On privacy and Surveillance Capitalism

I stored up for a bigger one, this time, in a topic wherein I actually know something! Though yes, in background we have worries about a looming U.S.-Iran war, which I've warned about since November 2017... and more recently... asking you to make sure your neighbors know terms like "Saddam's WMDs," "Tokin Gulf Incident," "Gleiwitz," and "Reichstag fire." (And see what Navy vet Jim Wright says about this recently, here.)   

Over the long haul, our way out of these messes will almost always be more light. Exposing the wicked. Which brings us to...

== Fear of exposure ==

Harvard Prof. Shoshana Zuboff’s new book - The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power - is a massive overview of the major quandary of our age. It's reviewed by Noah Smith at Bloomberg, who begins by citing a simplified view of my own Transparent Society. (In fact, a world awash in light won't end privacy. It is (I assert) the only possible way that citizens will be able to preserve some privacy.)

Zuboff's book is also reviewed in the Guardian – and yes, I’ve been asked my reaction. Here's a substantial and worthwhile extract from that review:

“Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural 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."

Zuboff thus  connects to the recent works of Yuval Harari, who foresees a future society driven and propelled by "dataism." Back to the Guardian review. 

"Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”

  

Reviewer John Naughton continues: 
“While the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users. In that sense, her vast (660-page) book is a continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and – dare I say it – Karl Marx.” 

(An aside: on a recent flight from DC, I sat across from a teenager who was reading Das Kapital. Old Karl has been re-awakened and is flying off the shelves, worldwide. And this resurrection was achieved by the gluttonous outrages of an oligarchy that seems bent on behaving exactly as KM described.)

== Simplistic, but with cause ==

Summarized in this interview, Zuboff correlates past episodes of rapacious colonialism with the way major data corporations treat us. Good line: Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us. Once we thought of digital services as free, but now surveillance capitalists think of us as free.

“Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists,” says Zuboff, “or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking old Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”

"At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx's 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 experience."  She examines several major organizations -- notably Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft -- that are in various stages of developing a "technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction-operation." In the end, "surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge." 

== And just like Marx... this model has fatal weaknesses ==

While describing valid complaits about info-greed by capitalists, Zuboff misses the key point that all elite accumulations of power will do this, trying to arrange for information to flow upwards, as it did into the manors, castles and cathedrals of old. This is monkey behavior; you see it in chimps. Hence, when she reflexively shouts "They're looking at you!" she and almost every other privacy paladin ignores the only possible conclusion from this tome:  that being seen is inevitable. 

Seriously, what is it she aims to accomplish with her book, with all its alarums, if failure of all constraints and freedom is unavoidable?

Time to step back. Maybe take a whiff of how our ancestors were treated when past elites similarly knew everything of any importance about those toiling below them in the villages and fields, when the aim of collecting "data" about the peasants (via priests and local gossips and by torture) was not about "selling them stuff." It was about life and death. About eviction from your hovel, or being levied into a hopeless war. It was about starvation.

Sure, elites always had imbalanced advantages when it came to surveillance  and it's worrisome, as it always was! But it's what they can do to you that matters. And right now what they can do - the plaint of Zuboff and most privacy paladins - is intrusively try to sell you stuff. 

Now, there are reasons why that business model is doomed, but that's beside the point. The way to limit what the mighty can do to you with your information is not to limit what elites know. There is not a scintilla of a chance that can happen and no example across the history of our species when it ever actually occurre.

The solution is not to (impossibly) blind elites, but to strip them naked, so that - no matter what they know about you, they hare severely hampered at using it against you.

That remedy has actually been used effectively, across the last 200 years. I give example after example, in The Transparent Society. 

== The reflex is addictive ==

Alas, Our earnest and sincere paladins of progress and freedom keep issuing hysterical screams "They're LOOKING at you!" without ever offering even a glimpse at the only remedy that can possibly work.

“This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society. The message here is simple: Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.”

Yet the author displays stunning contempt for the masses: “There can be no exit from processes that are intentionally designed to bypass individual awareness and produce ignorance, especially when these are the very same processes upon which we must depend for effective daily life. So our participation is best explained in terms of necessity, dependency, the foreclosure of alternatives, and enforced ignorance.”

Mind you, I agree with the overall call to action: “Our societies have tamed the dangerous excesses of raw capitalism before, and we must do it again….  We need new paradigms born of a close understanding of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives and foundational mechanisms.” 

Um sure. But doesn’t that imply that the solution is either state paternalism or else leveling the playing field?

Alas, the inevitable tilt is toward the former:  “GDPR [a recent EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the EU] is a good start, and time will tell if we can build on that sufficiently to help found and enforce a new paradigm of information capitalism.”

Except… does she point to a single paternalistic privacy protection or restriction that has ever effectively limited the data-aggrandizement processes that she decries?

In spurning other suggestions, Prof. Zuboff commands that the tide go out: “For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place?” 

“So what is to be done? In any confrontation with the unprecedented, the first work begins with naming. Speaking for myself, this is why I’ve devoted the past seven years to this work… to move forward the project of naming as the first necessary step toward taming. My hope is that careful naming will give us all a better understanding of the true nature of this rogue mutation of capitalism and contribute to a sea change in public opinion, most of all among the young.”

Vague, vague, vague arm-wavings after a 900 page, well-documented call for resignation and despair, avoiding any look at the one thing that ever worked. The only thing that can.

== A fictional perspective ==

  

Someone report back on this new novel - Golden State, by Ben H. Winters, author of the alternate history, Underground Airlines. As reviewed on NPR: “The world as we know it has been destroyed, and though we never find out exactly how, it appears it had something to do with a pandemic of lies. In the Golden State, lies are against the law, and the main enforcers of the truth are known as Speculators. If it's against the law to lie, it must also be against the law "to hypothesize, to imagine versions of what might have happened. But when you are trying to solve, for example, a suspicious death, sometimes it is necessary to hypothesize so we can try to follow the leads and crack this case. So to do that there are individuals within the Golden State, a special sort of law enforcement officer who has license to speculate."

It doesn’t sound remotely human or plausible – like those absurd films and tales abut dystopias that ban emotion – but perhaps an interesting thought experiment about a type of transparency.

And finally...

The object of the videogame DietDash is to travel through the aisles of a supermarket and avoid sugary foods. While it’s not an exciting game, overweight people who play it win in real life by losing up to 3.1 percent of their bodyweight after 8 weeks. The game was developed at Drexel University and researchers there are seeking recruits for a newer, highly gamified version of the shopping simulation.  Huh.