By Jim Harper

Michael Novak’s “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism” (Madison Books, 1990) is one of the foundational texts defending our political and economic system. It influenced me for the better, I think, when I read it in the years after its first publication, and it still has currency today. A 2017 Amazon review calls it an “outstanding book to help modern society understand that Capitalism is not an ‘evil force of repression’ but a valuable economic method of exchange.”

The wording of that review raises an important question. A
century after the Bolshevik Revolution — its legacy untold Soviet penury and
death — how does collectivism get a pass while capitalism must be defended
against the charge that it is the “evil force”?

Part of the problem may be the rhetorical choice in
defending a system by a name that originated to describe avarice. In our recent
report, “The semantics of ‘surveillance capitalism’: Much ado about
something,” Neil Chilson and I survey the history of the word “capitalism.”
We use a wonderful document, Fernand Braudel’s “Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Volume II: The
Wheels of Commerce” (University of California Press, 1992).

The word “capitalist,” Braudel tells us, began to see usage
in the mid-17th century, describing rich people as such — never favorably.
Louis Blanc used the term “capitalism” in an 1850 polemic against Frédéric
Bastiat, taking a term of odiousness against rich people and making it an
ideology.

Many people still think “capitalism” implies rule by the
rich, or a society operated in service to wealth. I think our system of free
trade and individual rights, including property, is meant to serve the many.
Where markets appear to serve the few, one can usually find something warping
their operation toward concentrated benefits.

But the phrase “surveillance capitalism” makes the most of
capitalism’s broadly negative implications, combining it with “surveillance,”
which sprung from the Reign of Terror in France. It is a potent meme.

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human
Future at the New Frontier of Power” (PublicAffairs, 2019) is the book by
Professor Shoshana Zuboff that coalesced critics of trends in business and
technology (cheaply summarized as “Big Tech”). “Surveillance capitalism” is
probably a better meme than a book. Amazon reviews offer some savagery. The book is “a mess, looping back and
repeating [itself] in very unhelpful ways, dallying in purple passages and
twisted metaphors, making up clever-sounding ‘concepts’ (like ‘division of
knowledge’) and actually failing to pick out the key aspects of the issue.”

Our report tries to rescue the “surveillance capitalism”
concept and book from their polemical form and overheated rhetoric. We pick
out three characteristics of modern markets that use personal information and
give them serious consideration.

One is the concern with “commodification,” the treatment of
things once separate from commercial culture as commodities to be bought and
sold. There are and should be spaces online and off that are not overrun by
marketers, we believe.

Zuboff also says that personal information is “extracted”
from people when they go online. It would be concerning if modern business
practices “dispossessed” consumers of information about themselves, but
consumers are generally sharing personal information subject to contract.

The power imbalances implied by the phrase “surveillance
capitalism” have some validity, we believe. Consumers struggle to apprehend how
personal information is collected, stored, shared, and used, so they may
overshare relative to what would be best for them. But this weak power
imbalance will diminish over time. What we are seeing today is nothing like the
advent of totalitarianism in the early 20th century. The many skeptics of surveillance
capitalism may not realize they are aligning themselves rhetorically with
Zuboff and her belief that Google is an inchoate enslaver of the masses as
threatening as history’s worst despots.

Chilson and I argue that the truer threat to people is in an
area where the power imbalance is clear and lasting. That is the relationship
between government and the private sector. When governments come calling for
personal information, sometimes great masses of it, there is no need for
rhetorical excess. Imprisonment and violence are literally behind the demand, and
the demand is often purposefully hidden from the citizenry. Recognizing
property rights in personal information would help rectify that imbalance
through the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

Are people wrong to see the worst in “capitalism”? I think
so. But it’s not the best word either. I can do more to change the language of
advocates for our system than to change the minds of everyone who might hear
them. I recommend substituting “capitalism” for another term: There is far less
coherence or threat in “surveillance individualism.”

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