In the brave new world that the British writer Aldous Huxley left captured in his 1932 novel of the same name, people live drugged and happy, manipulated by a higher plan in which the most cutting-edge science only serves a structure of domination. Now we don’t take ‘soma’ -the drug used by Huxley’s characters-, but we have an infinite range of free applications and services designed specifically to make us happy addicts and the authentic resources that fuel the accumulation of wealth in the new capitalism that order the world Welcome to surveillance capitalism, the place where we have never felt so free despite being relentlessly watched.
Your smartTV watches you. But also your phone, your car, your cleaning robot, your Google assistant and even that little bracelet that monitors the number of steps you take. A hint: all products that bear the word smart or include the tag ‘custom’ act as faithful soldiers at the service of surveillance capitalism. This is how Shoshana Zuboff, emeritus professor at Harvard Business School and creator of the concept called to bury the capitalism that we have known until now, sums it up.
Its origin goes back two decades with the ‘dotcom’ bubble, and we are still not aware that the economic era has changed. Let’s first establish the new map to know how to orient ourselves in this economic reality.
industrial capitalism vs. surveillance capitalism
In industrial capitalism, the owners of the means of production are the entrepreneurs who, through an investment, buy the raw materials and the necessary structure for the production of goods and services, and hire labor for this purpose. The ultimate goal is to place these products on the market, where customers coincide with workers. The medium on which the entire system of surveillance capitalism rests, however, is the digital infrastructure. Internet networks, computer technologies and human lives themselves are the essential means of production to provide personal data, the true raw material of the system.
The human being is a terminal of data streams. With this knowledge you can influence, control and totally dominate people
The workforce is no longer shaped by employees who receive a salary in exchange for their work, but by users of free applications and services, happy to acquire them in exchange for giving without consent to multiple companies a record of their life experiences.
In the new capitalism, personal data is accumulated to produce the good that will be put up for sale on the market: predictions about ourselves. The owners of the means of production, as you may have already guessed, are none other than those who exercise the monopoly of the digital business: Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon. However, all kinds of companies from the traditional environment have joined its model. “Industrial capitalism, with all its cruelties, was capitalism for people. In surveillance capitalism, on the contrary, people are just customers and employees, we are above all sources of information. It is not capitalism for us , but above us,” says Shoshana Zuboff in an interview on the BBC.
The South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, professor at the Berlin University of the Arts and author of a dozen books, elaborates on this idea: “The human being is a terminal for data streams, the result of an algorithmic operation. With This knowledge can influence, control and totally dominate people”.
How Google discovered the crystal ball
We return to the crisis of the ‘dotcom’. At the end of the last century, Google, a company then allergic to advertising, had to rethink its business model and how to achieve profitability. Sheryl Sandberg, director of online advertising at the firm, concluded that the combination of the information derived from its algorithm and the computer data collected from its users could offer very interesting analysis so that advertisers do not err. its objective. With a prediction of who needed or wanted what, the advertiser knew who to target and what to sell.
The services offered by surveillance capitalism consist of data-based predictions about our behaviors, and these predictions are sold to other companies.
“Google had found a formula to predict human behavior,” summarizes Zuboff, who establishes at this point a “dark and unexpected turn” in surveillance capitalism, “since it claims private human experiences to turn them into behavioral data and integrate them into the market “.
Between 2001 and 2004, search engine revenue grew nearly 3,600%. In March 2008, Sandberg was signed by Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook, where he would implement the same successful model.
From here, this business structure was extended to all economic areas, where data is now the true source of wealth. “The services offered by surveillance capitalism consist of predictions based on data about our behaviors, and these predictions are sold to other companies such as advertisers, insurers, department stores or health providers,” the American economist recounts.
The Lie of Consent and Addiction
For the creation of this data in massive quantities to extract predictions like from a crystal ball, humans are essential agents. The singularity is that, in this new capitalism, nobody tells them that they suppose free labor. Nor how important are their behaviors, their habits, their desires, their fears, their dreams, their projects, their doubts. All these details, this intimacy, is extracted from the digital infrastructure to be sold. And there is not even a remuneration for it. How have we come to consent to this?
The applications are based on a very intelligent addiction and gamification system. They design this to make us addicted
For Paloma Llaneza, lawyer, cybersecurity expert and author of Datanomics, the answer boils down, first, to the fact that consent doesn’t really exist when we type our personal data quickly to download a free application even faster or receive a weekly newsletter. “Consent is one of the great lies of the internet,” she says in a conversation with the Economist. The expert assures that the problem begins when our data is used for other purposes and transferred to third-party companies that seek to get to know us better and create a profile of who we are. This is legal, but the user usually accesses the terms without having read them in depth. And even when she does, it’s hard not to get lost in the legislative, technical terminology, and concepts. “Unknowingly, the user may be giving consent to be scanned on social networks and, from there, the person’s profile is taken. Only with Instagram photos can things be deduced from behavior,” she explains.
Paloma Llaneza, lawyer and expert in computer security. Image: elEconomista.es
If more and more companies are using us, the next question is why do we accept it as something irremediable? Why not say ‘enough’? Llaneza -who, by the way, does not use WhatsApp or is on Facebook- invites us to focus our attention elsewhere, to delve into aspects of human psychology. Only then does it become obvious that an alcoholic doesn’t say ‘enough’ to another bottle of beer either. “The applications are based on a very intelligent addiction and gamification system. They design this to make us addicted, everything is like a game and you have to participate to be part of society”, he resolves.
Once we’re addicted, it seems almost impossible to say ‘no’ to giving up our lives once again for the ‘app’ of the moment. The lawyer considers that people are not unconscious, but addicted, and that they live in a state of infantilization before technology. “They ask me: ‘how can you live without WhatsApp?’, And I answer them: ‘and how can you live so hooked?”, She relates.
Gamification, the technique by which anything acquires the format of a game, is essential in the new system
The adolescent fervor of wanting to be part of the latest, receive attention and not miss out on what the group does now affects all age groups. Like Huxley’s characters, people are happy with apps that save them tasks as simple as turning off the light. In other cases, not even that. Remember this app that matched a photo of your face against classical paintings to see which immortal face it most resembled? The purpose of this game was to create models for facial recognition and serve them on a platter to artificial intelligence so that, in the future, we might be denied access at a certain location. Had they known, probably no one would have fallen for it. Hence, gamification, the technique by which anything acquires the format of a game, is essential in the new system.
“We are being deceived doubly,” says Evgeny Morozov, an expert writer and researcher on the social implication of technology, in one of his articles, “first, when we hand over our data in exchange for relatively trivial services, and, second, when that data is then used to personalize and structure our world in a way that is neither transparent nor desirable.”
The bait is not a gift
In addition to gamification, the other key that explains why the addiction cycle is put into operation lies in the fact that these services are free. Free apps are the bait, not a gift from a magnanimous company. Through them, the extraction of data begins, the accumulation of behaviors that will be baked to put on a tray a feast of predictions ready to be transformed into money. “Behind all this is the problem of being free,” emphasizes Paloma Llaneza, for whom the lure of free services emerged as an alternative monetization formula.
If you are not used to paying for content, for services, for specialized information, in the end someone will lose their job and, sooner or later, it will be your turn
Free of charge not only makes it easier for companies to continue collecting personal data, but also the faucet of job insecurity remains open. Or rather, of a “self-precariousness” that will end up affecting the…
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