The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism Quotes

The real psychological truth is this: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you are nothing.

Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.

it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.

What would hold society together in the absence of the rules and rituals of clan and kin? Durkheim’s answer was the division of labor.

Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world’s information. One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks.

Uncertainty is not chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense. We choose the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price we pay for freedom to will, which founds our right to the future tense. In the absence of this freedom, the future collapses into an infinite present of mere behavior, in which there can be no subjects and no projects: only objects.

We are no longer the subjects of value realization. Nor are we, as some have insisted, the “product” of Google’s sales. Instead, we are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for Google’s prediction factories. Predictions about our behavior are Google’s products, and they are sold to its actual customers but not to us. We are the means to others’ ends.

Imagine you have a hammer. That’s machine learning. It helped you climb a grueling mountain to reach the summit. That’s machine learning’s dominance of online data. On the mountaintop you find a vast pile of nails, cheaper than anything previously imaginable. That’s the new smart sensor tech. An unbroken vista of virgin board stretches before you as far as you can see. That’s the whole dumb world. Then you learn that any time you plant a nail in a board with your machine learning hammer, you can extract value from that formerly dumb plank. That’s data monetization. What do you do? You start hammering like crazy and you never stop, unless somebody makes you stop. But there is nobody up here to make us stop. This is why the “internet of everything” is inevitable.

Google’s ideal society is a population of distant users, not a citizenry. It idealizes people who are informed, but only in the ways that the corporation chooses. It means for us to be docile, harmonious, and, above all, grateful.

Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities, and surveillance capitalism lays its claims to the stuff of human nature for a new commodity invention. Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project. It is obscene to suppose that this harm can be reduced to the obvious fact that users receive no fee for the raw material they supply. That critique is a feat of misdirection that would use a pricing mechanism to institutionalize and therefore legitimate the extraction of human behavior for manufacturing and sale. It ignores the key point that the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us. The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us.

Google is a shape-shifter, but each shape harbors the same aim: to hunt and capture raw material. Baby, won’t you ride my car? Talk to my phone? Wear my shirt? Use my map? In all these cases the varied torrent of creative shapes is the sideshow to the main event: the continuous expansion of the extraction architecture to acquire raw material at scale to feed an expensive production process that makes prediction products that attract and retain more customers.

The knowledge that now displaces our freedom is proprietary. The knowledge is theirs, but the lost freedom belongs solely to us.

Information and communications technologies are more widespread than electricity

This is the existential contradiction of the second modernity that defines our conditions of existence: we want to exercise control over our own lives, but everywhere that control is thwarted. Individualization has sent each one of us on the prowl for the resources we need to ensure effective life, but at each turn we are forced to do battle with an economics and politics from whose vantage point we are but ciphers. We live in the knowledge that our lives have unique value, but we are treated as invisible. As the rewards of late-stage financial capitalism slip beyond our grasp, we are left to contemplate the future in a bewilderment that erupts into violence with increasing frequency. Our expectations of psychological self-determination are the grounds upon which our dreams unfold, so the losses we experience in the slow burn of rising inequality, exclusion, pervasive competition, and degrading stratification are not only economic. They slice us to the quick in dismay and bitterness because we know ourselves to be worthy of individual dignity and the right to a life on our own terms.

Forget the cliché that if it’s free, “You are the product.” You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The “product” derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life.

today our societies are threatened as the division of learning drifts into pathology and injustice at the hands of the unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism has achieved.

This unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society.

the founder embraced the button only when new data revealed it as a powerful source of behavioral surplus that helped to ratchet up the magnetism of the Facebook News Feed, as measured by the volume of comments.34

Personal information is increasingly used to enforce standards of behavior. Information processing is developing, therefore, into an essential element of long-term strategies of manipulation intended to mold and adjust individual conduct.”34

Right now, however, the extreme asymmetries of knowledge and power that have accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogate these elemental rights as our lives are unilaterally rendered as data, expropriated, and repurposed in new forms of social control, all of it in the service of others’ interests and in the absence of our awareness or means of combat. We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action—this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society—that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future. And while the work of these inventions awaits us, this mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.

Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law’s book Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms, we’ve learned how to send people into outer space and how to shrink a powerful computer into a device that fits into the palm of our hand, yet we haven’t yet learned how to face our racial history or how to tell the truth about the devastation wrought by colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism. We’ve learned how to develop powerful surveillance systems and how to build missiles that can reach halfway around the globe. But what have we learned about the true meaning of justice?

Research by media scholars Daniel Kreiss and Philip Howard indicates that the 2008 Obama campaign compiled significant data on more than 250 million Americans, including “a vast array of online behavioral and relational data collected from use of the campaign’s web site and third-party social media sites such as Facebook.…”96 Journalist Sasha Issenberg, who documented these developments in his book The Victory Lab, quotes one of Obama’s 2008 political consultants who likened predictive modeling to the tools of a fortune-teller: “We knew who… people were going to vote for before they decided.

The corporation’s ability to hide this rights grab depends on language as much as it does on technical methods or corporate policies of secrecy. George Orwell once observed that euphemisms are used in politics, war, and business as instruments that “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”81

users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply. As we shall see, surveillance capitalism’s unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us.

The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling 'confessions,' written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the 'D.P.R.K.' (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) for 'lenience.' Kim Il Sung ('Fat Man') was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn't ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as 'beautiful.' As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn't look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I'd see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water. Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed 'Demilitarized Zone,' one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it's proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.

Mass production was aimed at new sources of demand in the early twentieth century’s first mass consumers. Ford was clear on this point: “Mass production begins in the perception of a public need.”73 Supply and demand were linked effects of the new “conditions of existence” that defined the lives of my great-grandparents Sophie and Max and other travelers in the first modernity. Ford’s invention deepened the reciprocities between capitalism and these populations. In contrast, Google’s inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users. The role of the behavioral value reinvestment cycle that had once aligned Google with its users changed dramatically. Instead of deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations, Google chose to reinvent its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behavior by any available means in the competition for market advantage. In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends. Reinvestment in user services became the method for attracting behavioral surplus, and users became the unwitting suppliers of raw material for a larger cycle of revenue generation.

As legal scholar Frank Pasquale describes it, “The decisions at the Googleplex are made behind closed doors… the power to include, exclude, and rank is the power to ensure which public impressions become permanent and which remain fleeting.… Despite their claims of objectivity and neutrality, they are constantly making value-laden, controversial decisions. They help create the world they claim to merely ‘show’ us.”20 When

There are many buzzwords that gloss over these operations and their economic origins: “ambient computing,” “ubiquitous computing,” and the “internet of things” are but a few examples. For now I will refer to this whole complex more generally as the “apparatus.” Although the labels differ, they share a consistent vision: the everywhere, always-on instrumentation, datafication, connection, communication, and computation of all things, animate and inanimate, and all processes—natural, human, physiological, chemical, machine, administrative, vehicular, financial. Real-world activity is continuously rendered from phones, cars, streets, homes, shops, bodies, trees, buildings, airports, and cities back to the digital realm, where it finds new life as data ready for transformation into predictions, all of it filling the ever-expanding pages of the shadow text.4

It was there, in Spain, that the right to the future tense was on the move, insisting that the operations of surveillance capitalism and its digital architecture are not, never were, and never would be inevitable. Instead, the opposition asserted that even Google’s capitalism was made by humans to be unmade and remade by democratic processes, not commercial decree. Google’s was not to be the last word on the human or the digital future.

Birds, bees, butterflies… nests, holes, trees, lakes, hives, hills, shores, and hollows… nearly every creature shares some version of this deep attachment to a place in which life has been known to flourish, the kind of place we call home. It is in the nature of human attachment that every journey and expulsion sets into motion the search for home. That nostos, finding home, is among our most profound needs is evident by the price we are willing to pay for it.

One consequence of the new density of social comparison triggers and their negative feedback loops is a psychological condition known as FOMO (“fear of missing out”). It is a form of social anxiety defined as “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that . . . your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something better than you.”51 It’s a young person’s affliction that is associated with negative mood and low levels of life satisfaction.

Futuristic as this may sound, the vision of individuals and groups as so many objects to be continuously tracked, wholly known, and shunted this way or that for some purpose of which they are unaware has a history. It was coaxed to life nearly sixty years ago under the warm equatorial sun of the Galapagos Islands, when a giant tortoise stirred from her torpor to swallow a succulent chunk of cactus into which a dedicated scientist had wedged a small machine. It was a time when scientists reckoned with the obstinacy of free-roaming animals and concluded that surveillance was the necessary price of knowledge. Locking these creatures in a zoo would only eliminate the very behavior that scientists wanted to study, but how were they to be surveilled? The solutions once concocted by scholars of elk herds, sea turtles, and geese have been refurbished by surveillance capitalists and presented as an inevitable feature of twenty-first-century life on Earth. All that has changed is that now we are the animals

First, there is hardly an innocent app; if it’s not tracking you now, it may be doing so in the next week or month: “There is an entire industry based upon these trackers, and apps identified as ‘clean’ today may contain trackers that have not yet been identified. Tracker code may also be added by developers to new versions of apps in the future.” Second is that even the most innocent-seeming applications such as weather, flashlights, ride sharing, and dating apps are “infested” with dozens of tracking programs that rely on increasingly bizarre, aggressive, and illegible tactics to collect massive amounts of behavioral surplus ultimately directed at ad targeting. For example, the ad tracker FidZup developed “communication between a sonic emitter and a mobile phone. . . .” It can detect the presence of mobile phones and therefore their owners by diffusing a tone, inaudible to the human ear, inside a building: “Users installing ‘Bottin Gourmand,’ a guide to restaurants and hotels in France, would thus have their physical location tracked via retail outlet speakers as they move around Paris.

we can recognize that over the centuries we have imagined threat in the form of state power. This left us wholly unprepared to defend ourselves from new companies with imaginative names run by young geniuses that seemed able to provide us with exactly what we yearn for at little or no cost. This new regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation.

Political correspondent Jim Rutenberg’s New York Times account of the data scientists’ seminal role in the 2012 Obama victory offers a vivid picture of the capture and analysis of behavioral surplus as a political methodology. The campaign knew “every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex, and income,” and it had figured out how to target its television ads to these individuals. One breakthrough was the “persuasion score” that identified how easily each undecided voter could be persuaded to vote for the Democratic candidate.103

Facebook’s own North American marketing director, Michelle Klein, who told an audience in 2016 that while the average adult checks his or her phone 30 times a day, the average millennial, she enthusiastically reported, checks more than 157 times daily. Generation Z, we now know, exceeds this pace. Klein described Facebook’s engineering feat: “a sensory experience of communication that helps us connect to others, without having to look away,” noting with satisfaction that this condition is a boon to marketers. She underscored the design characteristics that produce this mesmerizing effect: design is narrative, engrossing, immediate, expressive, immersive, adaptive, and dynamic.11 If you are over the age of thirty, you know that Klein is not describing your adolescence, or that of your parents, and certainly not that of your grandparents. Adolescence and emerging adulthood in the hive are a human first, meticulously crafted by the science of behavioral engineering; institutionalized in the vast and complex architectures of computer-mediated means of behavior modification; overseen by Big Other; directed toward economies of scale, scope, and action in the capture of behavioral surplus; and funded by the surveillance capital that accrues from unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power. Our children endeavor to come of age in a hive that is owned and operated by the applied utopianists of surveillance capitalism and is continuously monitored and shaped by the gathering force of instrumentarian power. Is this the life that we want for the most open, pliable, eager, self-conscious, and promising members of our society?

The division of learning is to us, members of the second modernity, what the division of labor was to our grandparents and great-grandparents, pioneers of the first modernity.

The first text, full of promise, actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text. Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how trivial or fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction. That surplus fills the pages of the second text. This one is hidden from our view: “read only” for surveillance capitalists.19 In this text our experience is dragooned as raw material to be accumulated and analyzed as means to others’ market ends. The shadow text is a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its analyses, and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves.

In 2016 it announced the development of a new chip for “deep learning inference” called the tensor processing unit (TPU). The TPU would dramatically expand Google’s machine intelligence capabilities, consume only a fraction of the power required by existing processors, and reduce both capital expenditure and the operational budget, all while learning more and faster.28

Google/Alphabet is the most aggressive acquirer of AI technology and talent. In 2014–2016 it purchased nine AI companies, twice as many as its nearest rival, Apple.30

In 2017, US companies are estimated to have allocated more than $650 million to fuel the AI talent race, with more than 10,000 available positions at top employers across the country. The top five tech companies have the capital to crowd out competitors: startups, universities, municipalities, established corporations in other industries, and less wealthy countries.31 In Britain, university administrators are already talking about a “missing generation” of data scientists.

The division of learning in society has been hijacked by surveillance capitalism. In the absence of a robust double movement in which democratic institutions and civil society tether raw information capitalism to the people’s interests—however imperfectly—we are thrown back on the market form of the surveillance capitalist companies in this most decisive of contests over the division of learning in society. Experts in the disciplines associated with machine intelligence know this, but they have little grasp of its wider implications.

Insuring the liberty that nourishes democracy requires a structuring of societal use of information and even permitting some concealment of information

As things currently stand, it is the surveillance capitalist corporations that know. It is the market form that decides. It is the competitive struggle among surveillance capitalists that decides who decides.

Surveillance profits awakened intense competition over the revenues that flow from new markets for future behavior.

This question marks a critical turning point in the trial-and-error elaboration of surveillance capitalism. It crystallizes a second economic imperative—the prediction imperative—and reveals the intense pressure that it exerts on surveillance capitalist revenues.

Economies of action mean that real-world machine architectures must be able to know as well as to do.

He insists that ubiquitous sensor information and computing will be “an extension of ourselves rather than an embodiment of an ‘other.’” Information will stream “directly into our eyes and ears once we enter the age of wearables… the boundaries of the individual will be very blurry in this future.

The first of these was “data extraction and analysis,” from which we deduced the extraction imperative as one of the foundational mechanisms of surveillance capitalism.

the other three new uses—“new contractual forms due to better monitoring,” “personalization and customization,” and “continuous experiments”—“will, in time, become even more important than the first.

As we shall see, surveillance capitalism’s unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us.

Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.

users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply.

Today these rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it.

As competition intensifies, surveillance capitalists learn that extracting human experience is not enough. The most-predictive raw-material supplies come from intervening in our experience to shape our behavior in ways that favor surveillance capitalists’ commercial outcomes.

Surveillance capitalism’s command of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of the two texts. The specific mechanisms of surveillance capitalism compel the production of two “electronic texts,” not just one. When it comes to the first text, we are its authors and readers. This public-facing text is familiar and celebrated for the universe of information and connection it brings to our fingertips. Google Search codifies the informational content of the world wide web. Facebook’s News Feed binds the network. Much of this public-facing text is composed of what we inscribe on its pages: our posts, blogs, videos, photos, conversations, music, stories, observations, “likes,” tweets, and all the great massing hubbub of our lives captured and communicated.

As legal scholar Frank Pasquale describes it, “The decisions at the Googleplex are made behind closed doors . . . the power to include, exclude, and rank is the power to ensure which public impressions become permanent and which remain fleeting. . . . Despite their claims of objectivity and neutrality, they are constantly making value-laden, controversial decisions. They help create the world they claim to merely ‘show’ us.”20 When it comes to the shadow text, surveillance capitalism’s laws of motion compel both its secrecy and its continuous growth. We are the objects of its narratives, from whose lessons we are excluded. As the source from which all the treasure flows, this second text is about us, but it is not for us. Instead, it is created, maintained, and exploited outside our awareness for others’ benefit.

This unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society. This means that powerful private interests are in control of the definitive principle of social ordering in our time, just as Durkheim warned of the subversion of the division of labor by the powerful forces of industrial capital a century ago.

individualization

individualization is a consequence of long-term processes of modernization.

Not every declaration is a spoken statement. Sometimes we just describe, refer to, talk about, think about, or even act in relation to a situation in ways that “create a reality by representing that reality as created.” For example, let’s say the waiter brings my friend and me two identical bowls of soup, placing one bowl in front of each of us. Without saying anything, he has declared that the bowls are not the same: one bowl is my friend’s, and the other bowl is mine. We strengthen the facts of his declaration when I take soup only from “my” bowl and my friend takes soup from his. When “his” bowl is empty, my friend is still hungry, and he asks permission to take a spoonful of soup from the bowl in front of me, further establishing the fact that it is my bowl of soup. In this way declarations rise or fall on the strength of others’ acceptance of the new facts. As Searle concludes, “All of institutional reality, and therefore . . . all of human civilization is created by . . . declarations.”4

The friar Bartolomé de las Casas, whose account bears witness to this history of Spanish atrocities, wrote that the Requirimiento promised the native people fair treatment upon surrender but also spelled out the consequences of defiance. Every act of indigenous resistance was framed as “revolt,” thereby legitimizing brutal “retaliation” that exceeded military norms, including grotesque torture, the burning of whole villages in the dark of night, and hanging women in public view: “I will do to you all the evil and damages that a lord may do to vassals who do not obey or receive him. And I solemnly declare that the deaths and damages received from such will be your fault and not that of His Majesty, nor mine, nor of the gentlemen who came with me.”9

The six declarations laid the foundation for the wider project of surveillance capitalism and its original sin of dispossession. They must be defended at any cost because each declaration builds on the one before it. If one falls, they all fall: •  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 behavioral data. •  Our right to take, based on our claim of free raw material, confers the right to own the behavioral 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. Thus, the age of surveillance capitalism was inaugurated with six declarations that defined it as an age of conquest.

Given the hostility and intensity of these supply operations, it is not too surprising that Disconnect software was banned from Google Play’s vast catalog of mobile apps, leading to Disconnect’s lawsuit against Google in 2015. The startup’s complaint explains that “advertising companies including Google use these invisible connections to ‘track’ the user as he/she browses the web or opens other mobile applications, in order to collect personal information about the user, create a ‘profile’ of the user, and make money targeting advertising to the user.

Google is under enormous pressure from the financial community to increase the “effectiveness” of its tracking, so that it can increase revenues and profits. Giving a user the ability to control his own privacy information (and to protect himself from malware) by blocking invisible connections to problematic sites constitutes an existential threat to Google.22

Legal opposition and social protest have surfaced in relation to the digitalization of books,24 the collection of personal information through Street View’s Wi-Fi and camera capabilities,25 the capture of voice communications,26 the bypassing of privacy settings,27 the manipulation of search results,28 the extensive retention of search data,29 the tracking of smartphone location data,30 wearable technologies and facial-recognition capabilities,31 the secret collection of student data for commercial purposes,32 and the consolidation of user profiles across all Google’s services and devices,33 just to name several instances. Expect to see drones, body sensors, neurotransmitters, “digital assistants,” and other sensored devices on this list in the years to come.

In a second stage the aim is habituation. Whereas lawsuits and investigations unwind at the tedious pace of democratic institutions, Google continues the development of its contested practices at high velocity. During the elapsed time of FTC and FCC inquiries, court cases, judicial reviews, and EU Commission investigations, the new contested practices become more firmly established as institutional facts, rapidly bolstered by growing ecosystems of stakeholders. People habituate to the incursion with some combination of agreement, helplessness, and resignation. The sense of astonishment and outrage dissipates. The incursion itself, once unthinkable, slowly worms its way into the ordinary. Worse still, it gradually comes to seem inevitable. New dependencies develop. As populations grow numb, it becomes more difficult for individuals and groups to complain.

Google Earth was also under fire, blamed for aiding a deadly terrorist attack in Mumbai, but Hanke insisted that the debate over Google Earth or Street View had “mostly died off” in “the West.” He cleverly equated any resistance to Google’s incursions with the anti-freedom-of-expression interests of authoritarian governments and their “closed information societies.”35 This would become a standard rhetorical device for Google and its allies as they executed their offense.

Within days, an independent analysis by German security experts proved decisively that Street View’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes. Google was forced to concede that it had intercepted and stored “payload data,” personal information grabbed from unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions. As its apologetic blog post noted, “In some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.” Technical experts in Canada, France, and the Netherlands discovered that the payload data included names, telephone numbers, credit information, passwords, messages, e-mails, and chat transcripts, as well as records of online dating, pornography, browsing behavior, medical information, location data, photos, and video and audio files. They concluded that such data packets could be stitched together for a detailed profile of an identifiable person.39

Google had unilaterally undertaken to change the rules of the information life cycle when it decided to crawl, index, and make accessible personal details across the world wide web without asking anyone’s permission.

We cannot fully reckon with the gravity of surveillance capitalism and its consequences unless we can trace the scars they carve into the flesh of our daily lives.

The disciplines of competitive markets promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects too preoccupied with survival to complain.

The public corporation as a social institution was reinterpreted as a costly error, and its long-standing reciprocities with customers and employees were recast as destructive violations of market efficiency.

By 2014 nearly half of the US population lived in functional poverty, with the highest wage in the bottom half of earners at about $34,000.

the ways in which financial elites use their outsized earnings to fund a cycle of political capture that protects their interests from political challenge.

They expressed it in different ways,” the report concludes, “but at heart what the rioters talked about was a pervasive sense of injustice.

What is different is that from the start very large sections of we, the people, proved to be wiser than our rulers. We saw further and proved to have better judgment, thus reversing the traditional legitimacy of our elite governance that those in charge know better than the unwashed.

Apple was criticized for extractive pricing policies, offshoring jobs, exploiting its retail staff, abrogating responsibility for factory conditions, colluding to depress wages via illicit noncompete agreements in employee recruitment, institutionalized tax evasion, and a lack of environmental stewardship—just to name a few of the violations that seemed to negate the implicit social contract of its own unique logic.

By serving ads related to content, Google seemed almost to be reveling in the fact that users’ privacy was at the mercy of the policies and trustworthiness of the company that owned the servers. And since those ads made profits, Google was making it clear that it would exploit the situation.

terms of service can be altered unilaterally by the firm at any time, without specific user knowledge or consent, and the terms typically implicate other companies (partners, suppliers, marketers, advertising intermediaries, etc.) without stating or accepting responsibility for their terms of service.

These “contracts” impose an unwinnable infinite regress upon the user that law professor Nancy Kim describes as “sadistic.

Radin calls this “private eminent domain,” a unilateral seizure of rights without consent. She regards such “contracts” as a moral and democratic “degradation” of the rule of law and the institution of contract, a perversion that restructures the rights of users granted through democratic processes, “substituting for them the system that the firm wishes to impose.… Recipients must enter a legal universe of the firm’s devising in order to engage in transactions with the firm.

Still, most users remain unaware of these “rapacious” terms that, as Kim puts it, allow firms “to acquire rights without bargaining and to stealthily establish and embed practices before users, and regulators, realize what has happened.

Education and knowledge work increased mastery of language and thought, the tools with which we create personal meaning and form our own opinions.

Saskia Sassen in the Daily Beast observed that “if there’s one underlying condition, it has to do with the unemployment and bitter poverty among people who desire to be part of the middle class and who are keenly aware of the sharp inequality between themselves and their country’s wealthy elite.

The terms of reference in nearly every study sound the same drumbeat: lack of opportunity, lack of access to education, marginalization, deprivation, grievance, hopelessness.

Two years after the North London riots, research in the UK showed that by 2013, poverty fueled by lack of education and unemployment already excluded nearly a third of the population from routine social participation.

Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism.

Varian’s casual understatement stands in counterpoint to his often-startling declarations: “Nowadays there is a computer in the middle of virtually every transaction… now that they are available these computers have several other uses.”8 He then identifies four such new uses: “data extraction and analysis,” “new contractual forms due to better monitoring,” “personalization and customization,” and “continuous experiments.

Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is talking about when they talk about big data.

in addition to key words, each Google search query produces a wake of collateral data such as the number and pattern of search terms, how a query is phrased, spelling, punctuation, dwell times, click patterns, and location.

Amit Patel, a young Stanford graduate student with a special interest in “data mining,” is frequently credited with the groundbreaking insight into the significance of Google’s accidental data caches. His work with these data logs persuaded him that detailed stories about each user—thoughts, feelings, interests—could be constructed from the wake of unstructured signals that trailed every online action. These data, he concluded, actually provided a “broad sensor of human behavior” and could be put to immediate use in realizing cofounder Larry Page’s dream of Search as a comprehensive artificial intelligence.

During this early period, behavioral data were put to work entirely on the user’s behalf. User data provided value at no cost, and that value was reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved services: enhancements that were also offered at no cost to users.

Shoshana Zuboff, a social psychologist, and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, characterizes the transfer of data from the public to the digital giants as an act of theft.

leading to books with such titles as Evil by Design by Chris Nodder, Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff.

I call instrumentarianism. Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of “smart” networked devices, things, and spaces.

The extension and depth of exposure include every data point but necessarily omit the latency within each person, precisely because it cannot be observed and measured. This is the latency of a possible self that awaits ignition from that one spark caused by the caring attention of another embodied human being. It is in that clash of oxygen and ember that the latent is perceived, comprehended, and yanked forward into existence. This is real life: fleshy, soft, uncertain, and replete with silence, risk, and, when fortune smiles, genuine intimacy.

[W]e've learned how to send people into outer space and how to shrink a powerful computer into a device that fits into the palm of our hand, yet we haven't yet learned how to face our racial history or how to tell the truth about the devastation wrought by colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism. We've learned how to develop powerful surveillance systems and how to build missiles that can reach halfway around the globe. But what have we learned about the true meaning of justice?

You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The "product" derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life.

I actually want to stress that I think that many of the things that one can do should certainly not be done by corporations or governments without users' consent.