The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Using Karl Polanyi’s lens, we see that surveillance capitalism annexes human experience to the market dynamic so that it is reborn as behavior: the fourth “fictional commodity.” Polanyi’s first three fictional commodities—land, labor, and money—were subjected to law. Although these laws have been imperfect, the institutions of labor law, environmental law, and banking law are regulatory frameworks intended to defend society (and nature, life, and exchange) from the worst excesses of raw capitalism’s destructive power. Surveillance capitalism’s expropriation of human experience has faced no such impediments.

Radical indifference is a response to economic imperatives, and only occasionally do we catch an unobstructed view of its strict application as a managerial discipline. One such occasion was a 2016 internal Facebook memo acquired by BuzzFeed in 2018. Written by one of the company’s long-standing and most influential executives, Andrew Bosworth, it provided a window into radical indifference as an applied discipline. “We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly,” Bosworth began. He went on to explain how equivalence wins out over equality in the worldview of “an organism among organisms” that is essential to the march toward totality and thus the growth of surveillance revenues:
We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide. So we connect more people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that… anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.… That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in.… The best products don’t win. The ones everyone uses win… make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here.26
As Bosworth makes clear, from the viewpoint of radical indifference the positives and negatives must be viewed as equivalent, despite their distinct moral meanings and human consequences. From this perspective the only rational objective is the pursuit of products that snare “everyone,” not “the best products.”

We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior

Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the “hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends

Google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in much the same way that a century ago General Motors invented and perfected managerial capitalism

Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data

In the conquest of nature, industrial capitalism’s victims were mute. Those who would try to conquer human nature will find their intended victims full of voice, ready to name danger and defeat it. This book is intended as a contribution to that collective effort.
The Berlin Wall fell for many reasons, but above all it was because the people of East Berlin said, “No more!” We too can be the authors of many “great and beautiful” new facts that reclaim the digital future as humanity’s home. No more! Let this be our declaration.

Arendt, like Orwell, asserts the possibility of new beginnings that do not cleave to already visible lines of power. She reminds us that every beginning, seen from the perspective of the framework that it interrupts, is a miracle. The capacity for performing such miracles is entirely human, she argues, because it is the source of all freedom: “What usually remains intact in the epochs of petrification and foreordained doom is the faculty of freedom itself, the sheer capacity to begin, which animates and inspires all human activities and is the hidden source… of all great and beautiful things.”79

Orwell reviled Burnham for his absolute failure of “moral effort,” expressed in his profound loss of bearings. Under these conditions, “literally anything can become right or wrong if the dominant class of the moment so wills it.” Burnham’s loss of bearings allowed him “to think of Nazism as something rather admirable, something that could and probably would build up a workable and durable social order.”78

Orwell’s disgust is palpable: “It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now, the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.” Burnham’s “sensational” contradictions revealed his own enthrallment with power and a complete failure to ascertain the creative principle in human history. “In each case,” Orwell thundered, “he was obeying the same instinct: the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible.”77