.A big, sprawling, and alarming case for "the darkening of the digital dream." This will appeal to specialists; general readers will wish it were much shorter. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
