Businesses, advertisers, commerce always try to persuade people, you know, always try to change people’s behavior and get them to buy something that they didn’t want to buy so there’s nothing new about this. And of course, that’s true. There is nothing new about our desire to persuade each other to do things that we might not have otherwise done, or maybe to do things that we don’t even want to do. There’s nothing new about human persuasion.
Shoshana Zubhoff: Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (November 2019)
But let’s not lose our bearings. Because what is new here, is that at no other time in history, have the wealthiest private corporations had at their disposal, a pervasive global architecture of ubiquitous computation able to amass unparalleled concentrations of information about individuals, groups and populations sufficient to mobilize the pivot from the monitoring, to the actuation of behavior remotely and at scale. This, my friends, is unprecedented.
What is this new power. It works its will through the medium of digital instrumentation. It’s not sending anybody to our homes at night to take us to the Gulag or the camp. It’s not threatening us with murder or terror. It is not totalitarian power, but it is a new and unprecedented form of power, just as totalitarianism presented itself as a new and unprecedented power in the 20th century. This new power is what I call instrumentarian power. It works its will remotely. It comes to us, secretly, quietly. And if we ever know it’s there, it might actually greet us with a cappuccino, and a smile. Nevertheless, it represents a global means of behavioral modification, and is the engine of growth for surveillance capitalism.
Okay, so we’ve now climbed a mountain, we’ve climbed the mountain of the division of learning. And we’ve peeked inside the fortress into the AI hub, into these backstage operations. And what have we found a frontier operation, run by geniuses funded by immense amounts of capital. Are they solving the climate crisis? Are they curing cancers?
Are they figuring out how to get rid of all those plastic particles that now even are detectable in the Arctic snow. No, they’re not doing any of that. Instead, all of that genius and all of that capital is dedicated to knowing everything about us and pivoting that knowledge to the remote control of people for profit. I don’t like that.
This is how the age of surveillance capitalism becomes an age of conquest. So, you know, we’re meant to sleepwalk through all of this. We’re meant to be ignorant. This is engineered for our ignorance. Mark Zuckerberg says privacy is the future, very confusing.
