How "Surveillance Capitalism" Is Different From Previous Forms of Capitalism

[e_flux]

In The Guardian, John Naughton interviews scholar of business administration Shoshana Zuboff, whose highly anticipated new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power examines what she calls a fundamentally new phase of capitalism. “Surveillance capitalism,” she suggests, is less about the production of commodities for a consumer market, and more about the widespread automated collection of data about us, for sale to corporations. Google and Facebook are the paragons of a new form of capitalism that is more opaque than any that has gone before. Here’s an excerpt from Naughton’s introduction to the interview:

“Surveillance capitalism,” writes Zuboff, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”

While the general modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al has been known and understood (at least by some people) for a while, what has been missing – and what Zuboff provides – is the insight and scholarship to situate them in a wider context. She points out that while most of us think that we are dealing merely with algorithmic inscrutability, in fact what confronts us is the latest phase in capitalism’s long evolution – from the making of products, to mass production, to managerial capitalism, to services, to financial capitalism, and now to the exploitation of behavioural predictions covertly derived from the surveillance of users. In that sense, her vast (660-page) book is a continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and – dare I say it – Karl Marx.

Image via The Guardian.

[christian]

A review of her book by Miriam Cosic:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/big-brother-is-watching-you/news-story/61b55df7f9b806339438a93a288aea58?login=1

[ChrisBarratt]

Marxism highlights the intense competition between monopoly capitalists that forces them to spend on new machinery, advertising, marketing etc - and the costs of “surveillance” at the corporate level are no different in nature. At the capitalist state level, stepped-up surveillance on bourgeois rivals and most of all the working class are surely just a part of the permanent arms race, spying and use of fascist methods of control that have been seen since the onset of imperialism towards the end of the 19th century.
“Surveillance capitalism” therefore does not change the nature of monopoly-imperialist capitalism and the epoch of wars and revolutions as explained by Lenin, one iota.
There instead seems to be a defeatist undercurrent to claiming that things have really changed - the suggestion that corporate capitalism and the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6 and the Pentagon etc are so much better equipped for brainwashing and oppressing workers and holding them back from communist revolution that there is no chance for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist state power.
But this is just not the case. Mubarak’s rule in Egypt was overthrown - and the CIA barely saw it coming at all; it was not broadly expected at all - except in revolutionary analysis. Imperialist forces then got military fascism back into power via a coup. And that was only accomplished because the masses did not have a leadership capable of defeating anti-communist popular front illusions.
That same story is working its way through all over the world. The red shirts in Thailand rise - and a coup and military dictatorship are required.
How many chicken satays everyone eats as worked out by Google algorithms doesn’t come into the equation.
The same for the whole of Latin America - half-baked attempts at “pink tide” progressive movements and governments are put down miserably, with even the firmer left-nationalism of Venezuela struggling to convince anybody that it really knows what it is doing. After all, Chavez, Maduro and the Castroite leadership in Cuba have spent decades telling everyone in South America to support left-wing reformism rather than revolution and the Leninist fight for the proletarian dictatorship (and the CPSU tradition in Moscow was telling this to the world prior to 1989).
So, yes, the CIA and corporate capitalism spy on everyone shamelessly as Wikileaks and numerous other investigations have shown the world for a century or more. But, aside from the viciousness of imperialist armed reaction, what is really holding everyone back is the continuing ludicrous inability of the planet’s “left-wing” to escape from the anti-communist ignorance of the anti-Soviet Trotskyist tradition of politics and the equally rotten “peace at all costs” “reformist progress” block-headedness of the old Stalinist tradition. Obviously, revisionist ideology took a big hit from the collapse of Moscow’s socialist prestige in 1989, but that, of course, sadly dealt an even bigger physical blow to socialist strength in the world. The struggle for world socialism needs to get back to Leninism.
But, once again, if corporate mind manipulation and capitalist state super-surveillance are dominating all world affairs so effortlessly how come we get the mass Yellow Vest movement in France, Boko Haram (against Western influence) in Africa, jihadist revolt all across the Islamic world, endless struggle in Latin America, the need for military crackdowns in Thailand and Egypt etc, etc, etc???
And, when it comes to the defeat of spying, militarised police-state control and a draconian level of surveillance that had a file on EVERYONE then the Irish nationalist struggle around Sinn Fein/IRA has taught the world priceless lessons. Good, strong revolutionary politics will win when they are embraced by the masses - and are unbeatable. Reaction only wins when the revolutionary forces lose sight of all revolutionary understanding (as in the USSR in the 1980s) or when workers are trying to fight using hopeless reformist politics.
Certainly, corporate capitalism and the capitalist state will have vast amounts of information about their consumers and the hostile working class. In the end, the reactionaries will just drown in information. And they will still not know what’s going on.