extraordinary, charming, profound, original

Extremely good. Far more deliberate and clear than a most articles on big tech.

…the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of other’s improved control of us. The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us. p.94

If Google is a search company, why is it investing in smart-home devices, wearables, and self-driving cars? If Facebook is a social network, why is it developing drones and augmented reality? This diversity sometimes confounds observers but is generally applauded as a visionary investment: far-out bets on the future. In fact, activities that appear to be varied and even scattershot across a random selection of industries and projects are actually all the same activity guided by the same aim: behavioral surplus capture. p.129

Surveillance capitalism is the puppet master that imposes its will through the medium of the ubiquitous digital apparatus. I now name the apparatus Big Other: it is the sensate, computational, connected puppet that renders, monitors, computes, and modifies human behavior. Big Other combines these functions of knowing and doing to achieve a pervasive and unprecedented means of behavioral modification. Surveillance capitalism’s economic logic is directed through Big Other’s vast capabilities to produce instrumentarian power, replacing the engineering of souls with the engineering of behavior. p.376

As competition for surveillance assets heats up, new laws of motion rise to salience. Eventually, these will shape an even-more-merciless imperative to predict future behavior with greater certainty and detail, forcing the whole project to break loose from the virtual world in favor of the one that we call “real”. (p. 174)

Chapter 6 - Hijacked: The Division of Learning in Society

• We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking. On the basis of this claim, we can ignore considerations of individual’s rights, interests, awareness, or comprehension.
• On the basis of our claim, we assert the right to take an individual’s experience for translation into behavioral data.
• Our right to take, based on our claim of free raw material, confers the right to own the behavioral data derived from human experience.
• Our rights to take and to own confer the right to know what the data disclose.
• Our rights to take, to own, and to know confer the right to decide how to use our knowledge.
• Our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide confer our rights to the conditions that preserve our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide. (p. 178)

On the strength of its unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power, surveillance capitalism achieves dominance over the division of learning in society - the axial principle of social order in an information civilization. This development is all the more dangerous because it is unprecedented. It cannot be reduced to known harms and therefore does not easily yield to known forms of combat. What is this new principle of social order, and how do surveillance capitalists take command of it? These are the questions that we pursue in the sections that follow. The answers help us reflect on what we have learned and prepare for what lies ahead. (p.179)

The answer to the question Who knows? was that the machine knows, along with an elite cadre able to wield the analytic tools to troubleshoot and extract value from information. The answer to Who decides? was a narrow market form and its business models that decide. Finally, in the absence of a meaningful double movement, the answer to Who decides who decides? defaults entirely to financial capital bound to the disciplines of shareholder-value maximization. (p.180)

Instead, Durkheim trained his sights on the social transformation already gathering around him, observing that “specialization” was gaining “influence” in politics, administration, the judiciary, science, and the arts. He concluded that the division of labor was no longer quarantined in the industrial workplace. Instead, it had burst through those factory walls to becoming the critical organizing principle of industrial society. This is also an example of Edison’s insight: that the principles of capitalism initially aimed at production eventually shape the wider social and moral milieu. “Whatever opinion one has about the division of labor,” Durkheim wrote, “everyone knows that it exists, and is more and more becoming one of the fundamental bases of the social order.” (p. 183)

Surveillance capitalism’s command of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of the two texts. The specific mechanisms of surveillance capitalism compel the production of two “electronic texts, not just one. When it comes to the first text, we are its authors and readers. This public-facing text is familiar and celebrated for the universe of information and connection it brings to our fingertips. […] The first text, full of promise, actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text. Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how trivial or fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction. […] This one is hidden from our view: “read only” for surveillance capitalists. […] Worse still, it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text. (p. 185)

conclusion

defining feature of surveillance capitalism: its “command and control of the division of learning in society”