What is Surveillance Capitalism?

"I think my phone is listening to me..."

Definition

The term surveillance capitalism was best explained by Shoshana Zuboff in her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It refers to a twisted form of capitalism that underpins the rise of Big Tech. It refers to the business model that fuelled their growth into multi-trillion dollar companies.

Our definition:

Surveillance capitalism is the creepy way that Big Tech companies farm the personal behavioural data of citizens to predict and influence their behaviour.

Zuboff's definitions:

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification
3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history
4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy
5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth
6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy
7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty
8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people's sovereignty

These are all true, but it is number 1 that is of most use to realise what is actually happening when we use our devices to access the internet:

How does human experience become free raw material?

Whenever you do anything on the internet, and increasingly in the real world, you leave a breadcrumb trail of data. This could be the actual content you produce e.g. a post on social media or it could be metadata about that content.

What is metadata? Metadata is data about data. E.g. not the content itself but other simultaneous data points like the time you sent the message, who you sent it to, what mobile OS version you are using, your GPS location, your advertising ID, your email address, your IP address, your gender, your Wifi SSID and your name.

If it's free you're not the product, you're the raw material for the product

You've heard the expression "If it's free then you're the product". That's not accurate. Your behaviour, once gathered up into an endlessly updated profile, becomes the raw material that makes up the product that Big Tech sells: "behavioural futures". Advertisers pay to get access to information on what you are about to want, so they can sell it to you.

Big Tech have amazing machine learning algorithms that organise this seemingly useless metadata (alongside your actual data, when available) into profiles. Profiles are creepy proxy versions of you that are built up to represent you - what you like, what you do, what you'll do next. This is the information that advertisers want, and they pay big money for it. So when Big Tech companies like Google, Meta and Apple say they don't sell your data they are correct. Instead they sell access to the ability to influence you.

So is my phone listening to me?

Unlikely (via audio), but big tech's machine learning models are so powerful, so fast, and so regularly refreshed with your live data, that they don't need to actually listen to what you say. They can digitally recreate you via your proxy profile. A creepy digital you.

Next➡️ Why should I care?