By Jim Harper
In February 2022, Neil Chilson and I hosted a Twitter Spaces conversation on our recent AEI report, “The Semantics of ‘Surveillance Capitalism’: Much Ado About Something,” a response to the surveillance capitalism concept originating with Shoshana Zuboff’s book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Below is an edited and abridged excerpt from our discussion, with a link to a longer abridged recap. The full transcript of our conversation can be found here.
Neil Chilson: To start this conversation,
let’s lay out our three substantive concerns that we pulled from the book as
well as what our useful contributions to the book are.
Jim Harper: We literally took the
definition of surveillance capitalism in the book and said, “OK, what’s going
on here? What are the terms in this definition that we can work with?” And we
came up with these three important observations.
The first is the challenge often referred to as
“commodification.” I think it’s true that more and more of life is subjected to
commercialism because there are these applications that collect health and
other types of data that we never had before. So there’s the problem of
commodification of life in the modern age due to information technology.
The second is the question of extraction. Zuboff refers
to data collection on the part of companies like Google as “extraction.” That’s
a semantic choice that argues that there’s some level of wrongfulness about
this — that people are harvested or their lives are being harvested. And that
we differ with, but it’s worth discussing what’s actually going on there.
The final observation is one that we recognize as
real: Consumers have a really hard time keeping up with the changes in
information technology and information business, so they are at a disadvantage.
You could call it a “power disadvantage” relative to the companies that access
and use this information.
Neil Chilson: My thought around the
commodification point is that it’s a subset of a bigger point: The world is
getting more what I would call — I steal this term from James C. Scott —
“legible.” I wear something like the Fitbit that I have on, and there’s now
some data that persists and that other people can use, observe, and learn from.
Very few people would’ve been able to say how many steps they took in a day or
what their heart rate was at any point. But by collecting that data, we’re
making the world more legible, and that allows for uses in commerce and other
spaces. So commodification is a sort of subset, and it’s facilitated by this
increased legibility about the real world.
In contrast, the online world has always been highly
legible. In fact, to function, it essentially has to be highly legible. You’re
moving bits back and forth. Having them persist is one of the great benefits
and values of the online world. All of this is driving a concern that people
have about how that information will be used in the commercial space.
Like you, I find a lot of those uses potentially beneficial. It’s interesting to tease out how much Zuboff is concerned with commodification and how much she’s just fundamentally concerned about capitalism.
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