More surveillance - less capitalism

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 21^st 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/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://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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJwf6oLvc2Q&feature=youtu.be; 80 minute presentation

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 issues
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/17/google-workers-rights-coding-chrome-unions