Shoshana Zuboff is a highly respected academic who has been
investigating the effects of information technology on the worlds of work and,
latterly, of our social being for at least 30 years – from a
sociological/ethnographic perspective.
Her first book In
the Age of the Smart Machine – the future of work and power (1988) made
such an impact on me that I can actually remember where I read it (in my Glasgow
office) all of 30 years ago.
The future of work had become an issue of deep concern since Charles
Handy’s book of that title, published in 1984 - the year which gave many the
opportunity to reflect on how Orwell’s
“1984” had panned out, compared, for example, with Huxley’s Brave
New World - although
it was the following year before the phrase “the surveillance society” was
coined. And almost a decade later before we saw a proper study - The
Electronic Society – the rise of surveillance society; David Lyon (1994)
Zuboff’s next book was published in 2002, written with her husband
J Maxmin (a progressive CEO of an engineering company) and carried the title
The
Support Economy – why corporations are failing individuals and the next version
of capitalism (2002) whose purpose she
explains here
So her new, large, sprawling and highly-acclaimed book The
Age of Surveillance Capitalism – the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power
completes a trilogy of books on this subject. She may not have invented the
phrase “surveillance capitalism” (John Bellamy
Foster had an important article with that title in July 2014) – but she
has, in recent years, become one of the key “go-to” academics for journalists wanting to understand the sort of
world being created by companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.
And the picture she paints is a pretty devastating one – all the more
powerful because her patient note-taking exposes the business practices of
companies which are highly secretive. Zuboff outlines, for example, six astonishing principles which Google famously
let slip on one occasion to justify its strategy.
·
“We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking. On the
basis of this claim, we can ignore considerations of individuals’ rights,
interests, awareness, or comprehension.
·
On the basis of our claim, we assert the right to take an individual’s
experience for translation into behavioural data.
·
Our right to take, based on our claim of free raw material, confers the
right to own the behavioural data derived from human experience.
·
Our rights to take and to own confer the right to know what the data
disclose.
·
Our rights to take, to own, and to know confer the right to decide how
we use our knowledge.
·
Our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide confer our rights to
the conditions that preserve our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide”
(p179)
I’ve said enough, I think, to indicate that I have a very high respect
for this academic who has devoted 30 years of her life to a painstaking
analysis of the nature and effects of the new technologies.
But be warned that this latest
book of hers suffers from several large flaws –
-
It is
extraordinarily badly-written
-
It completely
lacks a framework to warrant the claim in the title to be about “capitalism”
It’s never easy to prove bad writing but readers are helped when they can
clearly see the subject and object of a sentence ie who does what to whom. Writing is bad when sentences are
cluttered by long qualifying diversions; adjectives piled on one another; and unusual
words introduced. Zuboff is guilty of all three.
Her 525 pages of actual text could have been easily reduced in half
with judicious editing – of the sort which Steven Pinker suggests in The
Sense of Style – a thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century
which I explored
in this 2014 post
Even more serious is the charge made by this
political economics blogger that the book lacks proper scholarship. The
post refers to the book’s longest (at
22 pages) review – by enfant terrible Efgeny Morozov but concentrates its argument
on an exposition of why scholarship is important -
Academic
writing works on a formula. There are a certain number of things you have to do
in order to prove that your work is legitimate and worthy of attention.
- You have to
show how you connect with the larger, ongoing conversation in your area of
interest.
- You have to
present your evidence carefully.
- You have to
show the framework you used to conduct your analysis.
Missing these
steps is a signal that there are very likely problems with the work in
question, but the steps are also important in their own right: they’re
necessary in order to construct a sound argument, and not just a lawyer’s
brief.
“The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism” has problems on all three accounts. Taken
together, they help to explain, or maybe contextualize, the blind spots that
Morozov noted in his essay.
The post is worth reading in detail since it suggests that Zuboff’s
book commits four serious sins against good scholarship –
-
Exaggerated claims to novelty
- Absence
of relevant literature references - particularly on "capitalism"!! A failing on which readers know I'm a bit of a pedant
- Unclear
framework
-
hyperbole
Certainly the 130 pages of detailed bibliographical references Zuboff offers simply alienates the average reader. What the book is crying out for is a short, annotated literature review…
Reviews of the Book (including
interviews)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/17/google-workers-rights-coding-chrome-unions
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook; the Guardian’s IT correspondent explains the
significance of the book and asks the author 10 questions
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/rob-lucas-the-surveillance-business - a clear 10 page review (apart from the last couple of pages) which usefully shows how Zuboff’s perception of capitalism has dramatically changed over the past 30 years
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II121/articles/rob-lucas-the-surveillance-business - a clear 10 page review (apart from the last couple of pages) which usefully shows how Zuboff’s perception of capitalism has dramatically changed over the past 30 years
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/04/09/bigger-brother-surveillance-capitalism/
which makes my point about the book’s appalling style and jargon but forgives
it for the emphasis it gives to power
https://bryanalexander.org/tag/zuboff/ book club assessment of most chapters
https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/380 – hour long interview with editor of IT journal
which allows Zuboff to explain the book
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jacc.13051; helpful 10 pages summary of the key arguments
presented in the book. Probably the most thorough and readable review – if a
bit uncritical
https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/13238/8503;
great interview with the people from the Canadian Surveillance Centre people
which helps us understand why Zuboff crafted the book the way she did.
https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/13126/8502; a short critical review of the book which considers
it adds little to what we already knew. Bit too academic and envious….
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review; another Guardian review – with a discussion thread
http://mediatheoryjournal.org/review-shoshana-zuboffs-the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-by-william-morgan/; an academic communications journal offers a
typically tortuously-written assessment which makes little sense
https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov; the field’s enfant terrible puts the book in
context and explores its gaps (20 pages)
https://www.cigionline.org/articles/shoshana-zuboff-undetectable-indecipherable-world-surveillance-capitalism; a Canadian think-tank interviews the author
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thieves-of-experience-how-google-and-facebook-corrupted-capitalism/; a very clear and jargon-free analysis (which also
notes the stylistic infelicities) from one of the field’s specialists
http://www.michaeljkramer.net/fall-2016-course-the-computerized-society/; useful to see the list of recommended reading for a
course on the “US digitised culture”
https://thoughtmaybe.com/topic/surveillance/; a documentary site shares its videos on the
surveillance theme.
https://prospect.org/power/how-neoliberal-policy-shaped-internet-surveillance-monopoly/ good overview of key issueshttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/17/google-workers-rights-coding-chrome-unions
