The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Introduction
Chapter 1
Home or Exile in the
Digital Future
I saw him crying, shedding floods of tears upon Calypso’s island, in her chambers. She traps him there; he cannot go back home. —HOMER, THE ODYSSEY
I.The Oldest Questions
“Are we all going to be working for a smart machine, or will we have smart people around the machine?” The question was posed to me in 1981 by a young paper mill manager sometime between the fried catfish and the pecan pie on my first night in the small southern town that was home to his mammoth plant and would become my home periodically for the next six years. On that rainy night his words flooded my brain, drowning out the quickening tap tap tap of raindrops on the awning above our table. I recognized the oldest political questions: Home or exile? Lord or subject? Master or slave? These are eternal themes of knowledge, authority, and power that can never be settled for all time. There is no end of history; each generation must assert its will and imagination as new threats require us to retry the case in every age.
Perhaps because there was no one else to ask, the plant manager’s voice was weighted with urgency and frustration: “What’s it gonna be? Which way are we supposed to go? I must know now. There is no time to spare.” I wanted the answers, too, and so I began the project that thirty years ago became my first book, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. That work turned out to be the opening chapter in what became a lifelong quest to answer the question “Can the digital future be our home?”
It has been many years since that warm southern evening, but the oldest questions have come roaring back with a vengeance. The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide. We celebrate the networked world for the many ways in which it enriches our capabilities and prospects, but it has birthed whole new territories of anxiety, danger, and violence as the sense of a predictable future slips away.
When we ask the oldest questions now, billions of people from every social strata, generation, and society must answer. Information and communications technologies are more widespread than electricity, reaching three billion of the world’s seven billion people. 1 The entangled dilemmas of knowledge, authority, and power are no longer confined to workplaces as they were in the 1980s. Now their roots run deep through the necessities of daily life, mediating nearly every form of social participation. 2
Just a moment ago, it still seemed reasonable to focus our concerns on the challenges of an information workplace or an information society. Now the oldest questions must be addressed to the widest possible frame, which is best defined as “civilization” or, more specifically, information civilization. Will this emerging civilization be a place that we can call home?
All creatures orient to home. It is the point of origin from which every species sets its bearings. Without our bearings, there is no way to navigate unknown territory; without our bearings, we are lost. I am reminded of this each spring when the same pair of loons returns from their distant travels to the cove below our window. Their haunting cries of homecoming, renewal, connection, and safeguard lull us to sleep at night, knowing that we too are in our place. Green turtles hatch and go down to the sea, where they travel many thousands of miles, sometimes for ten years or twenty. When ready to lay their eggs, they retrace their journey back to the very patch of beach where they were born. Some birds annually fly for thousands of miles, losing as much as half their body weight, in order to mate in their birthplace. Birds, bees, butterflies… nests, holes, trees, lakes, hives, hills, shores, and hollows… nearly every creature shares some version of this deep attachment to a place in which life has been known to flourish, the kind of place we call home.
It is in the nature of human attachment that every journey and expulsion sets into motion the search for home. That nostos, finding home, is among our most profound needs is evident by the price we are willing to pay for it. There is a universally shared ache to return to the place we left behind or to found a new home in which our hopes for the future can nest and grow. We still recount the travails of Odysseus and recall what human beings will endure for the sake of reaching our own shores and entering our own gates.
Because our brains are larger than those of birds and sea turtles, we know that it is not always possible, or even desirable, to return to the same patch of earth. Home need not always correspond to a single dwelling or place. We can choose its form and location but not its meaning. Home is where we know and where we are known, where we love and are beloved. Home is mastery, voice, relationship, and sanctuary: part freedom, part flourishing… part refuge, part prospect.
The sense of home slipping away provokes an unbearable yearning. The Portuguese have a name for this feeling: saudade, a word said to capture the homesickness and longing of separation from the homeland among emigrants across the centuries. Now the disruptions of the twenty-first century have turned these exquisite anxieties and longings of dislocation into a universal story that engulfs each one of us. 3
II. Requiem for a Home
In 2000 a group of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech collaborated on a project called the “Aware Home.” 4 It was meant to be a “living laboratory” for the study of “ubiquitous computing.” They imagined a “humanhome symbiosis” in which many animate and inanimate processes would be captured by an elaborate network of “context aware sensors” embedded in the house and by wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants. The design called for an “automated wireless collaboration” between the platform that hosted personal information from the occupants’ wearables and a second one that hosted the environmental information from the sensors.
There were three working assumptions: first, the scientists and engineers understood that the new data systems would produce an entirely new knowledge domain. Second, it was assumed that the rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s life would belong exclusively to the people who live in the house. Third, the team assumed that for all of its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take its place as a modern incarnation of the ancient conventions that understand “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its walls.
All of this was expressed in the engineering plan. It emphasized trust, simplicity, the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the home as a private domain. The Aware Home information system was imagined as a simple “closed loop” with only two nodes and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. Because the house would be “constantly monitoring the occupants’ whereabouts and activities… even tracing its inhabitants’ medical conditions,” the team concluded, “there is a clear need to give the occupants knowledge and control of the distribution of this information.” All the information was to be stored on the occupants’ wearable computers “to insure the privacy of an individual’s information.”
By 2018, the global “smart-home” market was valued at $36 billion and expected to reach $151 billion by 2023. 5 The numbers betray an earthquake beneath their surface. Consider just one smart-home device: the Nest thermostat, which was made by a company that was owned by Alphabet, the Google holding company, and then merged with Google in 2018. 6 The Nest thermostat does many things imagined in the Aware Home. It collects data about its uses and environment. It uses motion sensors and computation to “learn” the behaviors of a home’s inhabitants. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected products such as cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds. 7 Such systems can, for example, trigger lights if an anomalous motion is detected, signal video and audio recording, and even send notifications to homeowners or others. As a result of the merger with Google, the thermostat, like other Nest products, will be built with Google’s artificial intelligence capabilities, including its personal digital “assistant.” 8 Like the Aware Home, the thermostat and its brethren devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power—but for whom?
Wi-Fi–enabled and networked, the thermostat’s intricate, personalized data stores are uploaded to Google’s servers. Each thermostat comes with a “privacy policy,” a “terms-of-service agreement,” and an “end-user licensing agreement.” These reveal oppressive privacy and security consequences in which sensitive household and personal information are shared with other smart devices, unnamed personnel, and third parties for the purposes of predictive analyses and sales to other unspecified parties. Nest takes little responsibility for the security of the information it collects and none for how the other companies in its ecosystem will put those data to use. 9 A detailed analysis of Nest’s policies by two University of London scholars concluded that were one to enter into the Nest ecosystem of connected devices and apps, each with their own equally burdensome and audacious terms, the purchase of a single home thermostat would entail the need to review nearly a thousand so-called contracts. 10
Should the customer refuse to agree to Nest’s stipulations, the terms of service indicate that the functionality and security of the thermostat will be deeply compromised, no longer supported by the necessary updates meant to ensure its reliability and safety. The consequences can range from frozen pipes to failed smoke alarms to an easily hacked internal home system. 11
By 2018, the assumptions of the Aware Home were gone with the wind. Where did they go? What was that wind? The Aware Home, like many other visionary projects, imagined a digital future that empowers individuals to lead more-effective lives. What is most critical is that in the year 2000 this vision naturally assumed an unwavering commitment to the privacy of individual experience. Should an individual choose to render her experience digitally, then she would exercise exclusive rights to the knowledge garnered from such data, as well as exclusive rights to decide how such knowledge might be put to use. Today these rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? This book aims to answer these questions. It is about the darkening of the digital dream and its rapid mutation into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism.
III. What Is Surveillance Capitalism?
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 prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.
As we shall see in the coming chapters, the competitive dynamics of these new markets drive surveillance capitalists to acquire ever-more-predictive sources of behavioral surplus: our voices, personalities, and emotions. Eventually, surveillance capitalists discovered that the most-predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes. Competitive pressures produced this shift, in which automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior at scale. With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. In this phase of surveillance capitalism’s evolution, the means of production are subordinated to an increasingly complex and comprehensive “means of behavioral modification.” In this way, surveillance capitalism births a new species of power that I call instrumentarianism. Instrumentarium power knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of “smart” networked devices, things, and spaces.
In the coming chapters we will follow the growth and dissemination of these operations and the instrumentarian power that sustains them. Indeed, it has become difficult to escape this bold market project, whose tentacles reach from the gentle herding of innocent Pokémon Go players to eat, drink, and purchase in the restaurants, bars, fast-food joints, and shops that pay to play in its behavioral futures markets to the ruthless expropriation of surplus from Facebook profiles for the purposes of shaping individual behavior, whether it’s buying pimple cream at 5:45 P.M. on Friday, clicking “yes” on an offer of new running shoes as the endorphins race through your brain after your long Sunday morning run, or voting next week. Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists and their market players are now locked into the continuous intensification of the means of behavioral modification and the gathering might of instrumentarian power.
Surveillance capitalism runs contrary to the early digital dream, consigning the Aware Home to ancient history. Instead, it strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being “connected” is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge. Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.
Google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in much the same way that a century ago General Motors invented and perfected managerial capitalism. Google was the pioneer of surveillance capitalism in thought and practice, the deep pocket for research and development, and the trailblazer in experimentation and implementation, but it is no longer the only actor on this path. Surveillance capitalism quickly spread to Facebook and later to Microsoft. Evidence suggests that Amazon has veered in this direction, and it is a constant challenge to Apple, both as an external threat and as a source of internal debate and conflict.
As the pioneer of surveillance capitalism, Google launched an unprecedented market operation into the unmapped spaces of the internet, where it faced few impediments from law or competitors, like an invasive species in a landscape free of natural predators. Its leaders drove the systemic coherence of their businesses at a breakneck pace that neither public institutions nor individuals could follow. Google also benefited from historical events when a national security apparatus galvanized by the attacks of 9/11 was inclined to nurture, mimic, shelter, and appropriate surveillance capitalism’s emergent capabilities for the sake of total knowledge and its promise of certainty.
Surveillance capitalists quickly realized that they could do anything they wanted, and they did. They dressed in the fashions of advocacy and emancipation, appealing to and exploiting contemporary anxieties, while the real action was hidden offstage. Theirs was an invisibility cloak woven in equal measure to the rhetoric of the empowering web, the ability to move swiftly, the confidence of vast revenue streams, and the wild, undefended nature of the territory they would conquer and claim. They were protected by the inherent illegibility of the automated processes that they rule, the ignorance that these processes breed, and the sense of inevitability that they foster.
Surveillance capitalism is no longer confined to the competitive dramas of the large internet companies, where behavioral futures markets were first aimed at online advertising. Its mechanisms and economic imperatives have become the default model for most internet-based businesses. Eventually, competitive pressure drove expansion into the offline world, where the same foundational mechanisms that expropriate your online browsing, likes, and clicks are trained on your run in the park, breakfast conversation, or hunt for a parking space. Today’s prediction products are traded in behavioral futures markets that extend beyond targeted online ads to many other sectors, including insurance, retail, finance, and an ever-widening range of goods and services companies determined to participate in these new and profitable markets. Whether it’s a “smart” home device, what the insurance companies call “behavioral underwriting,” or any one of thousands of other transactions, we now pay for our own domination.
Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the “hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends. We are not surveillance capitalism’s “customers.” Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.
This logic turns ordinary life into the daily renewal of a twenty-first-century Faustian compact. “Faustian” because it is nearly impossible to tear ourselves away, despite the fact that what we must give in return will destroy life as we have known it. Consider that the internet has become essential for social participation, that the internet is now saturated with commerce, and that commerce is now subordinated to surveillance capitalism. Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified. It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate like defense mechanisms (“I have nothing to hide”), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness. 12 In this way, surveillance capitalism imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first-century individuals should not have to make, and its normalization leaves us singing in our chains. 13
Surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge. Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, whereas their operations are designed to be unknowable to us. They accumulate vast domains of new knowledge from us, but not for us. They predict our futures for the sake of others’ gain, not ours. As long as surveillance capitalism and its behavioral futures markets are allowed to thrive, ownership of the new means of behavioral modification eclipses ownership of the means of production as the fountainhead of capitalist wealth and power in the twenty-first century.
These facts and their consequences for our individual lives, our societies, our democracies, and our emerging information civilization are examined in detail in the coming chapters. The evidence and reasoning employed here suggest that surveillance capitalism is a rogue force driven by novel economic imperatives that disregard social norms and nullify the elemental rights associated with individual autonomy that are essential to the very possibility of a democratic society.
Just as industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity. The industrial legacy of climate chaos fills us with dismay, remorse, and fear. As surveillance capitalism becomes the dominant form of information capitalism in our time, what fresh legacy of damage and regret will be mourned by future generations? By the time you read these words, the reach of this new form will have grown as more sectors, firms, startups, app developers, and investors mobilize around this one plausible version of information capitalism. This mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the possibility of a human future at the new frontier of power will be contested.
IV. The Unprecedented
One explanation for surveillance capitalism’s many triumphs floats above them all: it is unprecedented. The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar categories, thereby rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented. A classic example is the notion of the “horseless carriage” to which people reverted when confronted with the unprecedented facts of the automobile. A tragic illustration is the encounter between indigenous people and the first Spanish conquerors. When the Taínos of the pre-Columbian Caribbean islands first laid eyes on the sweating, bearded Spanish soldiers trudging across the sand in their brocade and armor, how could they possibly have recognized the meaning and portent of that moment? Unable to imagine their own destruction, they reckoned that those strange creatures were gods and welcomed them with intricate rituals of hospitality. This is how the unprecedented reliably confounds understanding; existing lenses illuminate the familiar, thus obscuring the original by turning the unprecedented into an extension of the past. This contributes to the normalization of the abnormal, which makes fighting the unprecedented even more of an uphill climb.
On a stormy night some years ago, our home was struck by lightning, and I learned a powerful lesson in the comprehension-defying power of the unprecedented. Within moments of the strike, thick black smoke drifted up the staircase from the lower level of the house and toward the living room. As we mobilized and called the fire department, I believed that I had just a minute or two to do something useful before rushing out to join my family. First, I ran upstairs and closed all the bedroom doors to protect them from smoke damage. Next, I tore back downstairs to the living room, where I gathered up as many of our family photo albums as I could carry and set them outside on a covered porch for safety. The smoke was just about to reach me when the fire marshal arrived to grab me by the shoulder and yank me out the door. We stood in the driving rain, where, to our astonishment, we watched the house explode in flames.
I learned many things from the fire, but among the most important was the unrecognizability of the unprecedented. In that early phase of crisis, I could imagine our home scarred by smoke damage, but I could not imagine its disappearance. I grasped what was happening through the lens of past experience, envisioning a distressing but ultimately manageable detour that would lead back to the status quo. Unable to distinguish the unprecedented, all I could do was to close doors to rooms that would no longer exist and seek safety on a porch that was fated to vanish. I was blind to conditions that were unprecedented in my experience.
I began to study the emergence of what I would eventually call surveillance capitalism in 2006, interviewing entrepreneurs and staff in a range of tech companies in the US and the UK. For several years I thought that the unexpected and disturbing practices that I documented were detours from the main road: management oversights or failures of judgment and contextual understanding.
My field data were destroyed in the fire that night, and by the time I picked up the thread again early in 2011, it was clear to me that my old horseless carriage lenses could not explain or excuse what was taking shape. I had lost many details hidden in the brush, but the profiles of the trees stood out more clearly than before: information capitalism had taken a decisive turn toward a new logic of accumulation, with its own original operational mechanisms, economic imperatives, and markets. I could see that this new form had broken away from the norms and practices that define the history of capitalism and in that process something startling and unprecedented had emerged.
Of course, the emergence of the unprecedented in economic history cannot be compared to a house fire. The portents of a catastrophic fire were unprecedented in my experience, but they were not original. In contrast, surveillance capitalism is a new actor in history, both original and sui generis. It is of its own kind and unlike anything else: a distinct new planet with its own physics of time and space, its sixty-seven-hour days, emerald sky, inverted mountain ranges, and dry water.
Nonetheless, the danger of closing doors to rooms that will no longer exist is very real. The unprecedented nature of surveillance capitalism has enabled it to elude systematic contest because it cannot be adequately grasped with our existing concepts. We rely on categories such as “monopoly” or “privacy” to contest surveillance capitalist practices. And although these issues are vital, and even when surveillance capitalist operations are also monopolistic and a threat to privacy, the existing categories nevertheless fall short in identifying and contesting the most crucial and unprecedented facts of this new regime.
Will surveillance capitalism continue on its current trajectory to become the dominant logic of accumulation of our age, or, in the fullness of time, will we judge it to have been a toothed bird: A fearsome but ultimately doomed dead end in capitalism’s longer journey? If it is to be doomed, then what will make it so? What will an effective vaccine entail?
Every vaccine begins in careful knowledge of the enemy disease. This book is a journey to encounter what is strange, original, and even unimaginable in surveillance capitalism. It is animated by the conviction that fresh observation, analysis, and new naming are required if we are to grasp the unprecedented as a necessary prelude to effective contest. The chapters that follow will examine the specific conditions that allowed surveillance capitalism to root and flourish as well as the “laws of motion” that drive the action and expansion of this market form: its foundational mechanisms, economic imperatives, economies of supply, construction of power, and principles of social ordering. Let’s close doors, but let’s make sure that they are the right ones.
V. The Puppet Master, Not the Puppet
Our effort to confront the unprecedented begins with the recognition that we hunt the puppet master, not the puppet. A first challenge to comprehension is the confusion between surveillance capitalism and the technologies it employs. Surveillance capitalism is not technology; it is a logic that imbues technology and commands it into action. Surveillance capitalism is a market form that is unimaginable outside the digital milieu, but it is not the same as the “digital.” As we saw in the story of the Aware Home, and as we shall see again in Chapter 2, the digital can take many forms depending upon the social and economic logics that bring it to life. It is capitalism that assigns the price tag of subjugation and helplessness, not the technology.
That surveillance capitalism is a logic in action and not a technology is a vital point because surveillance capitalists want us to think that their practices are inevitable expressions of the technologies they employ. For example, in 2009 the public first became aware that Google maintains our search histories indefinitely: data that are available as raw-material supplies are also available to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. When questioned about these practices, the corporation’s former CEO Eric Schmidt mused, “The reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time.” 14
In truth, search engines do not retain, but surveillance capitalism does. 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. We will examine this notion of “inevitability” in depth in Chapter 7. For now, suffice to say that 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.”
In order to challenge such claims of technological inevitability, we must establish our bearings. We cannot evaluate the current trajectory of information civilization without a clear appreciation that technology is not and never can be a thing in itself, isolated from economics and society. This means that technological inevitability does not exist. Technologies are always economic means, not ends in themselves: in modern times, technology’s DNA comes already patterned by what the sociologist Max Weber called the “economic orientation.”
Economic ends, Weber observed, are always intrinsic to technology’s development and deployment. “Economic action” determines objectives, whereas technology provides “appropriate means.” In Weber’s framing, “The fact that what is called the technological development of modern times has been so largely oriented economically to profit-making is one of the fundamental facts of the history of technology.” 15 In a modern capitalist society, technology was, is, and always will be an expression of the economic objectives that direct it into action. A worthwhile exercise would be to delete the word “technology” from our vocabularies in order to see how quickly capitalism’s objectives are exposed.
Surveillance capitalism employs many technologies, but it cannot be equated with any technology. Its operations may employ platforms, but these operations are not the same as platforms. It employs machine intelligence, but it cannot be reduced to those machines. It produces and relies on algorithms, but it is not the same as algorithms. Surveillance capitalism’s unique economic imperatives are the puppet masters that hide behind the curtain orienting the machines and summoning them to action. These imperatives, to indulge another metaphor, are like the body’s soft tissues that cannot be seen in an X-ray but do the real work of binding muscle and bone. We are not alone in falling prey to the technology illusion. It is an enduring theme of social thought, as old as the Trojan horse. Despite this, each generation stumbles into the quicksand of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests. In modern times this means the interests of capital, and in our time it is surveillance capital that commands the digital milieu and directs our trajectory toward the future. Our aim in this book is to discern the laws of surveillance capitalism that animate today’s exotic Trojan horses, returning us to age-old questions as they bear down on our lives, our societies, and our civilization.
We have stood at this kind of precipice before. “We’ve stumbled along for a while, trying to run a new civilization in old ways, but we’ve got to start to make this world over.” It was 1912 when Thomas Edison laid out his vision for a new industrial civilization in a letter to Henry Ford. Edison worried that industrialism’s potential to serve the progress of humanity would be thwarted by the stubborn power of the robber barons and the monopolist economics that ruled their kingdoms. He decried the “wastefulness” and “cruelty” of US capitalism: “Our production, our factory laws, our charities, our relations between capital and labor, our distribution—all wrong, out of gear.” Both Edison and Ford understood that the modern industrial civilization for which they harbored such hope was careening toward a darkness marked by misery for the many and prosperity for the few.
Most important for our conversation, Edison and Ford understood that the moral life of industrial civilization would be shaped by the practices of capitalism that rose to dominance in their time. They believed that America, and eventually the world, would have to fashion a new, more rational capitalism in order to avert a future of misery and conflict. Everything, as Edison suggested, would have to be reinvented: new technologies, yes, but these would have to reflect new ways of understanding and fulfilling people’s needs; a new economic model that could turn those new practices into profit; and a new social contract that could sustain it all. A new century had dawned, but the evolution of capitalism, like the churning of civilizations, did not obey the calendar or the clock. It was 1912, and still the nineteenth century refused to relinquish its claim on the twentieth.
The same can be said of our time. As I write these words, we are nearing the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, but the economic and social contests of the twentieth continue to tear us apart. These contests are the stage upon which surveillance capitalism made its debut and rose to stardom as the author of a new chapter in the long saga of capitalism’s evolution. This is the dramatic context to which we will turn in the opening pages of Part I: the place upon which we must stand in order to evaluate our subject in its rightful context. Surveillance capitalism is not an accident of overzealous technologists, but rather a rogue capitalism that learned to cunningly exploit its historical conditions to ensure and defend its success.
VI. The Outline, Themes, and Sources of this Book
This book is intended as an initial mapping of a terra incognita, a first foray that I hope will pave the way for more explorers. The effort to understand surveillance capitalism and its consequences has dictated a path of exploration that crosses many disciplines and historical periods. My aim has been to develop the concepts and frameworks that enable us to see the pattern in what have appeared to be disparate concepts, phenomena, and fragments of rhetoric and practice, as each new point on the map contributes to materializing the puppet master in flesh and bone.
Many of the points on this map are necessarily drawn from fast-moving currents in turbulent times. In making sense of contemporary developments, my method has been to isolate the deeper pattern in the welter of technological detail and corporate rhetoric. The test of my efficacy will be in how well this map and its concepts illuminate the unprecedented and empower us with a more cogent and comprehensive understanding of the rapid flow of events that boil around us as surveillance capitalism pursues its long game of economic and social domination.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has four parts. Each presents four to five chapters as well as a final chapter intended as a coda that reflects on and conceptualizes the meaning of what has gone before. Part I addresses the foundations of surveillance capitalism: its origins and early elaboration. We begin in Chapter 2 by setting the stage upon which surveillance capitalism made its debut and achieved success. This stage setting is important because I fear that we have contented ourselves for too long with superficial explanations of the rapid rise and general acceptance of the practices associated with surveillance capitalism. For example, we have credited notions such as “convenience” or the fact that many of its services are “free.” Instead, Chapter 2 explores the social conditions that summoned the digital into our everyday lives and enabled surveillance capitalism to root and flourish. I describe the “collision” between the centuries-old historical processes of individualization that shape our experience as self-determining individuals and the harsh social habitat produced by a decades-old regime of neoliberal market economics in which our sense of self-worth and needs for self-determination are routinely thwarted. The pain and frustration of this contradiction are the condition that sent us careening toward the internet for sustenance and ultimately bent us to surveillance capitalism’s draconian quid pro quo.
Part I moves on to a close examination of surveillance capitalism’s invention and early elaboration at Google, beginning with the discovery and early development of what would become its foundational mechanisms, economic imperatives, and “laws of motion.” For all of Google’s technological prowess and computational talent, the real credit for its success goes to the radical social relations that the company declared as facts, beginning with its disregard for the boundaries of private human experience and the moral integrity of the autonomous individual. Instead, surveillance capitalists asserted their right to invade at will, usurping individual decision rights in favor of unilateral surveillance and the self-authorized extraction of human experience for others’ profit.
These invasive claims were nurtured by the absence of law to impede their progress, the mutuality of interests between the fledgling surveillance capitalists and state intelligence agencies, and the tenacity with which the corporation defended its new territories. Eventually, Google codified a tactical playbook on the strength of which its surveillance capitalist operations were successfully institutionalized as the dominant form of information capitalism, drawing new competitors eager to participate in the race for surveillance revenues. On the strength of these achievements, Google and its expanding universe of competitors enjoy extraordinary new asymmetries of knowledge and power, unprecedented in the human story. I argue that the significance of these developments is best understood as the privatization of the division of learning in society, the critical axis of social order in the twenty-first century.
Part II traces the migration of surveillance capitalism from the online environment to the real world, a consequence of the competition for prediction products that approximate certainty. Here we explore this new reality business, as all aspects of human experience are claimed as raw-material 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 competition intensifies, surveillance capitalists learn that extracting human experience is not enough. The most-predictive raw-material supplies come from intervening in our experience to shape our behavior in ways that favor surveillance capitalists’ commercial outcomes.
New automated protocols are designed to influence and modify human behavior at scale as the means of production is subordinated to a new and more complex means of behavior modification. We see these new protocols at work in Facebook’s contagion experiments and the Google-incubated augmented reality “game” Pokémon Go. The evidence of our psychic numbing is that only a few decades ago US society denounced mass behavior-modification techniques as unacceptable threats to individual autonomy and the democratic order. Today the same practices meet little resistance or even discussion as they are routinely and pervasively deployed in the march toward surveillance revenues.
Finally, I consider surveillance capitalism’s operations as a challenge to the elemental right to the future tense, which accounts for the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future. It is an essential condition of free will and, more poignantly, of the inner resources from which we draw the will to will. I ask and answer the question How did they get away with it? Part II ends with a meditation on our once and future history. If industrial capitalism dangerously disrupted nature, what havoc might surveillance capitalism wreak on human nature?
Part III examines the rise of instrumentarian power; its expression in a ubiquitous sensate, networked, computational infrastructure that I call Big Other; and the novel and deeply antidemocratic vision of society and social relations that these produce. I argue that instrumentarianism is an unprecedented species of power that has defied comprehension in part because it has been subjected to the “horseless-carriage” syndrome. Instrumentarian power has been viewed through the old lenses of totalitarianism, obscuring what is different and dangerous. Totalitarianism was a transformation of the state into a project of total possession. Instrumentarianism and its materialization in Big Other signal the transformation of the market into a project of total certainty, an undertaking that is unimaginable outside the digital milieu and the logic of surveillance capitalism. In naming and analyzing instrumentarian power, I explore its intellectual origins in early theoretical physics and its later expression in the work of the radical behaviorist B. F. Skinner.
Part III follows surveillance capitalism into a second phase change. The first was the migration from the virtual to the real world. The second is a shift of focus from the real world to the social world, as society itself becomes the new object of extraction and control. Just as industrial society was imagined as a well-functioning machine, instrumentarian society is imagined as a human simulation of machine learning systems: a confluent hive mind in which each element learns and operates in concert with every other element. In the model of machine confluence, the “freedom” of each individual machine is subordinated to the knowledge of the system as a whole. Instrumentarian power aims to organize, herd, and tune society to achieve a similar social confluence, in which group pressure and computational certainty replace politics and democracy, extinguishing the felt reality and social function of an individualized existence. The youngest members of our societies already experience many of these destructive dynamics in their attachment to social media, the first global experiment in the human hive. I consider the implications of these developments for a second elemental right: the right to sanctuary. The human need for a space of inviolable refuge has persisted in civilized societies from ancient times but is now under attack as surveillance capital creates a world of “no exit” with profound implications for the human future at this new frontier of power.
In the final chapter I conclude that surveillance capitalism departs from the history of market capitalism in surprising ways, demanding both unimpeded freedom and total knowledge, abandoning capitalism’s reciprocities with people and society, and imposing a totalizing collectivist vision of life in the hive, with surveillance capitalists and their data priesthood in charge of oversight and control. Surveillance capitalism and its rapidly accumulating instrumentarian power exceed the historical norms of capitalist ambitions, claiming dominion over human, societal, and political territories that range far beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm or the market. As a result, surveillance capitalism is best described as a coup from above, not an overthrow of the state but rather an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty and a prominent force in the perilous drift toward democratic deconsolidation that now threatens Western liberal democracies. Only “we the people” can reverse this course, first by naming the unprecedented, then by mobilizing new forms of collaborative action: the crucial friction that reasserts the primacy of a flourishing human future as the foundation of our information civilization. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so.
My methods combine those of a social scientist inclined toward theory, history, philosophy, and qualitative research with those of an essayist: an unusual but intentional approach. As an essayist, I occasionally draw upon my own experiences. I do this because the tendency toward psychic numbing is increased when we regard the critical issues examined here as just so many abstractions attached to technological and economic forces beyond our reach. We cannot fully reckon with the gravity of surveillance capitalism and its consequences unless we can trace the scars they carve into the flesh of our daily lives.
As a social scientist, I have been drawn to earlier theorists who encountered the unprecedented in their time. Reading from this perspective, I developed a fresh appreciation for the intellectual courage and pioneering insights of classic texts, in which authors such as Durkheim, Marx, and Weber boldly theorized industrial capitalism and industrial society as it rapidly constructed itself in their midst during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My work here has also been inspired by mid-twentieth-century thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Karl Polanyi, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Stanley Milgram, who struggled to name the unprecedented in their time as they faced the comprehension-defying phenomena of totalitarianism and labored to grasp their trail of consequence for the prospects of humanity. My work has also been deeply informed by the many insights of visionary scholars, technology critics, and committed investigative journalists who have done so much to illuminate key points on the map that emerges here.
During the last seven years I have focused closely on the top surveillance capitalist firms and their growing ecosystems of customers, consultants, and competitors, all of it informed by the larger context of technology and data science that defines the Silicon Valley zeitgeist. This raises another important distinction. Just as surveillance capitalism is not the same as technology, this new logic of accumulation cannot be reduced to any single company or group of companies. The top five internet companies—Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook—are often regarded as a single entity with similar strategies and interests, but when it comes to surveillance capitalism, this is not the case.
First, it is necessary to distinguish between capitalism and surveillance capitalism. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3, that line is defined in part by the purposes and methods of data collection. When a firm collects behavioral data with permission and solely as a means to product or service improvement, it is committing capitalism but not surveillance capitalism. Each of the top five tech companies practices capitalism, but they are not all pure surveillance capitalists, at least not now.
For example, Apple has so far drawn a line, pledging to abstain from many of the practices that I locate in the surveillance capitalist regime. Its behavior in this regard is not perfect, the line is sometimes blurred, and Apple might well change or contradict its orientation. Amazon once prided itself on its customer alignment and the virtuous circle between data collection and service improvement. Both firms derive revenues from physical and digital products and therefore experience less financial pressure to chase surveillance revenues than the pure data companies. As we see in Chapter 9, however, Amazon appears to be migrating toward surveillance capitalism, with its new emphasis on “personalized” services and third-party revenues.
Whether or not a corporation has fully migrated to surveillance capitalism says nothing about other vital issues raised by its operations, from monopolistic and anticompetitive practices in the case of Amazon to pricing, tax strategies, and employment policies at Apple. Nor are there any guarantees for the future. Time will tell if Apple succumbs to surveillance capitalism, holds the line, or perhaps even expands its ambitions to anchor an effective alternative trajectory to a human future aligned with the ideals of individual autonomy and the deepest values of a democratic society.
One important implication of these distinctions is that even when our societies address capitalist harms produced by the tech companies, such as those related to monopoly or privacy, those actions do not ipso facto interrupt a firm’s commitment to and continued elaboration of surveillance capitalism. For example, calls to break up Google or Facebook on monopoly grounds could easily result in establishing multiple surveillance capitalist firms, though at a diminished scale, and thus clear the way for more surveillance capitalist competitors. Similarly, reducing Google and Facebook’s duopoly in online advertising does not reduce the reach of surveillance capitalism if online advertising market share is simply spread over five surveillance capitalist firms or fifty, instead of two. Throughout this book I focus on the unprecedented aspects of surveillance capitalist operations that must be contested and interrupted if this market form is to be contained and vanquished.
My focus in these pages tends toward Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. The aim here is not a comprehensive critique of these companies as such. Instead, I view them as the petri dishes in which the DNA of surveillance capitalism is best examined. As I suggested earlier, my goal is to map a new logic and its operations, not a company or its technologies. I move across the boundaries of these and other companies in order to compile the insights that can flesh out the map, just as earlier observers moved across many examples to grasp the once new logics of managerial capitalism and mass production. It is also the case that surveillance capitalism was invented in the United States: in Silicon Valley and at Google. This makes it an American invention, which, like mass production, became a global reality. For this reason, much of this text focuses on developments in the US, although the consequences of these developments belong to the world.
In studying the surveillance capitalist practices of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other corporations, I have paid close attention to interviews, patents, earnings calls, speeches, conferences, videos, and company programs and policies. In addition, between 2012 and 2015 I interviewed 52 data scientists from 19 different companies with a combined 586 years of experience in high technology corporations and startups, primarily in Silicon Valley. These interviews were conducted as I developed my “ground truth” understanding of surveillance capitalism and its material infrastructure. Early on I approached a small number of highly respected data scientists, senior software developers, and specialists in the “internet of things.” My interview sample grew as scientists introduced me to their colleagues. The interviews, sometimes over many hours, were conducted with the promise of confidentiality and anonymity, but my gratitude toward them is personal, and I publicly declare it here.
Finally, throughout this book you will read excerpts from W. H. Auden’s Sonnets from China, along with the entirety of Sonnet XVIII. This cycle of Auden’s poems is dear to me, a poignant exploration of humanity’s mythic history, the perennial struggle against violence and domination, and the transcendent power of the human spirit and its relentless claim on the future.
Part 1
The Foundations of Surveillance Capitalism
Chapter 2
August 9th, 2011 Setting the
Stage for Surveillance Capitalism
The dangers and the punishments grew greater, And the way back by angels was defended Against the poet and the legislator.
—W. H. AUDEN SONNETS FROM CHINA, II
On August 9, 2011, three events separated by thousands of miles captured the bountiful prospects and gathering dangers of our emerging information civilization. First, Silicon Valley pioneer Apple promised a digital dream of new solutions to old economic and social problems, and finally surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world’s most highly capitalized corporation. Second, a fatal police shooting in London sparked extensive rioting across the city, engulfing the country in a wave of violent protests. A decade of explosive digital growth had failed to mitigate the punishing austerity of neoliberal economics and the extreme inequality that it produced. Too many people had come to feel excluded from the future, embracing rage and violence as their only remedies. Third, Spanish citizens asserted their rights to a human future when they challenged Google by demanding “the right to be forgotten.” This milestone alerted the world to how quickly the cherished dreams of a more just and democratic digital future were shading into nightmare, and it foreshadowed a global political contest over the fusion of digital capabilities and capitalist ambitions. We relive that August day every day as in some ancient fable, doomed to retrace this looping path until the soul of our information civilization is finally shaped by democratic action, private power, ignorance, or drift.
I. The Apple Hack
Apple thundered onto the music scene in the midst of a pitched battle between demand and supply. On one side were young people whose enthusiasm for Napster and other forms of music file sharing expressed a new quality of demand: consumption my way, what I want, when I want it, where I want it. On the other side were music-industry executives who chose to instill fear and to crush that demand by hunting down and prosecuting some of Napster’s mostardent users. Apple bridged the divide with a commercially and legally viable solution that aligned the company with the changing needs of individuals while working with industry incumbents. Napster hacked the music industry, but Apple appeared to have hacked capitalism.
It is easy to forget just how dramatic Apple’s hack really was. The company’s profits soared largely on the strength of its iPod/iTunes/iPhone sales. Bloomberg Businessweek described Wall Street analysts as “befuddled” by this mysterious Apple “miracle.” As one gushed, “We can’t even model out some of the possibilities.… It’s like a religion.” 1 Even today the figures are staggering: three days after the launch of the Windows-compatible iTunes platform in October 2003, listeners downloaded a million copies of the free iTunes software and paid for a million songs, prompting Steve Jobs to announce, “In less than one week we’ve broken every record and become the largest online music company in the world.” 2 Within a month there were five million downloads, then ten million three months later, then twenty-five million three months after that. Four and a half years later, in January 2007, that number rose to two billion, and six years later, in 2013, it was 25 billion. In 2008 Apple surpassed Walmart as the world’s largest music retailer. iPod sales were similarly spectacular, exploding from 1 million units per month after the music store’s launch to 100 million less than four years later, when Apple subsumed the iPod’s functions in its revolutionary iPhone, which drove another step-function of growth. A 2017 study of stock market returns concluded that Apple had generated more profit for investors than any other US company in the previous century. 3
One hundred years before the iPod, mass production provided the gateway to a new era when it revealed a parallel universe of economic value hidden in new and still poorly understood mass consumers who wanted goods, but at a price they could afford. Henry Ford reduced the price of an automobile by 60 percent with a revolutionary industrial logic that combined high volume and low unit cost. He called it “mass production,” summarized in his famous maxim “You can have any color car you want so long as it’s black.”
Later, GM’s Alfred Sloan expounded on that principle: “By the time we have a product to show them [consumers], we are necessarily committed to selling that product because of the tremendous investment involved in bringing it to market.” 4 The music industry’s business model was built on telling its consumers what they would buy, just like Ford and Sloan. Executives invested in the production and distribution of CDs, and it was the CD that customers would have to purchase.
Henry Ford was among the first to strike gold by tapping into the new mass consumption with the Model T. As in the case of the iPod, Ford’s Model T factory was pressed to meet the immediate explosion of demand. Mass production could be applied to anything, and it was. It changed the framework of production as it diffused throughout the economy and around the world, and it established the dominance of a new mass-production capitalism as the basis for wealth creation in the twentieth century.
The iPod/iTunes innovations flipped this century-old industrial logic, leveraging the new capabilities of digital technologies to invert the consumption experience. Apple rewrote the relationship between listeners and their music with a distinct commercial logic that, while familiar to us now, was also experienced as revolutionary when first introduced.
The Apple inversion depended on a few key elements. Digitalization made it possible to rescue valued assets—in this case, songs—from the institutional spaces in which they were trapped. The costly institutional procedures that Sloan had described were eliminated in favor of a direct route to listeners. In the case of the CD, for example, Apple bypassed the physical production of the product along with its packaging, inventory, storage, marketing, transportation, distribution, and physical retailing. The combination of the iTunes platform and the iPod device made it possible for listeners to continuously reconfigure their songs at will. No two iPods were the same, and an iPod one week was different from the same iPod another week, as listeners decided and re-decided the dynamic pattern. It was an excruciating development for the music industry and its satellites—retailers, marketers, etc.—but it was exactly what the new listeners wanted.
How should we understand this success? Apple’s “miracle” is typically credited to its design and marketing genius. Consumers’ eagerness to have “what I want, when, where, and how I want it” is taken as evidence of the demand for “convenience” and sometimes even written off as narcissism or petulance. In my view, these explanations pale against the unprecedented magnitude of Apple’s accomplishments. We have contented ourselves for too long with superficial explanations of Apple’s unprecedented fusion of capitalism and the digital rather than digging deeper into the historical forces that summoned this new form to life.
Just as Ford tapped into a new mass consumption, Apple was among the first to experience explosive commercial success by tapping into a new society of individuals and their demand for individualized consumption. The inversion implied a larger story of a commercial reformation in which the digital era finally offered the tools to shift the focus of consumption from the mass to the individual, liberating and reconfiguring capitalism’s operations and assets. It promised something utterly new, urgently necessary, and operationally impossible outside the networked spaces of the digital. Its implicit promise of an advocacy-oriented alignment with our new needs and values was a confirmation of our inner sense of dignity and worth, ratifying the feeling that we matter. In offering consumers respite from an institutional world that was indifferent to their individual needs, it opened the door to the possibility of a new rational capitalism able to reunite supply and demand by connecting us to what we really want in exactly the ways that we choose.
As I shall argue in the coming chapters, the same historical conditions that sent the iPod on its wild ride summoned the emancipatory promise of the internet into our everyday lives as we sought remedies for inequality and exclusion. Of most significance for our story, these same conditions would provide important shelter for surveillance capitalism’s ability to root and flourish. More precisely, the Apple miracle and surveillance capitalism each owes its success to the destructive collision of two opposing historical forces. One vector belongs to the longer history of modernization and the centuries-long societal shift from the mass to the individual. The opposing vector belongs to the decades-long elaboration and implementation of the neoliberal economic paradigm: its political economics, its transformation of society, and especially its aim to reverse, subdue, impede, and even destroy the individual urge toward psychological self-determination and moral agency. The next sections briefly sketch the basic contours of this collision, establishing terms of reference that we will return to throughout the coming chapters as we explore surveillance capitalism’s rapid rise to dominance.
II. The Two Modernities
Capitalism evolves in response to the needs of people in a time and place. Henry Ford was clear on this point: “Mass production begins in the perception of a public need.” 5 At a time when the Detroit automobile manufacturers were preoccupied with luxury vehicles, Ford stood alone in his recognition of a nation of newly modernizing individuals—farmers, wage earners, and shopkeepers— who had little and wanted much, but at a price they could afford. Their “demand” issued from the same conditions of existence that summoned Ford and his men as they discovered the transformational power of a new logic of standardized, high-volume, low-unit-cost production. Ford’s famous “five-dollar day” was emblematic of a systemic logic of reciprocity. In paying assembly-line workers higher wages than anyone had yet imagined, he recognized that the whole enterprise of mass production rested upon a thriving population of mass consumers.
Although the market form and its bosses had many failings and produced many violent facts, its populations of newly modernizing individuals were valued as the necessary sources of customers and employees. It depended upon its communities in ways that would eventually lead to a range of institutionalized reciprocities. On the outside the drama of access to affordable goods and services was bound by democratic measures and methods of oversight that asserted and protected the rights and safety of workers and consumers. On the inside were durable employment systems, career ladders, and steady increases in wages and benefits. 6 Indeed, considered from the vantage point of the last forty years, during which this market form was systematically deconstructed, its reciprocity with the social order, however vexed and imperfect, appears to have been one of its most-salient features.
The implication is that new market forms are most productive when they are shaped by an allegiance to the actual demands and mentalities of people. The great sociologist Emile Durkheim made this point at the dawn of the twentieth century, and his insight will be a touchstone for us throughout this book. Observing the dramatic upheavals of industrialization in his time—factories, specialization, the complex division of labor—Durkheim understood that although economists could describe these developments, they could not grasp their cause. He argued that these sweeping changes were “caused” by the changing needs of people and that economists were (and remain) systematically blind to these social facts:
The division of labor appears to us otherwise than it does to economists. For them, it essentially consists in greater production. For us, this greater productivity is only a necessary consequence, a repercussion of the phenomenon. If we specialize, it is not to produce more, but it is to enable us to live in the new conditions of existence that have been made for us. 7
The sociologist identified the perennial human quest to live effectively in our “conditions of existence” as the invisible causal power that summons the division of labor, technologies, work organization, capitalism, and ultimately civilization itself. Each is forged in the same crucible of human need that is produced by what Durkheim called the always intensifying “violence of the struggle” for effective life: “If work becomes more divided,” it is because the “struggle for existence is more acute.” 8 The rationality of capitalism reflects this alignment, however imperfect, with the needs that people experience as they try to live their lives effectively, struggling with the conditions of existence that they encounter in their time and place.
When we look through this lens, we can see that those eager customers for Ford’s incredible Model T and the new consumers of iPods and iPhones are expressions of the conditions of existence that characterized their era. In fact, each is the fruit of distinct phases of a centuries-long process known as “individualization” that is the human signature of the modern era. Ford’s mass consumers were members of what has been called the “first modernity,” 9 but the new conditions of the “second modernity” produced a new kind of individual for whom the Apple inversion, and the many digital innovations that followed, would become essential. This second modernity summoned the likes of Google and Facebook into our lives, and, in an unexpected twist, helped to enable the surveillance capitalism that would follow.
What are these modernities and how do they matter to our story? The advent of the individual as the locus of moral agency and choice initially occurred in the West, where the conditions for this emergence first took hold. First let’s establish that the concept of “individualization” should not be confused with the neoliberal ideology of “individualism” that shifts all responsibility for success or failure to a mythical, atomized, isolated individual, doomed to a life of perpetual competition and disconnected from relationships, community, and society. Neither does it refer to the psychological process of “individuation” that is associated with the lifelong exploration of self-development. Instead, individualization is a consequence of long-term processes of modernization. 10
Until the last few minutes of human history, each life was foretold in blood and geography, sex and kin, rank and religion. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s son. The sense of the human being as an individual emerged gradually over centuries, clawed from this ancient vise. Around two hundred years ago, we embarked upon the first modern road where life was no longer handed down one generation to the next according to the traditions of village and clan. This “first modernity” marks the time when life became “individualized” for great numbers of people as they separated from traditional norms, meanings, and rules. 11 That meant each life became an open-ended reality to be discovered rather than a certainty to be enacted. Even where the traditional world remains intact for many people today, it can no longer be experienced as the only possible story.
I often think about the courage of my great-grandparents. What mixture of sadness, terror, and exhilaration did they feel when in 1908, determined to escape the torments of the Cossacks in their tiny village outside of Kiev, they packed their five children, including my four-year-old grandfather Max, and all their belongings into a wagon and pointed the horses toward a steamer bound for America? Like millions of other pioneers of this first modernity, they escaped a still-feudal world and found themselves improvising a profoundly new kind of life. Max would later marry Sophie and build a family far from the rhythms of the villages that birthed them. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado captured the exhilaration and daring of these first-modernity individuals in his famous song: “Traveler, there is no road; the road is made as you go.” This is what “search” has meant: a journey of exploration and self-creation, not an instant swipe to already composed answers.
Still, the new industrial society retained many of the hierarchical motifs of the older feudal world in its patterns of affiliation based on class, race, occupation, religion, ethnicity, sex, and the leviathans of mass society: its corporations, workplaces, unions, churches, political parties, civic groups, and school systems. This new world order of the mass and its bureaucratic logic of concentration, centralization, standardization, and administration still provided solid anchors, guidelines, and goals for each life.
Compared to their parents and all the generations before, Sophie and Max had to make things up on their own, but not everything. Sophie knew she would raise the family. Max knew he would earn their living. You adapted to what the world had on offer, and you followed the rules. Nor did anyone ask your opinion or listen if you spoke. You were expected to do what you were supposed to do, and little by little you made your way. You raised a nice family, and eventually you’d have a house, car, washing machine, and refrigerator. Mass production pioneers like Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan had found a way to get you these things at a price you could afford.
If there was anxiety, it reflected the necessity of living up to the requirements of one’s roles. One was expected to suppress any sense of self that spilled over the edges of the given social role, even at considerable psychic cost. Socialization and adaptation were the materials of a psychology and sociology that regarded the nuclear family as the “factory” for the “production of personalities” ready-made for conformity to the social norms of mass society. 12 Those “factories” also produced a great deal of pain: the feminine mystique, closeted homosexuals, church-going atheists, and back-alley abortions. Eventually, though, they even produced people like you and me.
When I set out on the open road, there were few answers, nothing to emulate, no compass to follow except for the values and dreams that I carried inside me. I was not alone; the road was filled with so many others on the same kind of journey. The first modernity birthed us, but we brought a new mentality to life: a “second modernity.” 13 What began as a modern migration from traditional lifeways bloomed into a new society of people born to a sense of psychological individuality, with its double-edged birthright of liberation and necessity. We experience both the right and the requirement to choose our own lives. No longer content to be anonymous members of the mass, we feel our entitlement to self determination, an obvious truth to us that would have been an impossible act of hubris for Sophie and Max. This mentality is an extraordinary achievement of the human spirit, even as it can be a life sentence to uncertainty, anxiety, and stress.
Since the second half of the twentieth century, the individualization story has taken this new turn toward a “second modernity.” Industrialization modernity and the practices of mass production capitalism at its core produced more wealth than had ever been imagined possible. Where democratic politics, distributional policies, access to education and health care, and strong civil society institutions complemented that wealth, a new “society of individuals” first began to emerge. Hundreds of millions of people gained access to experiences that had once been the preserve of a tiny elite: university education, travel, improved life expectancy, disposable income, rising standards of living, broad access to consumer goods, varied communication and information flows, and specialized, intellectually demanding work.
The hierarchical social compact and mass society of the first modernity promised predictable rewards, but their very success was the knife that cut us loose and sent us tumbling onto the shores of the second modernity, propelling us toward more-intricate and richly patterned lives. Education and knowledge work increased mastery of language and thought, the tools with which we create personal meaning and form our own opinions. Communication, information, consumption, and travel stimulated individual self-consciousness and imaginative capabilities, informing perspectives, values, and attitudes in ways that could no longer be contained by predefined roles or group identity. Improved health and longer life spans provided the time for a self-life to deepen and mature, fortifying the legitimacy of personal identity over and against a priori social norms.
Even when we revert to traditional roles, these are choices now rather than absolute truths imposed at birth. 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.” 14 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. 15
The first modernity suppressed the growth and expression of self in favor of collective solutions, but by the second modernity, the self is all we have. The new sense of psychological sovereignty broke upon the world long before the internet appeared to amplify its claims. We learn through trial and error how to stitch together our lives. Nothing is given. Everything must be reviewed, renegotiated, and reconstructed on the terms that make sense to us: family, religion, sex, gender, morality, marriage, community, love, nature, social connections, political participation, career, food…
Indeed, it was this new mentality and its demands that summoned the internet and the burgeoning information apparatus into our everyday lives. The burdens of life without a fixed destiny turned us toward the empowering information-rich resources of the new digital milieu as it offered new ways to amplify our voices and forge our own chosen patterns of connection. So profound is this phenomenon that one can say without exaggeration that the individual as the author of his or her own life is the protagonist of our age, whether we experience this fact as emancipation or affliction. 16
Western modernity had formed around a canon of principles and laws that confer inviolable individual rights and acknowledge the sanctity of each individual life. 17 However, it was not until the second modernity that felt experience began to catch up with formal law. This felt truth has been expressed in new demands to make actual in everyday life what is already established in law. 18
In spite of its liberating potential, the second modernity was slated to become a hard place to live, and our conditions of existence today reflect this trouble. Some of the challenges of the second modernity arise from the inevitable costs associated with the creation and sustenance of one’s own life, but second modernity instability is also the result of institutionalized shifts in economic and social policies and practices associated with the neoliberal paradigm and its rise to dominance. This far-reaching paradigm has been aimed at containing, rechanneling, and reversing the secular wave of second-modernity claims to self determination and the habitats in which those claims can thrive. We live in this collision between a centuries-old story of modernization and a decades-old story of economic violence that thwarts our pursuit of effective life.
There is a rich and compelling literature that documents this turning point in economic history, and my aim here is simply to call attention to some of the themes in this larger narrative that are vital to our understanding of the collision: the condition of existence that summoned both the Apple “miracle” and surveillance capitalism’s subsequent gestation and growth. 19
III. The Neoliberal Habitat
The mid-1970s saw the postwar economic order under siege from stagnation, inflation, and sharply reduced growth, most markedly in the US and the UK. There were also new pressures on the political order as second-modernity individuals—especially students, young workers, African Americans, women, Latinos, and other marginalized groups—mobilized around demands for equal rights, voice, and participation. In the US the Vietnam War was a focal point of social unrest, and the corruption exposed by the Watergate scandal triggered public insistence on political reform. In the UK inflation had strained industrial relations beyond the breaking point. In both countries the specter of apparently intractable economic decay combined with vocal new demands on the democratic social compact produced confusion, anxiety, and desperation among elected officials ill-equipped to judge why once-reliable Keynesian policies had failed to reverse the course.
Neoliberal economists had been waiting in the wings for this opportunity, and their ideas flowed into the “policy vacuum” that now bedeviled both governments. 20 Led by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, fresh from his 1974 Nobel Prize, and his American counterpart Milton Friedman, who received the Nobel two years later, they had honed their radical free-market economic theory, political ideology, and pragmatic agenda throughout the postwar period at the fringe of their profession, under the shadow of Keynesian domination, and now their time had come. 21
The free-market creed originated in Europe as a sweeping defense against the threat of totalitarian and communist collectivist ideologies. It aimed to revive acceptance of a self-regulating market as a natural force of such complexity and perfection that it demanded radical freedom from all forms of state oversight. Hayek explained the necessity of absolute individual and collective submission to the exacting disciplines of the market as an unknowable “extended order” that supersedes the legitimate political authority vested in the state: “Modern economics explains how such an extended order… constitutes an information gathering process… that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess, or control.…” 22 Hayek and his ideological brethren insisted on a capitalism stripped down to its raw core, unimpeded by any other force and impervious to any external authority. Inequality of wealth and rights was accepted and even celebrated as a necessary feature of a successful market system and as a force for progress. 23 Hayek’s ideology provided the intellectual superstructure and legitimation for a new theory of the firm that became another crucial antecedent to the surveillance capitalist corporation: its structure, moral content, and relationship to society.
The new conception was operationalized by economists Michael Jensen and William Meckling. Leaning heavily on Hayek’s work, the two scholars took an ax to the pro-social principles of the twentieth-century corporation, an ax that became known as the “shareholder value movement.” In 1976 Jensen and Meckling published a landmark article in which they reinterpreted the manager as a sort of parasite feeding off the host of ownership: unavoidable, perhaps, but nonetheless an obstacle to shareholder wealth. They boldly argued that structural disconnect between owners and managers “can result in the value of the firm being substantially lower than it otherwise could be.” 24 If managers sub optimized the value of the firm to its owners in favor of their own preferences and comfort, it was only rational for them to do so. The solution, these economists argued, was to assert the market’s signal of value, the share price, as the basis for a new incentive structure intended to finally and decisively align managerial behavior with owners’ interests. Managers who failed to bend to the ineffable signals of Hayek’s “extended order” would quickly become prey to the “barbarians at the gate” in a new and vicious hunt for unrealized market value.
In the “crisis of democracy” zeitgeist, the neoliberal vision and its reversion to market metrics was deeply attractive to politicians and policy makers, both as the means to evade political ownership of tough economic choices and because it promised to impose a new kind of order where disorder was feared. 25 The absolute authority of market forces would be enshrined as the ultimate source of imperative control, displacing democratic contest and deliberation with an ideology of atomized individuals sentenced to perpetual competition for scarce resources. The disciplines of competitive markets promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects too preoccupied with survival to complain.
As the old collectivist enemies had receded, new ones took their place: state regulation and oversight, social legislation and welfare policies, labor unions and the institutions of collective bargaining, and the principles of democratic politics. Indeed, all these were to be replaced by the market’s version of truth, and competition would be the solution to growth. The new aims would be achieved through supply-side reforms, including deregulation, privatization, and lower taxes.
Thirty-five years before Hayek and Friedman’s ascendance, the great historian Karl Polanyi wrote eloquently on the rise of the market economy. Polanyi’s studies led him to conclude that the operations of a self-regulating market are profoundly destructive when allowed to run free of countervailing laws and policies. He described the double movement: “a network of measures and policies… integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land, and money.” 26
The double movement, Polanyi argued, supports the market form while tethering it to society: balancing, moderating, and mitigating its destructive excesses. Polanyi observed that such countermeasures emerged spontaneously in every European society during the second half of the nineteenth century. Each constructed legislative, regulatory, and institutional solutions to oversee contested new arenas such as workers’ compensation, factory inspection, municipal trading, public utilities, food safety, child labor, and public safety.
In the US the double movement was achieved through decades of social contest that harnessed industrial production, however imperfectly, to society’s needs. It appeared in the trust busting, civil society, and legislative reforms of the Progressive Era. Later it was elaborated in the legislative, juridical, social, and tax initiatives of the New Deal and the institutionalization of Keynesian economics during the post–World War II era: labor market, tax, and social welfare policies that ultimately increased economic and social equality. 27 The double movement was further developed in the legislative initiatives of the Great Society, especially civil rights law and landmark environmental legislation. Many scholars credit such countermeasures with the success of market democracy in the US and Europe, a political economics that proved far more adaptive in its ability to produce reciprocities of demand and supply than either leftist theorists or even Polanyi had imagined, and by mid-century the large corporation appeared to be a deeply rooted and durable modern social institution. 28
The double movement was scheduled for demolition under the neoliberal flag, and implementation began immediately. In 1976, the same year that Jensen and Meckling published their path breaking analysis, President Jimmy Carter initiated the first significant efforts to radically align the corporation with Wall Street’s market metrics, targeting the airline, transportation, and financial sectors with a bold program of deregulation. What began as a “ripple” turned into “a tidal wave that washed away controls from large segments of the economy in the last two decades of the twentieth century.” 29 The implementation that began with Carter would define the Reagan and Thatcher eras, virtually every subsequent US presidency, and much of the rest of the world, as the new fiscal and social policies spread to Europe and other regions in varying degrees. 30
Thus began the disaggregation and diminishment of the US public firm. 31 The public corporation as a social institution was reinterpreted as a costly error, and its long-standing reciprocities with customers and employees were recast as destructive violations of market efficiency. Financial carrots and sticks persuaded executives to dismember and shrink their companies, and the logic of capitalism shifted from the profitable production of goods and services to increasingly exotic forms of financial speculation. The disciplines imposed by the new market operations stripped capitalism down to its raw core, and by 1989 Jensen confidently proclaimed the “eclipse of the public corporation.” 32
By the turn of the century, as the foundational mechanisms of surveillance capitalism were just beginning to take shape, “shareholder value maximization” was widely accepted as the “objective function” of the firm. 33 These principles, culled from a once-extremist philosophy, were canonized as standard practice across commercial, financial, and legal domains. 34 By 2000, US public corporations employed fewer than half as many Americans as they did in 1970. 35 In 2009 there were only half as many public firms as in 1997. The public corporation had become “unnecessary for production, unsuited for stable employment and the provision of social welfare services, and incapable of proving a reliable long-term return on investment.” 36 In this process the cult of the “entrepreneur” would rise to near-mythic prominence as the perfect union of ownership and management, replacing the rich existential possibilities of the second modernity with a single glorified template of audacity, competitive cunning, dominance, and wealth.
IV. The Instability of the Second Modernity
On August 9, 2011, around the same time that cheers erupted in Apple’s conference room, 16,000 police officers flooded the streets of London, determined to quell “the most widespread and prolonged breakdown of order in London’s history since the Gordon riot of 1780.” 37 The rioting had begun four nights earlier when a peaceful vigil triggered by the police shooting of a young man suddenly turned violent. In the days that followed, the number of rioters swelled as looting and arson spread to twenty-two of London’s thirty-two boroughs and other major cities across Britain. 38 Over four days of street action, thousands of people caused property damage of over $50 million, and 3,000 people were arrested.
Even as Apple’s ascension appeared to ratify the claims of second-modernity individuals, the streets of London told the grim legacy of a three-decade experiment in economic growth through exclusion. One week after the rioting, an article by sociologist Saskia Sassen in the Daily Beast observed that “if there’s one underlying condition, it has to do with the unemployment and bitter poverty among people who desire to be part of the middle class and who are keenly aware of the sharp inequality between themselves and their country’s wealthy elite. These are in many ways social revolutions with a small ‘r,’ protests against social conditions that have become unbearable.” 39
What were the social conditions that had become so unbearable? Many analysts agreed that the tragedy of Britain’s riots was set into motion by neoliberalism’s successful transformation of society: a program that was most comprehensively executed in the UK and the US. Indeed, research from the London School of Economics based on interviews with 270 people who had participated in the rioting reported on the predominant theme of inequality: “no job, no money.” 40 The terms of reference in nearly every study sound the same drumbeat: lack of opportunity, lack of access to education, marginalization, deprivation, grievance, hopelessness. 41 And although the London riots differed substantially from other protests that preceded and followed, most notably the Indignados movement that began with a large-scale public mobilization in Madrid in May 2011 and the Occupy movement that would emerge on September 17 in Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park, they shared a point of origin in the themes of economic inequality and exclusion. 42
The US, the UK, and most of Europe entered the second decade of the twenty-first century facing economic and social inequalities more extreme than anything since the Gilded Age and comparable to some of the world’s poorest countries. 43 Despite a decade of explosive digital growth that included the Apple miracle and the penetration of the internet into everyday life, dangerous social divisions suggested an even more stratified and antidemocratic future. “In the age of new consensus financial policy stabilization,” one US economist wrote, “the economy has witnessed the largest transfer of income to the top in history.” 44 A sobering 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund warned of instability, concluding that the global trends toward neoliberalism “have not delivered as expected.” Instead, inequality had significantly diminished “the level and the durability of growth” while increasing volatility and creating permanent vulnerability to economic crisis. 45
The quest for effective life had been driven to the breaking point under the aegis of market freedom. Two years after the North London riots, research in the UK showed that by 2013, poverty fueled by lack of education and unemployment already excluded nearly a third of the population from routine social participation. 46 Another UK report concluded, “Workers on low and middle incomes are experiencing the biggest decline in their living standards since reliable records began in the mid-19th Century.” 47 By 2015, austerity measures had eliminated 19 percent, or 18 billion pounds, from the budgets of local authorities, had forced an 8 percent cut in child protection spending, and had caused 150,000 pensioners to no longer enjoy access to vital services. 48 By 2014 nearly half of the US population lived in functional poverty, with the highest wage in the bottom half of earners at about $34,000. 49 A 2012 US Department of Agriculture survey showed that close to 49 million people lived in “food-insecure” households. 50
In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty integrated years of income data to derive a general law of accumulation: the rate of return on capital tends to exceed the rate of economic growth. This tendency, summarized as r > g, is a dynamic that produces ever-more-extreme income divergence and with it a range of antidemocratic social consequences long predicted as harbingers of an eventual crisis of capitalism. In this context, Piketty cites the ways in which financial elites use their outsized earnings to fund a cycle of political capture that protects their interests from political challenge. 51 Indeed, a 2015 New York Times report concluded that 158 US families and their corporations provided almost half ($176 million) of all the money that was raised by both political parties in support of presidential candidates in 2016, primarily in support of “Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations, cut taxes… and shrink entitlements.” 52 Historians, investigative journalists, economists, and political scientists have analyzed the intricate facts of a turn toward oligarchy, shining a light on the systematic campaigns of public influence and political capture that helped drive and preserve an extreme free-market agenda at the expense of democracy. 53
A précis of Piketty’s extensive research may be stated simply: capitalism should not be eaten raw. Capitalism, like sausage, is meant to be cooked by a democratic society and its institutions because raw capitalism is antisocial. As Piketty warns, “A market economy… if left to itself… contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.” 54 Many scholars have taken to describing these new conditions as neo-feudalism, marked by the consolidation of elite wealth and power far beyond the control of ordinary people and the mechanisms of democratic consent. 55 Piketty calls it a return to “patrimonial capitalism,” a reversion to a premodern society in which one’s life chances depend upon inherited wealth rather than meritocratic achievement. 56
We now have the tools to grasp the collision in all of its destructive complexity: what is unbearable is that economic and social inequalities have reverted to the preindustrial “feudal” pattern but that we, the people, have not. We are not illiterate peasants, serfs, or slaves. Whether “middle class” or “marginalized,” we share the collective historical condition of individualized persons with complex social experiences and opinions. We are hundreds of millions or even billions of second-modernity people whom history has freed both from the once-immutable facts of a destiny told at birth and from the conditions of mass society. We know ourselves to be worthy of dignity and the opportunity to live an effective life. This is existential toothpaste that, once liberated, cannot be squeezed back into the tube. Like a detonation’s rippling sound waves of destruction, the reverberations of pain and anger that have come to define our era arise from this poisonous collision between inequality’s facts and inequality’s feelings. 57
Back in 2011, those 270 interviews of London participants in the riots also reflected the scars of this collision. “They expressed it in different ways,” the report concludes, “but at heart what the rioters talked about was a pervasive sense of injustice. For some, this was economic—the lack of a job, money, or opportunity. For others it was more broadly social, not just the absence of material things, but how they felt they were treated compared with others.…” The “sense of being invisible” was “widespread.” As one woman explained, “The young these days need to be heard. It’s got to be justice for them.” And a young man reflected, “When no one cares about you you’re gonna eventually make them care, you’re gonna cause a disturbance.” 58 Other analyses cite “the denial of dignity” expressed in the wordless anger of the North London rampage. 59
When the Occupy movement erupted on another continent far from London’s beleaguered neighborhoods, it appeared to have little in common with the violent eruptions that August. The 99 percent that Occupy intended to represent is not marginalized; on the contrary, the very legitimacy of Occupy was its claim to supermajority status. Nevertheless, Occupy revealed a similar conflict between inequality’s facts and inequality’s feelings, expressed in a creatively individualized political culture that insisted on “direct democracy” and “horizontal leadership.” 60 Some analysts concluded that it was this conflict that ultimately crippled the movement, with its “inner core” of leaders unwilling to compromise their highly individualized approach in favor of the strategies and tactics required for a durable mass movement. 61 However, one thing is certain: there were no serfs in Zuccotti Park. On the contrary, as one close observer of the movement ruminated, “What is different is that from the start very large sections of we, the people, proved to be wiser than our rulers. We saw further and proved to have better judgment, thus reversing the traditional legitimacy of our elite governance that those in charge know better than the unwashed.” 62
This is the existential contradiction of the second modernity that defines our conditions of existence: we want to exercise control over our own lives, but everywhere that control is thwarted. Individualization has sent each one of us on the prowl for the resources we need to ensure effective life, but at each turn we are forced to do battle with an economics and politics from whose vantage point we are but ciphers. We live in the knowledge that our lives have unique value, but we are treated as invisible. As the rewards of late-stage financial capitalism slip beyond our grasp, we are left to contemplate the future in a bewilderment that erupts into violence with increasing frequency. Our expectations of psychological self-determination are the grounds upon which our dreams unfold, so the losses we experience in the slow burn of rising inequality, exclusion, pervasive competition, and degrading stratification are not only economic. They slice us to the quick in dismay and bitterness because we know ourselves to be worthy of individual dignity and the right to a life on our own terms.
The deepest contradiction of our time, the social philosopher Zygmunt Bauman wrote, is “the yawning gap between the right of self-assertion and the capacity to control the social settings which render such self-assertion feasible. It is from that abysmal gap that the most poisonous effluvia contaminating the lives of contemporary individuals emanate.” Any new chapter in the centuries old story of human emancipation, he insisted, must begin here. Can the instability of the second modernity give way to a new synthesis: a third modernity that transcends the collision, offering a genuine path to a flourishing and effective life for the many, not just the few? What role will information capitalism play?
V. A Third Modernity
Apple once launched itself into that “abysmal gap,” and for a time it seemed that the company’s fusion of capitalism and the digital might set a new course toward a third modernity. The promise of an advocacy-oriented digital capitalism during the first decade of our century galvanized second-modernity populations around the world. New companies such as Google and Facebook appeared to bring the promise of the inversion to life in new domains of critical importance, rescuing information and people from the old institutional confines, enabling us to find what and whom we wanted, when and how we wanted to search or connect.
The Apple inversion implied trustworthy relationships of advocacy and reciprocity embedded in an alignment of commercial operations with consumers’ genuine interests. It held out the promise of a new digital market form that might transcend the collision: an early intimation of a third-modernity capitalism summoned by the self-determining aspirations of individuals and indigenous to the digital milieu. The opportunity for “my life, my way, at a price I can afford” was the human promise that quickly lodged at the very heart of the commercial digital project, from iPhones to one-click ordering to massive open online courses to on-demand services to hundreds of thousands of web-based enterprises, apps, and devices.
There were missteps, shortfalls, and vulnerabilities, to be sure. The potential significance of Apple’s tacit new logic was never fully grasped, even by the company itself. Instead, the corporation produced a steady stream of contradictions that signaled business as usual. Apple was criticized for extractive pricing policies, offshoring jobs, exploiting its retail staff, abrogating responsibility for factory conditions, colluding to depress wages via illicit noncompete agreements in employee recruitment, institutionalized tax evasion, and a lack of environmental stewardship—just to name a few of the violations that seemed to negate the implicit social contract of its own unique logic.
When it comes to genuine economic mutation, there is always a tension between the new features of the form and its mother ship. A combination of old and new is reconfigured in an unprecedented pattern. Occasionally, the elements of a mutation find the right environment in which to be “selected” for propagation. This is when the new form stands a chance of becoming fully institutionalized and establishes its unique migratory path toward the future. But it’s even more likely that potential mutations meet their fate in “transition failure,” drawn back by the gravitational pull of established practices. 63
Was the Apple inversion a powerful new economic mutation running the gauntlet of trial and error on its way to fulfilling the needs of a new age, or was it a case of transition failure? In our enthusiasm and growing dependency on technology, we tended to forget that the same forces of capital from which we had fled in the “real” world were rapidly claiming ownership of the wider digital sphere. This left us vulnerable and caught unawares when the early promise of information capitalism took a darker turn. We celebrated the promise of “help is on the way” while troubling questions broke through the haze with increasing regularity, each one followed by a predictable eruption of dismay and anger.
Why did Google’s Gmail, launched in 2004, scan private correspondence to generate advertising? As soon as the first Gmail user saw the first ad targeted to the content of her private correspondence, public reaction was swift. Many were repelled and outraged; others were confused. As Google chronicler Steven Levy put it, “By serving ads related to content, Google seemed almost to be reveling in the fact that users’ privacy was at the mercy of the policies and trustworthiness of the company that owned the servers. And since those ads made profits, Google was making it clear that it would exploit the situation.” 64
In 2007 Facebook launched Beacon, touting it as “a new way to socially distribute information.” Beacon enabled Facebook advertisers to track users across the internet, disclosing users’ purchases to their personal networks without permission. Most people were outraged by the company’s audacity, both in tracking them online and in usurping their ability to control the disclosure of their own facts. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shut the program down under duress, but by 2010 he declared that privacy was no longer a social norm and then congratulated himself for relaxing the company’s “privacy policies” to reflect this self-interested assertion of a new social condition. 65 Zuckerberg had apparently never read user Jonathan Trenn’s rendering of his Beacon experience:
I purchased a diamond engagement ring set from overstock in preparation for a New Year’s surprise for my girlfriend.… Within hours, I received a shocking call from one of my best friends of surprise and “congratulations” for getting engaged.(!!!) Imagine my horror when I learned that overstock had published the details of my purchase (including a link to the item and its price) on my public Facebook newsfeed, as well as notifications to all of my friends. ALL OF MY FRIENDS, including my girlfriend, and all of her friends, etc.… ALL OF THIS WAS WITHOUT MY CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE. I am totally distressed that my surprise was ruined, and what was meant to be something special and a lifetime memory for my girlfriend and I was destroyed by a totally underhanded and infuriating privacy invasion. I want to wring the neck of the folks at overstock and facebook who thought that this was a good idea. It sets a terrible precedent on the net, and I feel that it ruined a part of my life. 66 [ wow that is messed up for sure smfh DC]
Among the many violations of advocacy expectations, ubiquitous “terms-of service agreements” were among the most pernicious. 67 Legal experts call these “contracts of adhesion” because they impose take-it-or-leave-it conditions on users that stick to them whether they like it or not. Online “contracts” such as terms-of-service or terms-of-use agreements are also referred to as “click-wrap” because, as a great deal of research shows, most people get wrapped in these oppressive contract terms by simply clicking on the box that says “I agree” without ever reading the agreement. 68 In many cases, simply browsing a website obligates you to its terms-of-service agreement even if you don’t know it. Scholars point out that these digital documents are excessively long and complex in part to discourage users from actually reading the terms, safe in the knowledge that most courts have upheld the legitimacy of click-wrap agreements despite the obvious lack of meaningful consent. 69 US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts admitted that he “doesn’t read the computer fine print.” 70 Adding insult to injury, terms of service can be altered unilaterally by the firm at any time, without specific user knowledge or consent, and the terms typically implicate other companies (partners, suppliers, marketers, advertising intermediaries, etc.) without stating or accepting responsibility for their terms of service. These “contracts” impose an unwinnable infinite regress upon the user that law professor Nancy Kim describes as “sadistic.”
Legal scholar Margaret Radin observes the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of such “contracts.” Indeed, the sacred notions of “agreement” and “promise” so critical to the evolution of the institution of contract since Roman times have devolved to a “talismanic” signal “merely indicating that the firm deploying the boilerplate wants the recipient to be bound.” 71 Radin calls this “private eminent domain,” a unilateral seizure of rights without consent. She regards such “contracts” as a moral and democratic “degradation” of the rule of law and the institution of contract, a perversion that restructures the rights of users granted through democratic processes, “substituting for them the system that the firm wishes to impose.… Recipients must enter a legal universe of the firm’s devising in order to engage in transactions with the firm.” 72
The digital milieu has been essential to these degradations. Kim points out that paper documents once imposed natural restraints on contracting behavior simply by virtue of their cost to produce, distribute, and archive. Paper contracts require a physical signature, limiting the burden a firm is likely to impose on a customer by requiring her to read multiple pages of fine print. Digital terms, in contrast, are “weightless.” They can be expanded, reproduced, distributed, and archived at no additional cost. Once firms understood that the courts were disposed to validate their click-wrap and browse-wrap agreements, there was nothing to stop them from expanding the reach of these degraded contracts “to extract from consumers additional benefits unrelated to the transaction.” 73 This coincided with the discovery of behavioral surplus that we examine in Chapter 3, as terms-of-service agreements were extended to include baroque and perverse “privacy policies,” establishing another infinite regress of these terms of expropriation. Even the former Federal Trade Commission Chairperson Jon Leibowitz publicly stated, “We all agree that consumers don’t read privacy policies.” 74 In 2008 two Carnegie Mellon professors calculated that a reasonable reading of all the privacy policies that one encounters in a year would require 76 full workdays at a national opportunity cost of $781 billion. 75 The numbers are much higher today. Still, most users remain unaware of these “rapacious” terms that, as Kim puts it, allow firms “to acquire rights without bargaining and to stealthily establish and embed practices before users, and regulators, realize what has happened.” 76
At first, it had seemed that the new internet companies had simply failed to grasp the moral, social, and institutional requirements of their own economic logic. But with each corporate transgression, it became more difficult to ignore the possibility that the pattern of violations signaled a feature, not a bug. Although the Apple miracle contained the seeds of economic reformation, it was poorly understood: a mystery even to itself. Long before the death of its legendary founder, Steve Jobs, its frequent abuses of user expectations raised questions about how well the corporation understood the deep structure and historic potential of its own creations. The dramatic success of Apple’s iPod and iTunes instilled internet users with a sense of optimism toward the new digital capitalism, but Apple never did seize the reins on developing the consistent, comprehensive social and institutional processes that would have elevated the iPod’s promise to an explicit market form, as Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan had once done.
These developments reflect the simple truth that genuine economic reformation takes time and that the internet world, its investors and shareholders, were and are in a hurry. The credo of digital innovation quickly turned to the language of disruption and an obsession with speed, its campaigns conducted under the flag of “creative destruction.” That famous, fateful phrase coined by evolutionary economist Joseph Schumpeter was seized upon as a way to legitimate what Silicon Valley euphemistically calls “permissionless innovation.” 77 Destruction rhetoric promoted what I think of as a “boys and their toys” theory of history, as if the winning hand in capitalism is about blowing things up with new technologies. Schumpeter’s analysis was, in fact, far more nuanced and complex than modern destruction rhetoric suggests.
Although Schumpeter regarded capitalism as an “evolutionary” process, he also considered that relatively few of its continuous innovations actually rise to the level of evolutionary significance. These rare events are what he called “mutations.” These are enduring, sustainable, qualitative shifts in the logic, understanding, and practice of capitalist accumulation, not random, temporary, or opportunistic reactions to circumstances. Schumpeter insisted that this evolutionary mechanism is triggered by new consumer needs, and alignment with those needs is the discipline that drives sustainable mutation: “The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.” 78
If a mutation is to be reliably sustained, its new aims and practices must be translated into new institutional forms: “The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates.” Note that Schumpeter says “creates,” not “destroys.” As an example of mutation, Schumpeter cites “the stages of organizational development from the craft shop to the factory to a complex corporation like U.S. Steel.…” 79
Schumpeter understood creative destruction as one unfortunate by-product of a long and complex process of creative sustainable change. “Capitalism,” he wrote, “creates and destroys.” Schumpeter was adamant on this point: “Creative response shapes the whole course of subsequent events and their ‘long-run’ outcome.… Creative response changes social and economic situations for good. … This is why creative response is an essential element in the historical process: No deterministic credo avails against this.” 80 Finally, and contrary to the rhetoric of Silicon Valley and its worship of speed, Schumpeter argued that genuine mutation demands patience: “We are dealing with a process whose every element takes considerable time in revealing its true features and ultimate effects.… We must judge its performance over time, as it unfolds through decades or centuries.” 81
The significance of a “mutation” in Schumpeter’s reckoning implies a high threshold, one that is crossed in time through the serious work of inventing new institutional forms embedded in the new needs of new people. Relatively little destruction is creative, especially in the absence of a robust double movement. This is illustrated in Schumpeter’s example of US Steel, founded by some of the Gilded Age’s most notorious “robber barons,” including Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. Under pressure from an increasingly insistent double movement, US Steel eventually institutionalized fair labor practices through unions and collective bargaining as well as internal labor markets, career ladders, professional hierarchies, employment security, training, and development, all while implementing its technological advances in mass production.
Mutation is not a fairy tale; it is rational capitalism, bound in reciprocities with its populations through democratic institutions. Mutations fundamentally change the nature of capitalism by shifting it in the direction of those it is supposed to serve. This sort of thinking is not nearly as sexy or exciting as the “boys and their toys” gambit would have us think, but this is what it will take to move the dial of economic history beyond the collision and toward modernity.
VI. Surveillance Capitalism Fills the Void
A new breed of economic power swiftly filled the void in which every casual search, like, and click was claimed as an asset to be tracked, parsed, and monetized by some company, all within a decade of the iPod’s debut. It was as if a shark had been silently circling the depths all along, just below the surface of the action, only to occasionally leap glistening from the water in pursuit of a fresh bite of flesh. Eventually, companies began to explain these violations as the necessary quid pro quo for “free” internet services. Privacy, they said, was the price one must pay for the abundant rewards of information, connection, and other digital goods when, where, and how you want them. These explanations distracted us from the sea change that would rewrite the rules of capitalism and the digital world.
In retrospect, we can see that the many discordant challenges to users’ expectations were actually tiny peepholes into a rapidly emerging institutional form that was learning to exploit second-modernity needs and the established norms of “growth through exclusion” as the means to an utterly novel market project. Over time, the shark revealed itself as a rapidly multiplying, systemic, internally consistent new variant of information capitalism that had set its sights on domination. An unprecedented formulation of capitalism was elbowing its way into history: surveillance capitalism.
This new market form is a unique logic of accumulation in which surveillance is a foundational mechanism in the transformation of investment into profit. Its rapid rise, institutional elaboration, and significant expansion challenged the tentative promise of the inversion and its advocacy-oriented values. More generally, the rise of surveillance capitalism betrayed the hopes and expectations of many “netizens” who cherished the emancipatory promise of the networked milieu. 82
Surveillance capitalism commandeered the wonders of the digital world to meet our needs for effective life, promising the magic of unlimited information and a thousand ways to anticipate our needs and ease the complexities of our harried lives. We welcomed it into our hearts and homes with our own rituals of hospitality. As we shall explore in detail throughout the coming chapters, thanks to surveillance capitalism the resources for effective life that we seek in the digital realm now come encumbered with a new breed of menace. Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. In the absence of a decisive societal response that constrains or outlaws this logic of accumulation, surveillance capitalism appears poised to become the dominant form of capitalism in our time.
How did this happen? It is a question that we shall return to throughout this book as we accumulate new insights and answers. For now we can recognize that over the centuries we have imagined threat in the form of state power. This left us wholly unprepared to defend ourselves from new companies with imaginative names run by young geniuses that seemed able to provide us with exactly what we yearn for at little or no cost. This new regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation. On this road, terms whose meanings we take to be positive or at least banal—“the open internet,” “interoperability,” and “connectivity”—have been quietly harnessed to a market process in which individuals are definitively cast as the means to others’ market ends.
Surveillance capitalism has taken root so quickly that, with the exception of a courageous cadre of legal scholars and technology-savvy activists, it has cunningly managed to evade our understanding and agreement. As we will discuss in more depth in Chapter 4, surveillance capitalism is inconceivable outside the digital milieu, but neoliberal ideology and policy also provided the habitat in which surveillance capitalism could flourish. This ideology and its practical implementation bends second-modernity individuals to the draconian quid pro quo at the heart of surveillance capitalism’s logic of accumulation, in which information and connection are ransomed for the lucrative behavioral data that fund its immense growth and profits. Any effort to interrupt or dismantle surveillance capitalism will have to contend with this larger institutional landscape that protects and sustains its operations.
History offers no control groups, and we cannot say whether with different leadership, more time, or other altered circumstances Apple might have perceived, elaborated, and institutionalized the jewel in its crown as Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan had done in another era. Nor is that opportunity forever lost— far from it. We may yet see the founding of a new synthesis for a third modernity in which a genuine inversion and its social compact are institutionalized as principles of a new rational digital capitalism aligned with a society of individuals and supported by democratic institutions. The fact that Schumpeter reckoned the time line for such institutionalization in decades or even centuries lingers as a critical commentary on our larger story.
These developments are all the more dangerous because they cannot be reduced to known harms—monopoly, privacy—and therefore do not easily yield to known forms of combat. The new harms we face entail challenges to the sanctity of the individual, and chief among these challenges I count the elemental rights that bear on individual sovereignty, including the right to the future tense and the right to sanctuary. Each of these rights invokes claims to individual agency and personal autonomy as essential prerequisites to freedom of will and to the very concept of democratic order.
Right now, however, the extreme asymmetries of knowledge and power that have accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogate these elemental rights as our lives are unilaterally rendered as data, expropriated, and repurposed in new forms of social control, all of it in the service of others’ interests and in the absence of our awareness or means of combat. We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action—this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society—that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future. And while the work of these inventions awaits us, this mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.
On August 9, 2011, events ricocheted between two wildly different visions of a third modernity. One was based on the digital promise of democratized information in the context of individualized economic and social relations. The other reflected the harsh truths of mass exclusion and elite rule. But the lessons of that day had not yet been fully tallied when fresh answers—or, more modestly, the tenuous glimmers of answers as fragile as a newborn’s translucent skin—rose to the surface of the world’s attention gliding on scented ribbons of Spanish lavender and vanilla.
VII. For a Human Future
In the wee hours of August 9, 2011, eighteen-year-old Maria Elena Montes sat on the cool marble floor of her family’s century-old pastry shop in the El Raval section of Barcelona, nursing her cup of sweet café con leche, lulled by the sunrise scuffling of the pigeons in the plaza as she waited for her trays of rum soaked gypsy cakes to set.
Pasteleria La Dulce occupied a cramped medieval building tucked into a tiny square on one of the few streets that had escaped both the wrecking ball and the influx of yuppie chic. The Montes family took care that the passing decades had no visible effect on their cherished bakery. Each morning they lovingly filled sparkling glass cases with crispy sugar-studded churros, delicate buñuelos fat with vanilla custard, tiny paper ramekins of strawberry flan, buttery mantecados, coiled ensaimadas drenched in powdered sugar, fluffy magdalenas, crunchy pestiños, and Great-Grandmother Montes’s special flaó, a cake made with fresh milk cheese laced with Spanish lavender, fennel, and mint. There were almond and blood-orange tarts prepared, according to Señora Montes, exactly as they had once been served to Queen Isabella. Olive-oil ice cream flavored with anise filled the tubs in the gleaming white freezer along the wall. An old ceiling fan cycled slowly, nudging the perfume of honey and yeast into every corner of the ageless room.
Only one thing had changed. Any other August would have found Maria Elena and her family at their summer cottage nestled into a pine grove near the seaside town of Palafrugell that had been the family’s refuge for generations. In 2011, however, neither the Montes nor their customers and friends would take their August holidays. The economic crisis had ripped through the country like the black plague, shrinking consumption and driving unemployment to 21 percent, the highest in the EU, and to an astonishing 46 percent among people under twenty-four years old. In Catalonia, the region that includes Barcelona, 18 percent of its 7.5 million people had fallen below the poverty line. 83 In the summer of 2011, few could afford the simple pleasure of an August spent by the sea or in the mountains.
There was new pressure to sell the building and let the future finally swallow La Dulce. The family could live comfortably on the proceeds of such a sale, even at the bargain rates they would be forced to accept. Business was slow, but Señor Fito Montes refused to lay off any members of a staff that was like an extended family after years of steady employment. Just about everyone they knew said that the end was inevitable and that the Montes should leap at the opportunity for a dignified exit. But the family was determined to make every sacrifice to safeguard Pasteleria La Dulce for the future.
Just three months earlier, Juan Pablo and Maria had made the pilgrimage to Madrid to join thousands of protesters at the Puerta del Sol, where a month-long encampment established Los Indignados, the 15M, as the new voice of a people who had finally been pushed to the breaking point by the economics of contempt. All that was left to say was “Ya. No mas!” Enough already! The convergence of so many citizens in Madrid led to a wave of protests across the nation, and eventually those protests would give way to new political parties, including Podemos. Neighborhood assemblies had begun to convene in many cities, and the Montes had attended such a meeting in El Raval just the night before.
With the evening’s conversations still fresh, they gathered in the apartment above the shop in the early afternoon of August 9 to share their midday meal and discuss the fate of La Dulce, not quite certain what Papa Montes was thinking.
“The bankers may not know it,” Fito Montes reflected, “but the future will need the past. It will need these marble floors and the sweet taste of my gypsy cakes. They treat us like figures in a ledger, like they are reading the number of casualties in a plane crash. They believe the future belongs only to them. But we each have our story. We each have our life. It is up to us to proclaim our right to the future. The future is our home too.”
Maria and Juan Pablo breathed a shared sigh of relief as they outlined their plan. Juan Pablo would withdraw temporarily from his university studies, and Maria Elena would postpone her matriculation. They would work on expanding La Dulce’s sales with new home-delivery and catering options. Everyone would take a pay cut, but no one would have to leave. Everyone would tighten their belts, except the fat buñuelos and their perfect comrades steadfast in neat, delicious rows.
We know how to challenge the inevitable, they said. We’ve survived wars; we’ve survived the Fascists. We’ll survive again. For Fito Montes, his family’s right to anticipate the future as their home demanded continuity for some things that are elusive, beautiful, surprising, mysterious, inexpressible, and immaterial but without which, they all agreed, life would be mechanical and soulless. He was determined, for example, to ensure that another generation of Spanish children would recognize the bouquet of his blood-orange tarts flecked with rose petals and thus be awakened to the mystery of medieval life in the fragrant gardens of the Alhambra.
On August 9 the heat rose steadily in the shady square, and the sun emptied the avenues where Huns, Moors, Castilians, and Bourbons had each in their turn marched to triumph. Those silent streets bore little evidence of the historic deliberations in Madrid that would be featured in the New York Times that very day. 84 But I imagine the two cities linked by invisible ribbons of scent rising from La Dulce high into the bleached Barcelona sky and drifting slowly south and west to settle along the austere facade of the building that housed the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, where another struggle for the right to the future tense was underway.
The Spanish Data Protection Agency had chosen to champion the claims of ninety ordinary citizens who, like the Montes family, were determined to preserve inherited meaning for a world bent on change at the speed of light. 85 In the name of “the right to be forgotten,” the Spaniards had stepped into the bullring brandishing red capes, resolved to master the fiercest bull of all: Google, the juggernaut of surveillance capitalism. When the agency ordered the internet firm to stop indexing the contested links of these ninety individuals, the bull received one of its first and most significant blows.
This official confrontation drew upon the same tenacity, determination, and sentiment that sustained the Montes family and millions of other Spaniards compelled to claw back the future from the self-proclaimed inevitability of indifferent capital. In the assertion of a right to be forgotten, the complexity of human existence, with its thousand million shades of gray, was pitted against surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives that produced the relentless drive to extract and retain information. It was there, in Spain, that the right to the future tense was on the move, insisting that the operations of surveillance capitalism and its digital architecture are not, never were, and never would be inevitable. Instead, the opposition asserted that even Google’s capitalism was made by humans to be unmade and remade by democratic processes, not commercial decree. Google’s was not to be the last word on the human or the digital future.
Each of the ninety citizens had a unique claim. One had been terrorized by her former husband and didn’t want him to find her address online. Informational privacy was essential to her peace of mind and her physical safety. A middle-aged woman was embarrassed by an old arrest from her days as a university student. Informational privacy was essential to her identity and sense of dignity. One was an attorney, Mario Costeja González, who years earlier had suffered the foreclosure of his home. Although the matter had long been resolved, a Google search of his name continued to deliver links to the foreclosure notice, which, he argued, damaged his reputation. While the Spanish Data Protection Agency rejected the idea of requiring newspapers and other originating sites to remove legitimate information—such information, they reasoned, would exist somewhere under any circumstances—it endorsed the notion that Google had responsibility and should be held to account. After all, Google had unilaterally undertaken to change the rules of the information life cycle when it decided to crawl, index, and make accessible personal details across the world wide web without asking anyone’s permission. The agency concluded that citizens had the right to request the removal of links and ordered Google to stop indexing the information and to remove existing links to its original sources.
Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—starting with the web—changed all of our lives. There have been enormous benefits, to be sure. But for individuals it has meant that information that would normally age and be forgotten now remains forever young, highlighted in the foreground of each person’s digital identity. The Spanish Data Protection Agency recognized that not all information is worthy of immortality. Some information should be forgotten because that is only human. Unsurprisingly, Google challenged the agency’s order before the Spanish High Court, which selected one of the ninety cases, that of attorney Mario Costeja González, for referral to the Court of Justice of the European Union. There, after lengthy and dramatic deliberations, the Court of Justice announced its decision to assert the right to be forgotten as a fundamental principle of EU law in May of 2014. 86
The Court of Justice’s decision, so often reduced to the legal and technical considerations related to the deletion or de-linking of personal data, was in fact a key inflection point at which democracy began to claw back rights to the future tense from the powerful forces of a new surveillance capitalism determined to claim unilateral authority over the digital future. Instead, the court’s analysis claimed the future for the human way, rejecting the inevitability of Google’s search-engine technology and recognizing instead that search results are the contingent products of the specific economic interests that drive the action from within the belly of the machine: “The operator of a search engine is liable to affect significantly the fundamental rights to privacy and to the protection of personal data. In the light of the potential seriousness of the interference” with those interests, “it cannot be justified by merely the economic interest which the operator of such an engine has in that processing.” 87 As legal scholars Paul M. Schwartz and Karl-Nikolaus Peifer summarized it, “The Luxembourg Court felt that free flow of information matters, but not as much, ultimately, as the safeguarding of dignity, privacy, and data protection in the European rights regime.” 88 The court conferred upon EU citizens the right to combat, requiring Google to establish a process for implementing users’ de-linking requests and authorizing citizens to seek recourse in democratic institutions, including “the supervisory authority or the judicial authority, so that it carries out the necessary checks and orders the controller to take specific measures accordingly.” 89
In reasserting the right to be forgotten, the court declared that decisive authority over the digital future rests with the people, their laws, and their democratic institutions. It affirmed that individuals and democratic societies can fight for their rights to the future tense and can win, even in the face of a great private power. As the human rights scholar Federico Fabbrini observed, with this vital case the European Court of Justice evolved more assertively into the role of a human rights court, stepping into “the mine-field of human rights in the digital age.…” 90
When the Court of Justice’s decision was announced, the “smart money” said that it could never happen in the US, where the internet companies typically seek cover behind the First Amendment as justification for their “permissionless innovation.” 91 Some technology observers called the ruling “nuts.” 92 Google’s leaders sneered at the decision. Reporters characterized Google cofounder Sergey Brin as “joking” and “dismissive.” When asked about the ruling during a Q&A at a prominent tech conference, he said, “I wish we could just forget the ruling.” 93
In response to the ruling, Google CEO and cofounder Larry Page recited the catechism of the firm’s mission statement, assuring the Financial Times that the company “still aims to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’” Page defended Google’s unprecedented information power with an extraordinary statement suggesting that people should trust Google more than democratic institutions: “In general, having the data present in companies like Google is better than having it in the government with no due process to get that data, because we obviously care about our reputation. I’m not sure the government cares about that as much.” 94 Speaking to the company’s shareholders the day after the court’s ruling, Eric Schmidt characterized the decision as a “balance that was struck wrong” in the “collision between a right to be forgotten and a right to know.” 95
The comments of Google’s leaders reflected their determination to retain privileged control over the future and their indignation at being challenged. However, there was ample evidence that the American public did not concede the corporation’s unilateral power. In fact, the smart money appeared not to be all that smart. In the year following the EU decision, a national poll of US adults found that 88 percent supported a law similar to the right to be forgotten. That year, Pew Research found that 93 percent of Americans believed that it was important to have control of “who can get information about you.” A series of polls echoed these findings. 96
On January 1, 2015, California’s “Online Eraser” law took effect, requiring the operator of a website, online service, online application, or mobile application to permit a minor who is a registered user of the operator’s service to remove, or to request and obtain removal of, content or information posted by the minor. The California law breached a critical surveillance embattlement, attenuating Google’s role as the self-proclaimed champion of an unbounded right to know and suggesting that we are still at the beginning, not the end, of a long and fitful drama.
The Spanish Data Protection Agency and later the European Court of Justice demonstrated the unbearable lightness of the inevitable, as both institutions declared what is at stake for a human future, beginning with the primacy of democratic institutions in shaping a healthy and just digital future. The smart money says that US law will never abandon its allegiance to the surveillance capitalists over the people. But the next decades may once again prove that the smart money can be wrong. As for the Spanish people, their Data Protection Agency, and the European Court of Justice, the passage of time is likely to reveal their achievements as a stirring early chapter in the longer story of our fight for a third modern that is first and foremost a human future, rooted in an inclusive democracy and committed to the individual’s right to effective life. Their message is carefully inscribed for our children to ponder: technological inevitability is as light as democracy is heavy, as temporary as the scent of rose petals and the taste of honey are enduring.
VIII. Naming and Taming
Taming surveillance capitalism must begin with careful naming, a symbiosis that was vividly illustrated in the recent history of HIV research, and I offer it as an analogy. For three decades, scientists aimed to create a vaccine that followed the logic of earlier cures, training the immune system to produce neutralizing antibodies, but mounting data revealed unanticipated behaviors of the HIV virus that defy the patterns of other infectious diseases. 97
The tide began to turn at the International AIDS Conference in 2012, when new strategies were presented that rely on a close understanding of the biology of rare HIV carriers whose blood produces natural antibodies. Research began to shift toward methods that reproduce this self-vaccinating response. 98 As a leading researcher announced, “We know the face of the enemy now, and so we have some real clues about how to approach the problem.” 99
The point for us is that every successful vaccine begins with a close understanding of the enemy disease. The mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes obstruct progress. We smell smoke and rush to close doors to rooms that are already fated to vanish. The result is like hurling snowballs at a smooth marble wall only to watch them slide down its facade, leaving nothing but a wet smear: a fine paid here, an operational detour there, a new encryption package there.
What is crucial now is that we identify this new form of capitalism on its own terms and in its own words. This pursuit necessarily returns us to Silicon Valley, where things move so fast that few people know what just happened. It is the habitat for progress “at the speed of dreams,” as one Google engineer vividly describes it. 100 My aim here is to slow down the action in order to enlarge the space for such debate and unmask the tendencies of these new creations as they amplify inequality, intensify social hierarchy, exacerbate exclusion, usurp rights, and strip personal life of whatever it is that makes it personal for you or for me. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so. We will need to know. We will need to decide. We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.
next
The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus
notes
CHAPTER ONE
1. Martin Hilbert, “Technological Information Inequality as an Incessantly Moving Target: The Redistribution of Information and Communication Capacities Between 1986 and 2010,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 65, no. 4 (2013): 821–35, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23020.
2. By 2014, about twenty years after the invention of the world wide web, an extensive survey by Pew Research found 87 percent of Americans using the internet. Among those, 76 percent regarded it as “a good thing for society” and 90 percent as “a good thing for me.” Indeed, people routinely call 911 when Facebook is down. In less than two decades after the Mosaic browser was released to the public, enabling easy access to the world wide web, a 2010 BBC poll found that 79 percent of people in twenty-six countries considered internet access to be a fundamental human right. Six years later, the United Nations adopted specific language on internet access: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” See Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie, “The web at 25 in the U.S.,” PewResearchCenter, February 27, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/the-web-at-25-in-the-u-s; “911 Calls About Facebook Outage Angers L.A. County Sheriff’s Officials,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-meln-911-calls-about-facebook-outage-angers-la-sheriffs-officials-20140801- htmlstory.html; “Internet Access ‘a Human Right,’” BBC News, March 8, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8548190.stm; “The Promotion, Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet,” United Nations Human Rights Council, June 27, 2016, https://www.article19.org/data/files/Internet_Statement_Adopted.pdf.
3. João Leal, The Making of Saudade: National Identity and Ethnic Psychology in Portugal (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2000), https://run.unl.pt/handle/10362/4386.
4. Cory D. Kidd et al., “The Aware Home: A Living Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing Research,” in Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Cooperative Buildings, Integrating Information, Organization, and Architecture, CoBuild ’99 (London: Springer-Verlag, 1999), 191–98, http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=645969.674887.
5. “Global Smart Homes Market 2018 by Evolving Technology, Projections & Estimations, Business Competitors, Cost Structure, Key Companies and Forecast to 2023,” Reuters, February 19, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/brandfeatures/venture-capital/article?id=28096.
6. Ron Amadeo, “Nest Is Done as a Standalone Alphabet Company, Merges with Google,” Ars Technica, February 7, 2018, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/nest-is-done-as-a-standalonealphabet-company-merges-with-google; Leo Kelion, “Google-Nest Merger Raises Privacy Issues,” BBC News, February 8, 2018, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42989073.
7. Kelion, “Google-Nest Merger Raises Privacy Issues.”
8. Rick Osterloh and Marwan Fawaz, “Nest to Join Forces with Google’s Hardware Team,” Google, February 7, 2018, https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-annoucements/nest-joinforces-googles-hardware-team.
9. Grant Hernandez, Orlando Arias, Daniel Buentello, and Yier Jin, “Smart Nest Thermostat: A Smart Spy in Your Home,” Black Hat USA, 2014, https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-14/materials/us-14-Jin-Smart-NestThermostat-A-Smart-Spy-In-Your-Home-WP.pdf.
10. Guido Noto La Diega, “Contracting for the ‘Internet of Things’: Looking into the Nest” (research paper, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, 2016); Robin Kar and Margaret Radin, “Pseudo-Contract & Shared Meaning Analysis” (legal studies research paper, University of Illinois College of Law, November 16, 2017), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3083129.
11. Hernandez, Arias, Buentello, and Jin, “Smart Nest Thermostat.”
12. For a prescient early treatment of these issues, see Langdon Winner, “A Victory for Computer Populism,” Technology Review 94, no. 4 (1991): 66. See also Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Jennifer M. Urban, and Su Li, “Privacy and Modern Advertising: Most US Internet Users Want ‘Do Not Track’ to Stop Collection of Data About Their Online Activities” (BCLT Research Paper, Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, October 8, 2012), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2152135; Joseph Turow et al., “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities That Enable It,” Annenberg School for Communication, September 29, 2009, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1478214; Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Jan Whittington, “Free: Accounting for the Costs of the Internet’s Most Popular Price,” UCLA Law Review 61 (February 28, 2014): 606; Jan Whittington and Chris Hoofnagle, “Unpacking Privacy’s Price,” North Carolina Law Review 90 (January 1, 2011): 1327; Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Jennifer King, Su Li, and Joseph Turow, “How Different Are Young Adults from Older Adults When It Comes to Information Privacy Attitudes & Policies?” April 14, 2010, http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/399.
13. The phrase is from Roberto Mangabeira Unger, “The Dictatorship of No Alternatives,” in What Should the Left Propose? (London: Verso, 2006), 1– 11.
14. Jared Newman, “Google’s Schmidt Roasted for Privacy Comments,” PCWorld, December 11, 2009, http://www.pcworld.com/article/184446/googles_schmidt_roasted_for_privacy_comments.html.
15. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 1:67.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Roben Farzad, “Apple’s Earnings Power Befuddles Wall Street,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 7, 2011, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-28/apple-s-earningspower-befuddles-wall-street.
2. “iTunes Music Store Sells Over One Million Songs in First Week,” Apple Newsroom, March 9, 2018, https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2003/05/05iTunes-Music-Store-SellsOver-One-Million-Songs-in-First-Week.
3. Jeff Sommer, “The Best Investment Since 1926? Apple,” New York Times, September 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/business/appleinvestment.html.
4. See Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin, The Support Economy: How Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (New York: Penguin, 2002), 230.
5. Henry Ford, “Mass Production,” Encyclopedia Britannica (New York: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1926), 821, http://memory.loc.gov/cgibin/query/h?ammem/coolbib:@field(NUMBER+@band(amrlg+lg48)).
6. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism: 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
7. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 1964), 275 (italics mine).
8. Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, 266.
9. Ulrich Beck and Mark Ritter, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1992).
10. For readers interested in a more detailed analysis of the rise of this phenomenon, I recommend the extended discussion in Zuboff and Maxmin, The Support Economy. See also Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth BeckGernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002); Ulrich Beck, “Why ‘Class’ Is Too Soft a Category to Capture the Explosiveness of Social Inequality at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century,” British Journal of Sociology 64, no. 1 (2013): 63–74; Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, “Varieties of Second Modernity: The Cosmopolitan Turn in Social and Political Theory and Research,” British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010): 409–43.
11. Beck and Ritter, Risk Society.
12. Talcott Parsons, Social Structure and Personality (New York: Free Press, 1964).
13. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization.
14. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 279.
15. Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Ronald F. Inglehart, “Changing Values Among Western Publics from 1970 to 2006,” West European Politics 31, nos. 1–2 (2008): 130–46; Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, “How We Got Here: How Development Leads to Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 88, no. 2 (2012): 48–50; Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 1 (2000): 19; Mette Halskov Hansen, iChina: The Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society, ed. Rune Svarverud (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2010); Yunxiang Yan, The Individualization of Chinese Society (Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009); Arthur Kleinman et al., Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Chang Kyung-Sup and Song Min-Young, “The Stranded Individual Under Compressed Modernity: South Korean Women in Individualization Without Individualism,” British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010); Chang Kyung-Sup, “The Second Modern Condition? Compressed Modernity as Internalized Reflexive Cosmopolitization,” British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010); Munenori Suzuki et al., “Individualizing Japan: Searching for Its Origin in First Modernity,” British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010); Anthony Elliott, Masataka Katagiri, and Atsushi Sawai, “The New Individualism and Contemporary Japan: Theoretical Avenues and the Japanese New Individualist Path,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 42, no. 4 (2012); Mitsunori Ishida et al., “The Individualization of Relationships in Japan,” Soziale Welt 61 (2010): 217–35; David Tyfield and John Urry, “Cosmopolitan China?” Soziale Welt 61 (2010): 277–93.
16. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization; Ulrich Beck, A God of One’s Own: Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010).
17. Thomas M. Franck, The Empowered Self: Law and Society in an Age of Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
18. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, xxii.
19. Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); T. Flew, “Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and Contemporary Neo-Liberalism Debates,” Thesis Eleven 108, no. 1 (2012): 44–65, https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513611421481; Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (London: Verso, 2013); Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (Brooklyn: Verso, 2013); António Ferreira, “The Politics of Austerity as Politics of Law,” Oñati Socio-Legal Series 6, no. 3 (2016): 496–519; David M. Kotz, The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, eds., The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015); David Jacobs and Lindsey Myers, “Union Strength, Neoliberalism, and Inequality: Contingent Political Analyses of US Income Differences Since 1950,” American Sociological Review 79 (2014): 752–74; Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Greta R. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
20. Jones, Masters of the Universe, 215. See also Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis.
21. Mirowski, Dardot and Laval, and Jones provide detailed accounts of these developments.
22. Friedrich August von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. William Warren Bartley, vol. 1, The Collected Works of Friedrich August Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 14–15.
23. Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 53–67.
24. Michael C. Jensen and William H. Meckling, “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure,” Journal of Financial Economics 3, no. 4 (1976): 12.
25. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis.
26. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 79.
27. Martin J. Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Sanford M. Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Michael Alan Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929–1939, Studies in Economic History and Policy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1987); C. Goldin and R. A. Margo, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-century,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, no. 1 (1992): 1–34; Edwin Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal,” in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, ed. Theda Skocpol, Margaret Weir, and Ann Shola Orloff (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 81–122.
28. Ian Gough, Anis Ahmad Dani, and Harjan de Haan, “European Welfare States: Explanations and Lessons for Developing Countries,” in Inclusive States: Social Policies and Structural Inequalities (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008); Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Kenneth Galbraith, Sean Wilentz, and James K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967); Gerald Davis, “The Twilight of the Berle and Means Corporation,” Seattle University Law Review 34, no. 4 (2011): 1121–38; Alfred Dupont Chandler, Essential Alfred Chandler: Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business, ed. Thomas K. McCraw (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1988).
29. Jones, Masters of the Universe, 217.
30. See, for example, Vivien A. Schmidt and Mark Thatcher, eds., Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kathleen Thelen, Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Peter Kingstone, The Political Economy of Latin America: Reflections on Neoliberalism and Development (New York: Routledge, 2010); Jeffry Frieden, Manuel Pastor, Jr., and Michael Tomz, Modern Political Economy and Latin America: Theory and Policy (Boulder, CO: Routledge, 2000); Giuliano Bonoli and David Natali, The Politics of the New Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Richard Münch, Inclusion and Exclusion in the Liberal Competition State: The Cult of the Individual (New York: Routledge, 2012), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10589064; Kyung-Sup Chang, Developmental Politics in Transition: The Neoliberal Era and Beyond (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Zsuzsa Ferge, “The Changed Welfare Paradigm: The Individualization of the Social,” Social Policy & Administration 31, no. 1 (1997): 20–44.
31. Gerald F. Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-shaped America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Davis, “The Twilight of the Berle and Means Corporation”; Özgür Orhangazi, “Financialisation and Capital Accumulation in the Non-financial Corporate Sector: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation on the US Economy: 1973–2003,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 32, no. 6 (2008): 863–86; William Lazonick, “The Financialization of the U.S. Corporation: What Has Been Lost, and How It Can Be Regained,” in The Future of Financial and Securities Markets (Fourth Annual Symposium of the Adolf A. Berle, Jr. Center for Corporations, Law and Society of the Seattle School of Law, London, 2012); Yuri Biondi, “The Governance and Disclosure of the Firm as an Enterprise Entity,” Seattle University Law Review 36, no. 2 (2013): 391– 416; Robert Reich, “Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board: The Full List,” US News & World Report, November 7, 2008, http://www.usnews.com/news/campaign-2008/articles/2008/11/07/obamastransition-economic-advisory-board-the-full-listn; Robert B. Reich, Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong with Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 2012).
32. Michael Jensen, “Eclipse of the Public Corporation,” Harvard Business Review, September–October, 1989.
33. Michael C. Jensen, “Value Maximization, Stakeholder Theory, and the Corporate Objective Function,” Business Ethics Quarterly 12, no. 2 (2002): 235–56.
34. Thomas I. Palley, “Financialization: What It Is and Why It Matters” (white paper, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, 2007), http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_525.pdf; Jon Hanson and Ronald Chen, “The Illusion of Law: The Legitimating Schemas of Modern Policy and Corporate Law,” Michigan Law Review 103, no. 1 (2004): 1–149; Henry Hansmann and Reinier Kraakman, “The End of History for Corporate Law” (working paper, Discussion Paper Series, Harvard Law School’s John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business, 2000), http://lsr.nellco.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? article=1068&context=harvard_olin.
35. Davis, “The Twilight of the Berle and Means Corporation,” 1131.
36. Gerald F. Davis, “After the Corporation,” Politics & Society 41, no. 2 (2013): 41.
37. Juta Kawalerowicz and Michael Biggs, “Anarchy in the UK: Economic Deprivation, Social Disorganization, and Political Grievances in the London Riot of 2011,” Social Forces 94, no. 2 (2015): 673–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sov052.
38. Paul Lewis et al., “Reading the Riots: Investigating England’s Summer of Disorder,” London School of Economics and Political Science, 2011, 17, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/46297.
39. Saskia Sassen, “Why Riot Now? Malaise Among Britain’s Urban Poor Is Nothing New. So Why Did It Finally Tip into Widespread, Terrifying Violence?” Daily Beast, August 15, 2011, http://www.donestech.net/ca/why_riot_now_by_saskia_sassen_newsweek.
40. Lewis et al., “Reading the Riots,” 25.
41. In addition to Lewis et al., “Reading the Riots,” see also Kawalerowicz and Biggs, “Anarchy in the UK”; James Treadwell et al., “Shopocalypse Now: Consumer Culture and the English Riots of 2011,” British Journal of Criminology 53, no. 1 (2013): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azs054; Tom Slater, “From ‘Criminality’ to Marginality: Rioting Against a Broken State,” Human Geography 4, no. 3 (2011): 106–15.
42. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). Piketty integrated years of income data to conclude that income inequality in the US and the UK has reached levels not seen since the nineteenth century. The top decile of US wage earners steadily increased its share of national income from 35 percent in the 1980s to over 46 percent in 2010. The bulk of this increase comes from the top 1 percent, whose share rose from 9 percent to 20 percent, about half of which went to the 0.1 percent. Piketty calculates that 60–70 percent of the top 0.1 percent of the income hierarchy is composed of managers who have succeeded in obtaining “historically unprecedented” compensation thanks to new valuemaximizing incentive structures.
43. On the general theme of the salience of democratically oriented social, political, and economic institutions in the mitigation of economic outcomes, see Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s monumental Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012). It is also the focus of Robert Reich’s work on inequality and regressive economic policy: Robert B. Reich, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future (New York: Vintage, 2011). See also Michael Stolleis, History of Social Law in Germany (Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), www.springer.com/us/book/9783642384530; Mark Hendrickson, American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Swank, “The Political Sources of Labor Market Dualism in Postindustrial Democracies, 1975–2011”; Emin Dinlersoz and Jeremy Greenwood, “The Rise and Fall of Unions in the U.S.” (NBER working paper, US Census Bureau, 2012), http://www.nber.org/papers/w18079; Basak Kus, “Financialization and Income Inequality in OECD Nations: 1995–2007,” Economic and Social Review 43, no. 4 (2012): 477–95; Viki Nellas and Elisabetta Olivieri, “The Change of Job Opportunities: The Role of Computerization and Institutions” (Quaderni DSE working paper, University of Bologna & Bank of Italy, 2012), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1983214; Gough, Dani, and de Haan, “European Welfare States”; Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Ferge, “The Changed Welfare Paradigm”; Jacoby, Modern Manors; Sklar, The United States as a Developing Country; J. Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen, “The Marshall Plan: History’s Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program,” in Post–World War II Economic Reconstruction and Its Lessons for Eastern Europe Today, ed. Rudiger Dornbusch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Baldwin, The Politics of Social Solidarity; Amenta, “Redefining the New Deal”; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1930). By 2014, a Standard and Poor’s report concluded that income inequality impedes economic growth and destabilizes the social fabric, a fact that Henry Ford had long ago acknowledged with his five-dollar day. See “How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening US Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide,” S&P Capital IQ, Global Credit Portal Report, August 5, 2014, https://www.globalcreditportal.com/ratingsdirect/renderArticle.do? articleId=1351366&SctArtId=255732&from=CM&nsl_code=LIME&sourceObjectId=8741033&sourceRevId=1&fee_ind=N&exp_date=20240804- 19:41:13.
44. Tcherneva, “Reorienting Fiscal Policy: A Bottom-Up Approach,” 57. See also Francisco Rodriguez and Arjun Jayadev, “The Declining Labor Share of Income,” Journal of Globalization and Development 3, no. 2 (2013): 1– 18; Oliver Giovannoni, “What Do We Know About the Labor Share and the Profit Share? Part III: Measures and Structural Factors” (working paper, Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, 2014), http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/what-do-we-know-about-thelabor-share-and-the-profit-share-part-3-measures-and-structural-factors; Dirk Antonczyk, Thomas DeLeire, and Bernd Fitzenberger, “Polarization and Rising Wage Inequality: Comparing the U.S. and Germany” (IZA discussion papers, Institute for the Study of Labor, March 2010), https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp4842.html; Duane Swank, “The Political Sources of Labor Market Dualism in Postindustrial Democracies, 1975–2001,” conference paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, 2013; David Jacobs and Lindsey Myers, “Union Strength, Neoliberalism, and Inequality: Contingent Political Analyses of US Income Differences Since 1950,” American Sociological Review 79 (2014): 752–74; Viki Nellas and Elisabetta Olivieri, “The Change of Job Opportunities: The Role of Computerization and Institutions” (Quaderni DSE working paper, University of Bologna & Bank of Italy, 2012), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=1983214; Gough, Dani, and de Haan, “European Welfare States: Explanations and Lessons for Developing Countries.”
45. Jonathan D. Ostry, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” Finance & Development 53, no. 2 (2016): 38–41; as another U.S. economist concluded, “The Great Recession of 2008 finally stripped away the illusion of economic expansion, revealing instead the bare bones of financial capitalism’s achievements: income stagnation since the mid-1970s for the majority pitted against immense concentrations of wealth for a tiny minority.” See Josh Bivens, “In 2013, Workers’ Share of Income in the Corporate Sector Fell to Its Lowest Point Since 1950,” Economic Policy Institute (blog), September 4, 2014, http://www.epi.org/publication/2013-workers-shareincome-corporate-sector. Studies of financial deepening—liberalization, financialization—in both developed and less developed economies have shown that it is linked to new instabilities, including bankruptcies, bank failures, extreme asset volatility, and recession in the real sectors of the economy. See, for example, Malcolm Sawyer, “Financial Development, Financialisation and Economic Growth” (working paper, Financialisation, Economy, Society & Sustainable Development Project, 2014), http://fessud.eu/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/Financialisation-and-growthSawyer-working-paper-21.pdf. See also William A. Galston, “The New Challenge to Market Democracies: The Political and Social Costs of Economic Stagnation” (research report, Brookings Institution, 2014), http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports2/2014/10/new-challengemarket-democracies; Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); James K. Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ronald Dore, “Financialization of the Global Economy,” Industrial and Corporate Change 17, no. 6 (2008): 1097–1112; Philip Arestis and Howard Stein, “An Institutional Perspective to Finance and Development as an Alternative to Financial Liberalisation,” International Review of Applied Economics 19, no. 4 (2005): 381–98; Asil Demirguc-Kunt and Enrica Detragiache, “The Determinants of Banking Crises in Developing and Developed Countries,” Staff Papers—International Monetary Fund 45, no. 1 (1998): 81–109.
46. Emanuele Ferragina, Mark Tomlinson, and Robert Walker, “Poverty, Participation and Choice,” JRF, May 28, 2013, https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/poverty-participation-and-choice.
47. Helen Kersley et al., “Raising the Benchmark: The Role of Public Services in Tackling the Squeeze on Pay,” New Economics Foundation, https://www.unison.org.uk/content/uploads/2013/12/On-lineCatalogue219732.pdf.
48. Sally Gainsbury and Sarah Neville, “Austerity’s £18bn Impact on Local Services,” Financial Times, July 19, 2015, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/5fcbd0c4-2948-11e5-8db8- c033edba8a6e.html? ftcamp=crm/email/2015719/nbe/InTodaysFT/product#axzz3gRAfXkt4.
49. Carmen DeNavas-Walt and Bernadette D. Proctor, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2014,” US Census Bureau, September 2015, http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/demo/p60- 249.pdf; Thomas Gabe, “Poverty in the United States: 2013,” Congressional Research Service, September 25, 2014, http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/key_workplace/1329.
50. Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Mark Nord, and Anita Singh, “Household Food Security in the United States in 2012” (economic research report, US Department of Agriculture, September 2013), https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/45129/39937_err-155.pdf? v=42199.
51. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 334–35. See also Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
52. Nicholas Confessore, “The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election,” New York Times, October 10, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/11/us/politics/2016- presidential-election-super-pac-donors.html.
53. Historian Nancy MacLean and journalist Jane Mayer document hidden operations of radical-right ideologues and their billionaire backers who command unlimited funds for the purposes of political and public manipulation, relying on clandestine networks of think tanks, donor organizations, and media outlets to skillfully exploit citizen unrest and drive it toward extremist views. See Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017); Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Anchor, 2017).
54. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 571.
55. Milan Zafirovski, “‘Neo-Feudalism’ in America? Conservatism in Relation to European Feudalism,” International Review of Sociology 17, no. 3 (2007): 393–427, https://doi.org/10.1080/03906700701574323; Alain Supiot, “The Public-Private Relation in the Context of Today’s Refeudalization,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 11, no. 1 (2013): 129–45, https://doi.org/10.1093/icon/mos050; Daniel J. H. Greenwood, “Neofeudalism: The Surprising Foundations of Corporate Constitutional Rights,” University of Illinois Law Review 163 (2017).
56. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 237–70.
57. For a poignant and powerful exploration of these themes, see Carol Graham, Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); David G. Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, “Unhappiness and Pain in Modern America: A Review Essay, and Further Evidence, on Carol Graham’s ‘Happiness for All?’” (NBER working paper, November 2017).
58. See Tim Newburn et al., “David Cameron, the Queen and the Rioters’ Sense of Injustice,” Guardian, December 5, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/dec/05/cameron-queen-injusticeenglish-rioters.
59. Slater, “From ‘Criminality’ to Marginality.”
60. Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (New York: Harper Collins, 2012); Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). See also Andrew Gavin Marshall, “World of Resistance Report: Davos Class Jittery amid Growing Warnings of Global Unrest,” Occupy.com, July 4, 2014, http://www.occupy.com/article/world-resistance-report-davos-class-jitteryamid-growing-warnings-global-unrest.
61. Todd Gitlin, “Occupy’s Predicament: The Moment and the Prospects for the Movement,” British Journal of Sociology 64, no. 1 (2013): 3–25, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12001.
62. Anthony Barnett, “The Long and Quick of Revolution,” Open Democracy, February 2, 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/anthony-barnett/longand-quick-of-revolution.
63. Peter Wells and Paul Nieuwenhuis, “Transition Failure: Understanding Continuity in the Automotive Industry,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 79, no. 9 (2012): 1681–92, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2012.06.008.
64. Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 172–73.
65. Bobbie Johnson, “Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, Says Facebook Founder,” Guardian, January 10, 2010, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy.
66. See Charlene Li, “Close Encounter with Facebook Beacon,” Forrester, November 23, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20071123023712/http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/11/closeencounter.html.
67. Peter Linzer, “Contract as Evil,” Hastings Law Journal 66 (2015): 971; Paul M. Schwartz, “Internet Privacy and the State,” Connecticut Law Review 32 (1999): 815–59; Daniel J. Solove, “Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 7 (2013): 1880– 1904.
68. Yannis Bakos, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, and David R. Trossen, “Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? Consumer Attention to Standard-Form Contracts,” Journal of Legal Studies 43, no. 1 (2014): 1–35, https://doi.org/10.1086/674424; Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, “A Psychological Account of Consent to Fine Print,” Iowa Law Review 99 (2014): 1745; Thomas J. Maronick, “Do Consumers Read Terms of Service Agreements When Installing Software? A Two-Study Empirical Analysis,” International Journal of Business and Social Research 4, no. 6 (2014): 137–45; Mark A. Lemley, “Terms of Use,” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2006), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=917926; Nili Steinfeld, “‘I Agree to the Terms and Conditions’: (How) Do Users Read Privacy Policies Online? An Eye-Tracking Experiment,” Computers in Human Behavior 55 (2016): 992–1000, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.09.038; Victoria C. Plaut and Robert P. Bartlett, “Blind Consent? A Social Psychological Investigation of Non-readership of Click-Through Agreements,” Law and Human Behavior, June 16, 2011, 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-011-9288-y.
69. Ewa Luger, Stuart Moran, and Tom Rodden, “Consent for All: Revealing the Hidden Complexity of Terms and Conditions,” in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’13 (New York: ACM, 2013), 2687–96, https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2481371.
70. Debra Cassens Weiss, “Chief Justice Roberts Admits He Doesn’t Read the Computer Fine Print,” ABA Journal, October 20, 2010, http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/chief_justice_roberts_admits_he_doesnt_read_the_computer_fine_print.
71. Margaret Jane Radin, Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 14.
72. Radin, Boilerplate, 16–17.
73. Nancy S. Kim, Wrap Contracts: Foundations and Ramifications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 50–69.
74. Jon Leibowitz, “Introductory Remarks at the FTC Privacy Roundtable,” FTC, December 7, 2009, http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/leibowitz/091207.pdf.
75. Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, “The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies,” Journal of Policy for the Information Society, 4, no. 3 (2008), http://hdl.handle.net/1811/72839.
76. Kim, Wrap Contracts, 70–72.
77. For an example of this rhetoric, see Tom Hayes, “America Needs a Department of ‘Creative Destruction,’” Huffington Post, October 27, 2011, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayes/america-needs-adepartmen_b_1033573.html.
78. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 68.
79. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 83.
80. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 412 (italics mine).
81. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 83.
82. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
83. Tom Worden, “Spain’s Economic Woes Force a Change in Traditional Holiday Habits,” Guardian, August 8, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/08/spain-debt-crisis-economyaugust-economy.
84. Suzanne Daley, “On Its Own, Europe Backs Web Privacy Fights,” New York Times, August 9, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/world/europe/10spain.html.
85. Ankit Singla et al., “The Internet at the Speed of Light” (ACM Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1145/2670518.2673876; Taylor Hatmaker, “There Could Soon Be Wi-Fi That Moves at the Speed of Light,” Daily Dot, July 14, 2014, https://www.dailydot.com/debug/sisoft-li-fi-vlc-10gbps.
86. “Google Spain SL v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (Case C131/12 (May 13, 2014),” Harvard Law Review 128, no. 2 (2014): 735.
87. Google Spain, 2014 E.C.R. 317, 80–81. 88. Paul M. Schwartz and Karl-Nikolaus Peifer, “Transatlantic Data Privacy,” Georgetown Law Journal 106, no. 115 (2017): 131, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3066971. A few of the many excellent analyses of the right to be forgotten include Dawn Nunziato, “Forget About It? Harmonizing European and American Protections for Privacy, Free Speech, and Due Process” (GWU Law School Public Law Research Paper, George Washington University, January 1, 2015), http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/1295; Jeffrey Rosen, “The Right to Be Forgotten,” Stanford Law Review Online 64 (2012):
88; “The Right to Be Forgotten (Google v. Spain),” EPIC.org, October 30, 2016, https://epic.org/privacy/right-to-be-forgotten; Ambrose Jones, Meg Leta, and Jef Ausloos, “The Right to Be Forgotten Across the Pond,” Journal of Information Policy 3 (2012): 1–23; Hans Graux, Jef Ausloos, and Peggy Valcke, “The Right to Be Forgotten in the Internet Era,” Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT, November 12, 2012, http://www.researchgate.net/publication/256039959_The_Right_to_Be_Forgotten_in_the_Internet_Era; Franz Werro, “The Right to Inform v. the Right to Be Forgotten: A Transatlantic Clash,” Liability in the Third Millennium, May 2009, 285– 300; “Google Spain SL v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos.” For a comprehensive review, see Anita L. Allen and Marc Rotenberg, Privacy Law and Society, 3rd ed. (St. Paul: West, 2016), 1520–52.
89. “Judgement in Case C-131/12: Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González” (Court of Justice of the European Union, May 13, 2014), https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014- 05/cp140070en.pdf.
90. Federico Fabbrini, “The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Rights to Data Privacy: The EU Court of Justice as a Human Rights Court,” in The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights as a Binding Instrument: Five Years Old and Growing, ed. Sybe de Vries, Ulf Burnitz, and Stephen Weatherill (Oxford: Hart, 2015), 21–22.
91. For excellent background on “free speech” and the First Amendment in cyberlaw, see Anupam Chander and Uyên Lê, “The Free Speech Foundations of Cyberlaw” (UC Davis Legal Studies Research Paper 351, September 2013, School of Law, University of California, Davis).
92. Henry Blodget, “Hey, Europe, Forget the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’—Your New Google Ruling Is Nuts!” Business Insider, May 14, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/europe-google-ruling-2014-5.
93. Greg Sterling, “Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin: I Wish I Could Forget the ‘Right to Be Forgotten,’” Search Engine Land, May 28, 2014, http://searchengineland.com/google-co-founder-brin-wish-forget-rightforgotten-192648.
94. Richard Waters, “Google’s Larry Page Resists Secrecy but Accepts Privacy Concerns,” Financial Times, May 30, 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f3b127ea-e708-11e3-88be00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http %3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Ff3b127ea-e708-11e3- 88be00144feabdc0.html%3Fsiteedition%3Duk&siteedition=uk&_i_referer=https %3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com.
95. James Vincent, “Google Chief Eric Schmidt Says ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Ruling Has Got the Balance ‘Wrong,’” Independent, May 15, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/google-chief-ericschmidt-says-right-to-be-forgotten-ruling-has-got-the-balance-wrong9377231.html.
96. Pete Brodnitz et al., “Beyond the Beltway February 26–27 Voter Poll,” Beyond the Beltway Insights Initiative, February 27, 2015, http://web.archive.org/web/20160326035834/http://beltway.bsgco.com/about; Mary Madden and Lee Rainie, “Americans’ Attitudes About Privacy, Security and Surveillance,” PewResearchCenter (blog), May 20, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-attitudes-about-privacysecurity-and-surveillance. A national poll conducted by Software Advice found that 61 percent of Americans believe that some version of the right to be forgotten is necessary, 39 percent want a European-style blanket right to be forgotten, and nearly half were concerned that “irrelevant” search results can harm a person’s reputation. A survey by YouGov found that 55 percent of Americans would support legislation similar to the right to be forgotten, compared to only 14 percent who would not. A US survey by Benenson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker published nearly a year after the EU decision found that 88 percent of respondents somewhat (36 percent) or strongly (52 percent) supported a US law that would let them petition companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to remove certain personal information that appears in search results. See Daniel Humphries, “U.S. Attitudes Toward the ‘Right to Be Forgotten,’” Software Advice, September 5, 2014, https://www.softwareadvice.com/security/industryview/right-to-beforgotten-2014; Jake Gammon, “Americans Would Support ‘Right to Be Forgotten,’” YouGov, December 6, 2017, https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/06/02/americans-would-support-rightbe-forgotten; Mario Trujillo, “Public Wants ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Online,” Hill, March 19, 2015, http://thehill.com/policy/technology/236246-poll-public-wants-right-to-be- forgotten-online.
97. Francis Collins, “Vaccine Research: New Tactics for Tackling HIV,” NIH Director’s Blog, June 30, 2015, https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2015/06/30/vaccine-research-new-tactics-fortackling-hiv; Liz Szabo, “Scientists Making Progress on AIDS Vaccine, but Slowly,” USAToday.com, August 8, 2012, http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/story/2012-07-25/aidsvaccine/56485460/1.
98. Collins, “Vaccine Research.”
99. Szabo, “Scientists Making Progress on AIDS Vaccine.”
100. See Mary Madden and Lee Rainie, “Americans’ Attitudes About Privacy, Security and Surveillance,” PewResearchCenter (blog), May 20, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/05/20/americans-attitudes-about-privacysecurity-and-surveillance.
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