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=                      Surveillance capitalism                       =
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                             Introduction                             
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Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which
denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data
by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government
surveillance, although the two can be mutually reinforming. The
concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff,
is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising
companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using
personal data to target consumers more precisely.

Increased data collection may have various benefits for individuals
and society, such as self-optimization (the quantified self), societal
optimizations (e.g., by smart cities) and optimized services
(including various web applications). However, as capitalism focuses
on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data
collection and data processing, this can have significant implications
for vulnerability and control of society, as well as for privacy.

The economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification
of online connection and monitoring, with spaces of social life
opening up to saturation by corporate actors, directed at making
profits and/or regulating behavior. Therefore, personal data points
increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising
were known. As a result, the increasing price of data has limited
access to the purchase of personal data points to the richest in
society.


                              Background                              
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Shoshana Zuboff writes that "analysing massive data sets began as a
way to reduce uncertainty by discovering the probabilities of future
patterns in the behavior of people and systems". In 2014, Vincent
Mosco referred to the marketing of information about customers and
subscribers to advertisers as 'surveillance capitalism' and made note
of the surveillance state alongside it. Christian Fuchs found that the
surveillance state fuses with surveillance capitalism.

Similarly, Zuboff informs that the issue is further complicated by
highly invisible collaborative arrangements with state security
apparatuses. According to Trebor Scholz, companies recruit people as
informants for this type of capitalism. Zuboff contrasts the mass
production of industrial capitalism with surveillance capitalism,
where the former was interdependent with its populations, who were its
consumers and employees, and the latter preys on dependent
populations, who are neither its consumers nor its employees and
largely ignorant of its procedures.

Their research shows that the capitalist addition to the analysis of
massive amounts of data has taken its original purpose in an
unexpected direction. Surveillance has been changing power structures
in the information economy, potentially shifting the balance of power
further from nation-states and towards large corporations employing
the surveillance capitalist logic.

Zuboff notes that surveillance capitalism extends beyond the
conventional institutional terrain of the private firm, accumulating
not only surveillance assets and capital but also rights, and
operating without meaningful mechanisms of consent. In other words,
analysing massive data sets was at some point not only executed by the
state apparatuses but also companies. Zuboff claims that both Google
and Facebook have invented surveillance capitalism and translated it
into "a new logic of accumulation".

This mutation resulted in both companies collecting very large numbers
of data points about their users, with the core purpose of making a
profit. By selling these data points to external users (particularly
advertisers), it has become an economic mechanism. The combination of
the analysis of massive data sets and the use of these data sets as a
market mechanism has shaped the concept of surveillance capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism has been heralded as the successor to
neoliberalism.

Oliver Stone, creator of the film 'Snowden', pointed to the
location-based game 'Pokémon Go' as the "latest sign of the emerging
phenomenon and demonstration of surveillance capitalism". Stone
criticized that the location of its users was used not only for game
purposes, but also to retrieve more information about its players. By
tracking users' locations, the game collected far more information
than just users' names and locations: "it can access the contents of
your USB storage, your accounts, photographs, network connections, and
phone activities, and can even activate your phone, when it is in
standby mode". This data can then be analysed and commodified by
companies such as Google (which significantly invested in the game's
development) to improve the effectiveness of targeted advertisement.

Another aspect of surveillance capitalism is its influence on
political campaigning. Personal data retrieved by data miners can
enable various companies (most notoriously Cambridge Analytica) to
improve the targeting of 'political' advertising, a step beyond the
commercial aims of previous surveillance capitalist operations. In
this way, it is possible that political parties will be able to
produce far more targeted political advertising to maximise its impact
on voters. However, Cory Doctorow writes that the misuse of these data
sets "will lead us towards totalitarianism". This may resemble a
corporatocracy, and Joseph Turow writes that "the centrality of
corporate power is a direct reality at the very heart of the digital
age".


 Shoshana Zuboff 
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The terminology "surveillance capitalism" was popularized by Harvard
Professor Shoshana Zuboff. In Zuboff's theory, surveillance capitalism
is a novel market form and a specific logic of capitalist
accumulation. In her 2014 essay 'A Digital Declaration: Big Data as
Surveillance Capitalism', she characterized it as a "radically
disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism" based on
the commodification of "reality" and its transformation into
behavioral data for analysis and sales.

In a subsequent article in 2015, Zuboff analyzed the societal
implications of this mutation of capitalism. She distinguished between
"surveillance assets", "surveillance capital", and "surveillance
capitalism" and their dependence on a global architecture of computer
mediation that she calls "Big Other", a distributed and largely
uncontested new expression of power that constitutes hidden mechanisms
of extraction, commodification, and control that threatens core values
such as freedom, democracy, and privacy.

According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism was pioneered by Google
and later Facebook, just as mass-production and managerial capitalism
were pioneered by Ford and General Motors a century earlier, and has
now become the dominant form of information capitalism. Zuboff
emphasizes that behavioral changes enabled by artificial intelligence
have become aligned with the financial goals of American internet
companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

In her Oxford University lecture published in 2016, Zuboff identified
the mechanisms and practices of surveillance capitalism, including the
production of "prediction products" for sale in new "behavioral
futures markets." She introduced the concept "dispossession by
surveillance", arguing that it challenges the psychological and
political bases of self-determination by concentrating rights in the
surveillance regime. This is described as a "coup from above."


 Key features 
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Zuboff's book 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism'  is a detailed
examination of the unprecedented power of surveillance capitalism and
the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control human
behavior. Zuboff identifies four key features in the logic of
surveillance capitalism and explicitly follows the four key features
identified by Google's chief economist, Hal Varian:

# The drive toward more and more data extraction and analysis.
# The development of new contractual forms using computer-monitoring
and automation.
# The desire to personalize and customize the services offered to
users of digital platforms.
# The use of the technological infrastructure to carry out continual
experiments on its users and consumers.


 Analysis 
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Zuboff compares demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or
lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet to
asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand and states that such
demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of
the entity's survival.

Zuboff warns that principles of self-determination might be forfeited
due to "ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience,
habituation, or drift" and states that "we tend to rely on mental
models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes,"
referring to the twentieth century's totalitarian nightmares or the
monopolistic predations of Gilded Age capitalism, with countermeasures
that have been developed to fight those earlier threats not being
sufficient or even appropriate to meet the novel challenges.

She also poses the question: "will we be the masters of information,
or will we be its slaves?" and states that "if the digital future is
to be our home, then it is we who must make it so".

In her book, Zuboff discusses the differences between industrial
capitalism and surveillance capitalism. Zuboff writes that as
industrial capitalism exploited nature, surveillance capitalism
exploits human nature.


 John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney 
=============================================
The term "surveillance capitalism" has also been used by political
economists John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, although with
a different meaning. In an article published in 'Monthly Review' in
2014, they apply it to describe the manifestation of the "insatiable
need for data" of financialization, which they explain is "the
long-term growth speculation on financial assets relative to GDP"
introduced in the United States by industry and government in the
1980s that evolved out of the military-industrial complex and the
advertising industry.


                               Response                               
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Numerous organizations have been struggling for free speech and
privacy rights in the new surveillance capitalism and various national
governments have enacted privacy laws. It is also conceivable that new
capabilities and uses for mass-surveillance require structural changes
towards a new system to create accountability and prevent misuse.
Government attention towards the dangers of surveillance capitalism
especially increased after the exposure of the Facebook-Cambridge
Analytica data scandal that occurred in early 2018. In response to the
misuse of mass-surveillance multiple states have taken preventive
measures. The European Union, for example, has reacted to these events
and restricted its rules and regulations on misusing big data.
Surveillance-Capitalism has become a lot harder under these rules,
known as the General Data Protection Regulations. However,
implementing preventive measures against misuse of mass-surveillance
is hard for many countries as it requires structural change of the
system.

Bruce Sterling's 2014 lecture at Strelka Institute "The epic struggle
of the internet of things" explained how consumer products could
become surveillance objects that track people's everyday life. In his
talk, Sterling highlights the alliances between multinational
corporations who develop Internet of Things-based surveillance systems
which feeds surveillance capitalism.

In 2015, Tega Brain and Surya Mattu's satirical artwork 'Unfit Bits'
encourages users to subvert fitness data collected by Fitbits. They
suggested ways to fake datasets by attaching the device, for example
to a metronome or on a bicycle wheel. In 2018, Brain created a project
with Sam Lavigne called 'New Organs' which collect people's stories of
being monitored online and offline.

The 2019 documentary film 'The Great Hack' tells the story of how a
company named Cambridge Analytica used Facebook to manipulate the 2016
U.S. presidential election. Extensive profiling of users and news
feeds that are ordered by black box algorithms were presented as the
main source of the problem, which is also mentioned in Zuboff's book.
The usage of personal data to subject individuals to categorization
and potentially politically influence individuals highlights how
individuals can become voiceless in the face of data misusage. This
highlights the crucial role surveillance capitalism can have on social
injustice as it can affect all aspects of life.


                            External links                            
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* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QwPHinDdOc Shoshana Zuboff
Keynote: Reality is the Next Big Thing], YouTube, Elevate Festival,
2014
* [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2594754 Big
Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information
Civilization], Shoshana Zuboff
* [https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
Capitalism's New Clothes], Evgeny Morozov, 'The Baffler' (4 February
2019)


 License 
=========
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License URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism


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