Re: <nettime> James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

I agree with David. Chandler's "The Visible Hand" was also written from a business-school perspective, with a much greater flattening of all the stakes and a much less critical outlook; but still it's a valuable book for understanding the vertically integrated corporation, and to use as a foil when putting forth alternative analyses. We will be stuck with Surveillance Capitalism for a long time to come; but you could do worse.

It's important to grasp why she says such inane things about "the Apple miracle," such as:

"The potential significance of Apple’s tacit new logic was never fully grasped, even by the company itself. Instead, the corporation produced a steady stream of contradictions that signaled business as usual."

On the one hand this is a relic of her own early Internet enthusiasm: something pretty much everyone has to cop to. But her variety is different. She needs to believe there is a potentially good outcome from the corporate order. At some points she identifies Apple with the Ford Motor Company, as the inventor of positive forms of mass consumption bringing the fruits of industry to the people, with a contrast to General Motors that would have perverted the dream. Without ever mentioning Roosevelt and the New Deal, she speaks about a gradual overcoming of all the exploitation and injustice that accompanied the emergence of the mass production system. But this is as absurd as the idealization of Apple, it doesn't hold up, and often she will also take Ford as just another of the giant corporations.

The whole thing gets more interesting, but also wierder, when she brings up Ulrich Beck's notion of the "Second Modernity," characterized by hyperbolic individualism. Apple is supposed to fulfill the desires of the self-reflexive individual. She has no critical take on this at all: she does not see that the forms of individualism that we have now result from over a centuries' worth of advertising, which repurposed Romantic aspirational literature as a lure in the market. It's a typically American thing: you are not locked into the spiral of "individual freedom" with all its devastatingly repressive consequences; instead there is a paradise out there somewhere, where you can just take a bite of the forbidden fruit.

All of this culminates in the way that she uses Polanyi's notion of the double movement. For her it's just shorthand for diffuse social resistance leading to political reforms. So you would have the initial movement of surveillance capitalism, then a countervailing movement which at once "brings us back" to some supposedly just social order (postwar social democracy?) while it also "bringis us forward" to a Third Modernity of hyperindividualism fulfilled. This is a total evisceration of Polanyi's concept, which is not just another way of saying resistance. Instead the double movement includes an overwhelming reaction to the damage caused by capitalism - a reaction that ends up being even worse than the problem that sparked it. Check it out:

"This was more than the usual defensive behavior of society faced with change; it was a reaction against a dislocation which attacked the fabric of society, and which would have destroyed the very organization of production that the market had called into being.... Two vital functions of society, the political and the economic, were being used and abused as weapons in a struggle for sectional interests. It was out of such a perilous deadlock that in the twentieth century the fascist crisis sprang."

The above is what's happening today. A huge popular reaction is being fuelled by the abuses of neoliberal capitalism, which are of multiple orders: economic, cultural, political, environmental. The reaction takes up the available forms of racism, nationalism, sexism and authoritarianism, which then mask and distort the reality that capitalist exploitation of the earth, of labor, of engagement - and indeed of one's very dreams, in the case of corporations like Apple - is at the root of the whole crisis. The resentment that is the leading political affect throughout all the Western societies today is fuelled by hatred of the oligarchs at the head of Google, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, and a thousand other megabanks and megacorporations, plus all their yes men in governments around the world - and yet this resentment misses its own target and puts a wannabe billionnaire like Trump in charge, in order to make everything still worse. Zuboff seemingly has no clue about this. She refers to Polanyi over and over again, but despite a brief and highly dramatic development at the very end of Part II, she never goes into the specificity of his key concept.

So yeah, like David I think there's a lot to learn from Surveillance Capitalism. It's a fascinating read, it brings together tons of fine-grained technological analysis and also some quite interesting theory - definitely much more than you would expect from Morozov's review. But at the bottom of it there's a naivete to the effects of capitalism's most recent expansion, and that naivete is in my view not just inane but literally insane under present circumstances.

Watch out what you wish for, Brian

On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 5:14 AM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:

On 08.02.19 03:27, Brian Holmes wrote:

> That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth
> reading. It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but
> it's fascinating at points and hopefully gets better as you go.
> Morozov has written the perfect intro for a critical read of what
> might become a landmark book- if the situation it describes does not
> again suddenly change beyond recognition, as it easily could.

I've read bit and pieces by now, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't
get better and is in line with her earlier articles and talks you can
find online.

Mozorov highlighted many of the problematic aspects of her approach,
which he boils down to her claim that the imbalance of power between the
individual user and corporations is a novel thing, and that prior to the
current phase, capitalism worked by making transparent offers to
rational consumers who would choose from these offers based on their
own, genuine needs and desires.

Thus her proposals to change the situation are all about restoring this
individual autonomy, through what she calls "right to the future" (aka
the ability to change ones life without being restricted by predictions
based on past behavior) and "right to sanctuary" (which, basically,
is an elaborate version of 'my home is my castle').

Mozorov puts lots of emphasis on her lack of engagement with other
theories of contemporary capitalism and her unwillingness to considers
options beyond the market. And, really, not even Wikipedia is ever
mentioned (expect as a source once) and Free Software only in relation
to Android and Google's strategy to dominate it. Thus, she never asks
why such alternatives exist and what could be done to support them. So,
the only alternative we get is Apple, the company, as Richard Stallman
famously put it, that "made prison look cool".

But not only does she barely engage with capitalism, she also does not
engage with the surveillance as a feature of contemporary life that
preceded "surveillance capitalism" by decades, if not centuries (a line
of thinking that stretches from Foucault to David Lyon et al). Strangely
enough, she also doesn't engage with the history of "behavioral
modification", which has played a major role in the history of
capitalism in the last 100 years. This ignorance is necessary to keep
her basic premise, about the sudden undermining of individual autonomy
alive.

Of course, there is much to like on the book as well, particularly her
claim that what we are living through is really a "coup from above: an
overthrow of the people’s sovereignty." But is this really the result of
"surveillance capitalism" or, more broadly, of neo-liberalism, as
post-democracy theory has been arguing since the late 1990s?

Nevertheless, it puts this again into the table and connects it to some
of the most powerful actors in the economy and it highlights the demands
for regulation. Which leads Mozorov to the following question:

> Should we accept the political utility of Zuboff’s framework while
> rejecting its analytical validity? I’d argue that we can proceed down
> that path only if we understand the price of doing so: a greater
> sense of confusion with regard to the origins, operations, and
> vulnerabilities of digital capitalism.

No. We need to come up with a better reading of the current situation
regarding informational capitalism.

Both Zuboff and Mozorov mention in passing Polanyi, though don't make
much of it. I think that concept of a fictitious commodity can be
usefully expanded. So far, this has mainly been done in relation to
knowledge [1], but this does not work well.

It works better with "engagement" as the commodity form of
"communication". I tried to develop this idea in a talk recently and
posted the relevant segment to nettime recently as "Engagement, a new
fictitious commodity"

https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1901/msg00039.html

To expand a bit on this post: the old settlement between communication
as a social (non-market) activity and engagement as a commodity, created
by laws and ethical standards, broke down as new set of corporations
established a radical market-system for communication. Initially, this
was seen as a liberation, because the old settlement was unable to cope
with the rising diversity of cultural/political positions seeking new
forms of _expression_. But over time, the pressure to increase profits by
focusing solely on commodity production, and the pressures to operate in
such an environment placed on everyone, began to undermine communication
(as negotiation of shared meaning) more and more, to the degree that
within these radical market systems, almost all non-market element have
been destroyed, and hence, undermining societies ability to communicate.

Hence, we need to ask, what kind of resistance (aka double movement) and
new institutional arrangements do we need to protect and expand our
collective capacity to communicate. There are lots of possible answers
to this, ranging from regulation of social media companies to the need
develop communication infra-structures outside the markets.

Felix

[1] Jessop, Bob (2007): Knowledge as a Fictitious Commodity: Insights
and Limits of a Polanyian Perspective.

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