BOOKS: AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
Did you play Pokémon GO, the 2016 mobile game that drove a billion users outdoors? It used GPS and augmented reality to locate, capture, battle and train digital critters that appeared in your environment via your phone screen.
It got fully-grown adults to spend real money on lucky eggs and virtual incense, and it also got them out into a real world overlaid with fabricated rewards. It gently hoarded Pokémon-hunting players to eat, drink and buy in restaurants, bars and shops that paid to play. It drove user behaviour. By early 2019, the game had a billion downloads and $3 billion in revenue.
You didn’t play Pokémon? Nor did I. But we are part of a larger game. We use digital products that learn our behaviour, our needs, preferences, favourites and fears. Search engines, social media, web browsers, our Fitbits and trackers, our smart TVs.
Remember Inception, the 2010 sci-fic movie about implanting an idea in someone else’s mind? Well, in 1930s Germany, as in modern India, the right messaging could convince millions of a threat from a minority. But modern technology goes a step further: to behavioural micro-targeting. Cambridge Analytica used Facebook user profiles and behaviour to analyse, and then influence opinion en masse in favour of a candidate, or the Brexit vote.
Author Shoshana Zuboff says the global digital giants, our surveillance capitalists, are doing this on a grand scale. I was sceptical about this conspiracy theory when I started out on this book. Midway, I became a convert.
Surveillance capitalism translates our experiences and behaviour into data (a small part of which may be used for product improvement). The data is extracted, analysed, measured and exploited. From this they make predictive products that anticipate what we think, feel, do or desire: products that are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioural predictions that Zuboff calls behavioural futures markets.
The surveillance capitalists soon discovered the power of this tech—they could intervene, to nudge, coax, tune and herd behaviour toward profitable outcomes. They learn our behaviour, and they can also shape it—at scale. Our minds are being mined for data, and are being ‘radically changed in the process’.
Google was our portal to knowledge; Facebook was our friends’ club. Now, both know our darkest secrets, and have our “behavioural surplus”—information on our every thought and action, to be traded in new markets based on predicting our needs. Google pioneered surveillance capitalism, Zuboff says, which spread to Facebook and Microsoft. Amazon has veered in this direction, and it is a constant challenge to Apple as an internal conflict.
Behavioural futures were first aimed at online advertising. Now, the mechanisms have gone offline too, aided by smart devices. The tech that expropriated your online browsing, likes and clicks is now trained on your conversations, your activities, car drives.
And so we trade our privacy for convenience, a conflict whose psychic numbing inures us to the realities of being tracked, mined, modified. It forces us to rationalise or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand.
The surveillance capitalists protect themselves with obscure algorithms, convincing many users that it’s just the tech doing it. After the world became aware in 2009 that Google maintains search histories indefinitely (and the data may go to law enforcement), then CEO Eric Schmidt said: “The reality is that search engines do retain this information for some time.” No, search engines do not retain the information, surveillance capitalism does.
Zuboff’s book was published in 2019. But it has become more relevant in a locked down 2020 world forced to go online. Going to school, attending events, payments: these are now necessarily digital. They will be mined, our data derivatives will land up in those behavioural futures markets, as we’ll be coaxed, again, toward someone’s profitable outcome. Gradually eroding both free markets, and free will, making surveillance capitalism a horrific perversion of capitalism as we knew it—a terrible legacy, like climate change, for future generations to deal with. ■
THE BOOK IS ALL THE MORE RELEVANT IN THE LOCKED DOWN 2020 WORLD, WHERE OUR EXTENDED DIGITAL PRESENCE WILL BE MINED