zuboff_intro_ch1

Information civilization as home?

Is the Aware Home for us?

The “real” functions of the devices to produce the “smart home” are not obvious. On purpose. 

Opting out is virtually impossible

Surveillance, data collection, AI, then behavioral influences. 

“Surveillance Capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.”

“behavioral surplus” – data generated by users in a system that can be extracted and used in other ways. + rendition and extraction = prediction and control." 

Digital connection no longer=being connected to others. It means connection to others’ commercial ends. 

Ideology: Surveillance capitalists dressed in the fashions of “advocacy and emancipation” and interaction, engagement, and participation (the rhetoric of an “empowering web”) conquered and claimed the territory for commercial profit. 

The behavioral marketplace is now both on and off line. The “free” products and services offered are HOOKS to lure people into situations where data can be extracted. 

We aren’t customers
We aren’t the product
We are the sources of behavioral surplus . . . we provide the raw data/material for extraction and deployment. 

The Faustian bargain: I can’t not participate, but whenever I do, I get used. 

SC operates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge

[BTW: I DON’T THINK THIS IS UNPRECEDENTED. IT IS VERY SIMILAR TO THE WAY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH OPERATED IN THE MIDDLE/DARK AGES. Literacy was low and focused primarily on educated clerics. Books were not available to the masses. All power rested in the Church and the government (aligned with the Church). No way in, no way out. Most work product went to the hierarchy.. no profit to the people. Etc. 

SC only SEEMS unprecedented because we are SO FAR REMOVED from the arrangements in the middle ages. 

SC is not the tech that it deploys. SC  is the infrastructure. 
[thank you Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. The content, eh. The infrastructure, ya]

If we focus on the tech, we are doing the SCs a favor. “Oh, doing THAT isn’t a problem now is it?” 

So when Google or X promises to “delete our data” in X years, we think “well ok, that’s an acceptable control.” The fact that they do or don’t doesn’t really matter. The data have already contributed to our capture. 

Tech is NOT inevitable/Deterministic. Tech are means, not ends. Tech can get capitalists to their goals, but do not have to do just that or just that in a particular manner.