Somni Porta
Reaction to:
Shosanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the Frontier of Power (Introduction, Chp. 1: “Home in Exile” & Chapter 2: August 9, 2011 “Setting the Stage for Surveillance Capitalism”).
Definition of “Surveillance Capitalism: A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.” (Or, for behavioral data, which is our voice, our personalities, our preferences, and our experiences”)
Zuboff starts Chapter 1, “Home or Exile in the Digital Age,” by providing a quotation from the past. She asks, “Home or exile,” “Lord or servant,” “Master or slave,” which touches upon the question of “knowledge, power, and authority.” In 2020, I would have to say that the digital world is now our virtual home. We seek comfort in our cell phones, our social media, our apps. We are lost, like Odysseus, without our electronic devices.
However, Zuboff warns us of a new -ism, instrumentalism, where the surveillance capitalists are the new Gorgons selling our data and “feeding off every human’s experiences” without any governmental controls nor restraints. According to Zuboff, “we cannot tear ourselves from the Internet, but the Internet is saturated with consumerism, and consumerism is now subjected to surveillance capitalism.” She calls this, “The Faustian Compact,” where we are unable to break free from the Internet, yet it is tearing us apart. We are always watched, analyzed, and categorized as if we were living in a petri-dish. What is the cost of surveillance capitalism? Our humanity. Our privacy. Our sanity.
What is the solution to this “unprecedented problem”? Reaction to:
Shosanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the Frontier of Power (Introduction, Chp. 1: “Home in Exile” & Chapter 2: August 9, 2011 “Setting the Stage for Surveillance Capitalism”).
“Surveillance Capitalism: A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.” (Or, for behavioral data, which is our voice, our personalities, our preferences, and our experiences”)
Zuboff starts Chapter 1, “Home or Exile in the Digital Age,” by providing a quotation from the past. She asks, “Home or exile,” “Lord or servant,” “Master or slave,” which touches upon the question of “knowledge, power, and authority.” In 2020, I would have to say that the digital world is now our virtual home. We seek comfort in our cell phones, our social media, our apps. We are lost, like Odysseus, without our electronic devices.
However, Zuboff warns us of a new -ism, instrumentalism, where the surveillance capitalists are the new Gorgons selling our data and “feeding off every human’s experiences” without any governmental controls nor restraints. According to Zuboff, “we cannot tear ourselves from the Internet, but the Internet is saturated with consumerism, and consumerism is now subjected to surveillance capitalism.” She calls this, “The Faustian Compact,” where we are unable to break free from the Internet, yet it is tearing us apart. We are always watched, analyzed, and categorized as if we were living in a petri-dish.
How did surveillance capitalism emerge? What happened to the governmental regulations? Take the case of hoarding: In New Jersey, legislators were quick to pass legislation that certain items such as toilet paper may not be returned to the stores. However, in the early days of the Internet, there are very few governmental regulations. In Chapter 2, August 9, 2011: Setting the Stage for Surveillance Capitalism,” Zuboff contends that Apple was able to “tap into individualized consumption” of music. The first shift is from mass consumption to individual consumption, which provided a conduit for surveillance capitalism to flourish and thrive, leading to the “second modernity” where “the self is all we have.” It is people living the selfie culture with the backdrop of neoliberalism.
Zuboff ends with wisdom: “If the digital world is to be our home, then it is who must make it so. We will need to know. We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.” Zuboff ends with a conditional sentence that refers back to her question of “Home or exile?” She surmises that if the digital world is our home, then we must have the knowledge, decision-making power, awareness, and agency. We cannot allow the technocrats, corporations, and technocrats to make decisions for us. One final note: We need to start by reading the fine print and terms of service.
