Name: Surveillance Capitalism In Today’s Digital Age
Uploaded: 2019-11-18
Duration: 16 min 12 s
Description: A look at how the commodification of data can change human behavior, widen the inequality gap, and reshape the future of capitalism with Shoshana Zuboff, Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Thank you, Brian. And welcome, Shoshana. Thank you, Adam. And Hello everybody. The Guardian called your book a chilling, expose a of the business model that underpins the digital world. You brought a copy of your book on stage with you. Thank you for doing that. Paperback. [ LAUGH ] What is, Shoshana what is surveillance capitalism. Surveillance capitalism is a new market form born digital in many ways that diverges from everything that we've learned about capitalism for the last few centuries. But in this critical way it emulates the old pattern. It takes something that lives outside the market dynamic. It brings it into the market dynamic for productions and sales. That's called making a commodity. The thing is, we're all familiar with the idea that industrial capitalism claim nature Turned it into land real estate things that could be sold and purchased. In the case of surveillance capitalism, it takes a dark and startling twist. Because what it claims for the market dynamic now, is private human experience. Private human experience Is reenvisioned as a free source of raw material for new processes of production and sales. Specifically translational and behavioral data, behavioral data that fills new data supply chains. On their way to new computational factories that we call AI, machine learning. In those factories, products are made, their computational products, they predict future human behavior. These prediction products are sold Not back to us from whence they came, but to a new group of business customers with a profound interest in understanding what we will do soon and later, these new markets trade exclusively in human futures. Of course, all of this began with The click through rate is the first globally successful prediction product. And the online targeted advertising markets is the first globally successful human futures markets. Now it's spread beyond tech beyond the sector. Into the normal economy. So but you've been researching this before GDPR, before Cambridge Analytica, you've made the case that and you make it very specifically about Google being the first and the best that they took our data and sold it to others without our permission. [ COUGH ] All right, so let's fine tune that a little bit, Mark. Please, of course, of course. All right, they took our data, obviously without our permission because most of the taking happens without our knowledge. When they write about these I'm getting over a pneumonia. I'm not contagious or sick anymore, but I've got a little cough so bear. Water right here if you need it. Yeah, thank you so much. So when they write about their mechanisms and methods, the patent scientists, the data scientists within the company, the researchers, they celebrate this one key fat. That they learned how to take our personal information, various aspects of our personal experience, while bypassing our awareness. This is celebrated. This is why it's called surveillance cap. This is what puts the surveillance and surveillance capitalism. Alright, so they're taking our data without our personal information or experience without our knowing it. translating it into data without our knowing it. They're not selling the data. They're putting it through the factories. They're analysing it, their computing it. This was Google's Original secret sauce, where they produced the quality score that allowed them to produce the click- through rate from the so- called data exhaust that no one was using. These were the leftover data in their servers that were more than what was needed for Product improvement for service improvement. So it's now these computational products coming out of the factories Adam, that's what's getting sold. And that's why in hundreds of videos, believe me, I've watched them all. Eric Schmidt can sit on a stage like this and talk to you folks and say We're not selling your data, and no one comes into a restroom or anything for possibly not telling the truth, because they're not actually selling our data. They're selling the proprietary meaning That they create from the data about our future behavior. And so let me ask you in all earnestness, where the harm is and all sort of facetiously, but by way of of asking the question, I'll say for example, I love Google Maps. Just a moment. Because it's so helpful to me. You understand why I'm making that statement? Of course I do. Of course I do. Look. There are a couple key things to say about this. Number one, [ COUGH ] nothing that I say or write is an argument against the digital. We are citizens of a democratic society in the digital century. We deserve the services that have been created, that have made our lives better in many ways. [ COUGH ] Our societies deserve big data. We should be using Big Data for the new remedies and treatments for all kinds of cancers that we are desperate to solve, problems we are desperate to solve. We should be using Big Data to solve climate catastrophe. And to eliminate the plastic particles that are now even in the Arctic snow. That's not what we're doing. The most powerful companies in this sector with the material infrastructure, the corner nearly on the market of data scientists, the ones who really know how to do big data. They are entirely trained on one thing. And that's click stream science. They are entirely trained on these computational products that move into their markets for their revenues and their profits. They are not using big data to solve our needs or our society's needs. You've said that this, that what they're doing is antithetical to democracy. How so, I understand they're, it from your perspective, they're craving, they're just trying to make money. All right, so, [ COUGH ] Adam a minute ago you said I like those maps and we started to talk about. You should be able to have those maps without the overhang of the negative, [ COUGH ] externalities. They come with this market forum. So let me talk quite briefly about what the key externalities are that I'm referring to. Number one, [ COUGH ] We're talking about an economic logic, not about bad people and just rogue bad behavior. We're talking about an economic logic that compels certain forms of corporate behaviour. In order to have great predictions, remember that's what they're selling, they're selling certainty to business customers, they've figured out three critical imperatives. Number one, you want to feed AI to get great predictions, you need to feed it a lot of data. Economies of scale. Intensification of competition turns out scales not enough. We also need scope, varieties of data. Ultimately, in this competition, they came to understand that the most predictive data comes from intervening in our behavior. To learn how to coax, tune and hurt our behavior in the direction of their guaranteed outcomes, good for revenue, good for profit, good for them, good for their business customers. This is how the game works. This is called economies of action. These are designed. To utilize the digital architecture, to work their will, through the medium of digital instrumentation, to intervene in our behavior in ways that we are not aware of, to push our behavior in the directions that serve the bottom line. Economies of action are a new zone of experimentation. We saw it being developed in Facebook's massive scale contagion experiments where they were successful in getting more people to go vote in the 2010 mid term elections. They were also successful in creating an emotional contagion, making people happier and sadder, These things were published in 2012 and 2014. And when they publish these findings they celebrated. We know we can manipulate cues and social comparison dynamics online to get people to change their behavior and feeling in the real world. And we know they can do it without them ever detecting our presence. They never know we're doing it. So that's number one. These experiments continued Adam under Pokemon Go. anybody in this room ever play Pokemon Go with your friends and family? Pokemon GO incubated in Google over many years. Brought to you by the same gentleman who brought you Street View and Google Earth has spent most of his career filling Google supply chains with surplus behavioral data for these new computations. In the case of Pokemon Go, there were businesses from McDonald's and Starbucks to Joe's pizza. Paying Pokemon Go for guaranteed footfall and what Pokemon GO this Niantic labs that came out of Google. And what they learned how to do was use the rewards and punishments of gamification to herd our behavior through the city. To the places that we're going to pay them fees for our footfall, footfall in the real world being the absolute equivalent of click through in the online world. [ COUGH ] Now the next zone of experimentation, Adam is set to be the city. This is the war that's going on in Toronto right now. We're sidewalk labs. Google slash Alphabet has its sights set on the Toronto waterfront and only two weeks ago, the citizens of Toronto, a group of them in a highly democratic process that they went through good, slow democracy. Beat back the first really extreme aims of this proposal, and the elected official stood up to constrain the proposal. So, where are we with democracy? Let me answer you very succinctly. Number one, surveillance capitalism is on a collision course with democracy. Eroding from below, and completely restructuring democracy from above. From below, it takes aim at human agency, at human autonomy, at what we consider to be individual sovereignty. The things that allow us to have decision rights, to be self determinant. This now global means of behavior modification takes aim at human autonomy without which a democratic society is impossible to imagine. From above We are now entering the third decade of the digital century Adam. This was supposed to be the apotheosis of democratization this digital century. Instead, what we see is a new kind of society marked by extreme forms. Of social inequality. A new social inequality. What is the social inequality? Concentration of knowledge in these companies, best expressed in the growing [ UNKNOWN ] between what we know and what can be known about us. This is intolerable for a democratic society. But that's not all. These extreme concentrations of knowledge, produce extreme concentrations of power. That what we can do is now no match for what can be done to us. Using these extreme concentrations of knowledge through the medium of the digital. So I couldn't help thinking the picture that you painted of these companies. Is like in the industrial age these factories that dumped sludge, polluted sludge into the river because nobody was stopping them from doing it. ->> The extranalities, yes. Then they were regulations came up to stop them from doing it, you are already a philosopher now for about a minute more I'd like you to be a philosopher king. And say exactly what democracy should do about this. First of all, this thing has had 20 years to root and flourish, largely unimpeded by law. That's to say that we're at the beginning of this not at the end So we have to understand that the root now moves through politics. Only democracy, only law, only a new regulatory vision will reign in surveillance capitalism. By the way, in the massive [ INAUDIBLE ] search study published just this past week 81 % of the US sample says that the risks of corporate surveillance outweigh the benefits 81 %. If you want to see what's coming in the future, pay attention to that number. We need laws that interrupts supply and demand. That disassemble the incentives for the surveillance dividend. That means we interrupt supply, taking our experience without our knowledge and therefore without our consent or the right to combat must be simply illegal. Let's call it what it would be called in any First or second or third grade classroom. It would be called theft. Let's go to the other end. That's supply, let's talk about demand. We outlaw markets that trade in human futures Because we know that they have predictably destructive consequences to human autonomy and to democracy. We outlaw them the same way we outlaw markets that trade in human organs, or babies or slaves, because we know that they have destructive consequences. And are incompatible with our aspirations as a democratic society. That's where we are today. Suzana I cannot imagine you are very popular in Mountain View or Menlo Park California. But I wanna thank you for coming here and giving us your message today. [ APPLAUSE ] Thank you. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Surveillance Capitalism In Today’s Digital Age

A look at how the commodification of data can change human behavior, widen the inequality gap, and reshape the future of capitalism with Shoshana Zuboff, Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
