How Not to Live as Digital Commodities

Big tech corporations are wielding instrumentarian power and we’re here as the raw material. There’s a dystopian dimension to it.

A Harvard professor, Shoshana Zuboff, seems to have the answer. In a new ground-breaking book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), she dissects the business of big tech corporations that make profits by commodifying users’ data. Capitalism has taken a new form, Zuboff argues, by “claiming human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales”.

Zuboff calls it “surveillance capitalism” which centers on mining our digital data as “behavioral surplus” to predict and create personalized profiles for sale. She calls it surplus because these data are beyond what the companies actually need to improve their products and services. It’s our searches, click patterns, cursor movement, typing logs, voices, and a million other things which we don’t even know about. Advertising companies are eager to pay more for this kind of data. According to Interactive Advertising Bureau, American companies have spent USD 19 billion in 2018 to acquire and analyze consumers’ data.

The unprecedented surge of technological innovation in the twenty-first century has given people the means to express themselves, although poverty and economic inequality are still major global problems. People want access to information and connect with others, but they want them free. Over time, this creates gap and a vast asymmetry of power between users and tech companies. “Privacy was the price one must pay for the abundant rewards of information, connection, and other digital goods when, where, and how you want them”, Zuboff writes.

These companies don’t face much resistance from the users for two reasons: first, people like the service since it makes their lives easier, which creates dependency. Second, ignorance or lack of understanding of the industry’s business model of data extraction. We readily accept the mostly one-sided terms of service agreements (if we even read them) stating that our data can be used for any commercial purposes. In fact, data mining takes place because the users “consent” to it. Some are even convinced that they’re not afraid of privacy breach since they feel they have nothing to hide.

From individual perspective, data mining may only cause a nuisance like the coffee machine ads which follows you across Instagram or that persistent hotel discount sent to your email. But, this breach has broader impact from national and global standpoint. In the Cambridge Analytica case, social media can be exploited as engineering platform to modify users’ behavior. The data firm was able to extract behavioral data of 87 million Facebook users to create divisive and targeted political messages and misinformation. Investigation shows that it has compromised the U.S. Election and British referendum on European Union membership in 2016.

Scholars, politicians, and regulators around the world have been grappling with this issue for years. Most countries (outside the EU) still don’t have a comprehensive privacy law, although government agencies have started to impose heavy fines to tech companies for violating their privacy policies (Amazon and Google are facing antitrust complaint in many jurisdictions). Much of the effort is laudable, but whether it can serve as deterrence to those corporations remains unclear. Even if we succeed in claiming our data, we still have no idea to what extent the data are given back and what sort of purposes the data have been used for. What we need as users is algorithmic transparency.

A new reckoning

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism gives us exactly that. It’s an ambitious book, which deserves a greater audience outside business leaders and policy makers. It puts a name to the face and gives us the vocabularies to recognize the challenges we’re facing. In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian power rejects any forms of freedom and privacy to succumb the citizens to total devotion to the ruler. But, unlike Big Brother, big corporations are not trying to impose ideologies or terror people. As oppose to totalitarianism, surveillance capitalism wields what Zuboff calls an “instrumentarian power”: the power to alter, predict, monetize, and ultimately control our behavior. There’s also a dystopian dimension in that practice.

As we start a new decade, it’s time for a new reckoning. The year 2020 should be the turning point for digital capitalism. We’ve seen what seemingly emancipating technology turns us to raw materials for revenue stream. Can we change that under robust institutional and regulatory frameworks? Or are we bracing for another Facebook election? If the last ten years teach us anything, we can’t afford to let our dependency become a subordination.

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