Surveil and Control: A critical review of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

Surveillance capitalism has taken popular imagination by storm, and the scholarly world quickly followed. It is the nom du jour if one attempts to briefly describe the current regime of datafication for profit, and the power-hungry technology companies which increasingly dominate markets and societies. It serves as the intellectual backbone of Netflix’s The Social Dilemma, and that one necessary critical reference in articles across disciplines. But having read Shoshanna Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”, I suspect the concept has taken a life of its own, reinterpreted, expanded beyond Zuboff’s account of behavioural manipulation industry. It is a sign of a great oeuvre and a dazzling artist, but much less of critical accuracy. A long-time student of managers and firms, Zuboff adopts a functionalist, positivist lens to portray the rise of a new mode of accumulation. Her narrative draws heavily from the companies’ own accounts, dozens of interviews with data scientists and other accessible materials on business development. With a far from apologetic stance, the Harvard Business School professor openly admits the failings of neoliberal dogma and draws from intellectual traditions of heterodox schools. Hayek, Friedman and Jensen receive no mercy when Zuboff unpacks their political economy as in fact stripping people of agency and subduing them to the market. Instead, the book is rich with Polanyi’s “fictitious commodities” and “double movement”, Marx-inspired “behavioral surplus” and Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession”. Big Tech’s “coup from above” (p. 463) is one of the book’s excellent metaphors, clearly pointing to the stakes of the conflict en large: the loss of human sovereignty, a precondition for collective action and social order. Zuboff warns of this danger to democracy and free will, and the alarm has since rung true, be it in the case of algorithmically amplified genocide in Myanmar, or people unable to take sound decisions thanks to COVID-19 vaccine disinformation. The book reads essentially as a manifesto of uncertainty-as-liberty, human unpredictability and possibility of other futures, although a viable proposal of the better future is missing from this picture. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” employs Arendt’s ideas on free will to battle the impossible vision of perfect information and full rationality, now powering the fanaticism of fully automated smart contracts.