Kasey Coholan
May 13, 2019 | Reviews
Recently, not one, not two, but three digital home assistants were gifted, exchanged and/or stolen amongst my in-laws in an annual gift swap. As the Amazon EchoTMs and Google HomeTMs were being passed around, I secretly prayed, please, please let us not end up with one of these things, and, of course, we did, and, of course, I use it, almost every day. Welcome Google HomeTM, to our home. Welcome to the private lives of a heteronormative, married couple, who each work from the home they rent together, where they are raising a toddler and a big, furry, very friendly dog, who ends up at the vet, a lot. But Google, you already knew all of that, didn’t you?
Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff would say yes, Google almost certainly knew all of that, and probably Facebook, Amazon, and Huawei, and maybe Microsoft knew too; they knew that and much more in both scale and scope. In her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019), Zuboff claims the knowledge these companies have of us is more than mere “data exhaust”, the trail of detritus data our digital lives leave behind, as it also entails what she calls, “behavioural surplus”. Behavioural surplus is the raw material of surveillance capitalism, which is to say, it is our individual, unfiltered human experiences rendered as data by companies like Google and then sold for almost unimaginable profits to other companies that want to know your behaviour so they can sell you things. This may or may not be news to you but what is new, and to be honest, refreshing, is the clarity with which Zuboff makes her case for this stage of capitalism and the role technology plays in it.
What hard technological determinists lack in nuance is usually more than made up with fervor. Citing Google’s former executive chairman and CEO, Eric Schmidt, Zuboff highlights the seemingly inevitable, ever-forward march of life rendered digitally. “In the future, information technology will be everywhere, like electricity. It will be a given” (p. 223). As critically-minded researchers we know there is no ‘big T,’ Technology or technologies that are inevitable. People, politics and philosophy all shape and reshape technology. When Zuboff writes, “The relentless drumbeat of inevitabilist messages presents the new apparatus of ubiquity as the product of technological forces that operate beyond human agency and the choices of communities, an implacable movement that originates outside history and exerts a momentum that in some vague way drives toward the perfection of the species and the planet…The monster did it, not Victor Frankenstein. However, the ankle bracelet does not monitor the prisoner; the criminal justice system does that,” it becomes clear that she knows this too. Drawing on a well of scholars from Émile Durkheim to Hannah Arendt, Michael Polanyi to B. F. Skinner, she takes the time to emphasize this and other, if not entirely original, at the very least fundamental points about our relationship with technology and in turn surveillance capitalism (p. 234). It is here we must admit this book, more than anything, is for the general reader. While the book is fascinating, (she leaves no dramatic stone unturned, at times to her detriment) it also leaves those of us looking for a deeper dive into any one of the disciplinary fields she astutely brings together wanting more.
Other reviewers of the book use their specific expertise to build on, but also question the foundation Zuboff lays out (see the reviews by Julie E. Cohen for a legal perspective and Kirstie Ball for more on surveillance studies). Similarly, as someone who studies technology’s relationship to the self, I was most interested in her exploration of how surveillance capitalism and its technology understands human experience and what this particular variant of capitalism requires of the self and how it might change our own ideas of who we are. Here Zuboff does good work parsing out how the more surveillance capitalism captures our offline thoughts, actions and patterns, the more Skinner’s radical behaviourism comes to life. The extent to which Google et. al. take our lives and “informate” them is new, but the impetus to conflate human and machines for purposes of efficiency, ease, and capitalist gain is most definitely not. Barely a century ago Frederick Taylor, Henry Gantt and the Gilbreths1 were perfecting not just the scientific management of work and workers, but also the scientific management of self and home.
What I find most interesting about Zuboff’s book is that it asks us to examine what we value in our everyday. Surveillance capitalism is not without its perks; our lives are exponentially easier, faster, more efficient, and frictionless in ways that were unimaginable before Google MapsTM, Amazon’s AlexaTM or Microsoft’s LinkedInTM. But this effortlessness has a cost. We can live lives as smooth and transparent as glass, but for that to happen our lives must indeed be transparent; they must be predictable so that Amazon can deliver your kid’s birthday present, your dog’s food, more dish soap before it even occurs to you that you need these things. The surveillance capitalist rhetoric that Zuboff explores would have us believe that all of these efficiencies allow us more time to do more of what we really love, but what of the joy in the serendipity of walking your dog past local shops only to discover the perfect, idiosyncratic birthday gift? Zuboff dives into wildly complicated and complex territory with this book, and if you can forgive all of the repetitive melodrama, which you should, it is worth the read to understand exactly what surveillance capitalism gives with one hand, and exactly what it takes away with the other.
1 Known as the “the father” of scientific management, Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American industrial engineer who sought to increase workplace efficiency through the scientific study and training of work and workers. For further reading see his 1911 monograph, The Principles of Scientific Management. Gantt was a dedicated follower of Taylor and worked closely with him for several years. Gantt’s work eventually parted from Taylor’s in significant ways. Whereas Taylor promoted the “science” of management, Gantt’s management style grew to include the point-of-view of the worker—psychology—as the “art” of management. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, also industrial engineers who worked with both Taylor and Gantt, are known for their motion study work which included the breakdown of human actions to their most efficient essence to determine the one best way to complete any task. For further reading on Lillian Gilbreth’s work on the efficient home see, Jane Lancaster, Making Time: Lillian Moller Gilbreth–A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the Dozen”, 2004.
Kasey Coholan is working on her PhD in Science & Technology Studies at York University, Toronto. Her research focuses on the relationship between modern technology and the ways we see, seek and understand the self.
Published: 05/13/2019