b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Sareeta Amrute — Sounding the Flat Alarm (Review of Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)

    Sareeta Amrute — Sounding the Flat Alarm (Review of Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism)

    a review of Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019)

    by Sareeta Amrute

    Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism begins badly: the author’s house burns down. Her home is struck by lightning, it takes Zuboff a few minutes to realize the enormity of the conflagration happening all around her and escape. The book, written after the fire goes out, is a warning about the enormity of the changes kindled while we slept. Zuboff describes a world in which autonomy, agency, and privacy–the walls of her house–are under threat by a corporate apparatus that records everything in order to control behavior. That act of monitoring and recording inaugurates a new era in the development of capitalism that Zuboff believes is destructive of both individual liberty and democratic institutions.

    Surveillance Capitalism  is the alarm to all of us to get out of the house, lest it burn down all around us. In making this warning however, Zuboff discounts the long history of surveillance outside the middle class enclaves of Europe and the United States and assumes that protecting the privacy of individuals in that same location will solve the problem of surveillance for the Rest.

    The house functions as a metaphor throughout the book, first as a warning about how difficult it is to recognize a radical remaking of our world as it is happening: this change is akin to a lightning strike. The second is as an indicator of the kind of world we inhabit: it is a world that could be enhancing of life, instead it treats life as a resource to be extracted. The third uses the idea of house as protection to solve the other two problems.

    Zuboff contrasts an early moment of the digitally connected world, an internet of things that was on a closed circuit within one house, to the current moment, where the same devices are wired to the companies that make them. For Zuboff, that difference demonstrates the exponential changes that happened in between the early promise of the internet and its current malformation. Surveillance Capital argues that from the connective potential of the early Internet has come the current dystopian state of affairs, where human behavior is monitored by companies in order to nudge that behavior toward predetermined ends. In this way, Surveillance Capitalism reverses an earlier moment of connectivity boosterism, exemplified by the title of Thomas Friedman’s popular 2005 book, The World is Flat, which celebrated technologically-produced globalization.[1] The decades from the mid to late 2000s witnessed a significant critique of the flat world hypothesis, which could be summed up as an argument for both the vast unevenness of the world, and for the continuous remaking of global tropes into local and varied meanings. Yet, here we are again it seems in 2020, except instead of celebrating flatness, we are sounding the flat alarm.

    The book’s very dimensions–it is a doorstop, on purpose–act as an inoculation against the thinness and flatness Zuboff diagnoses as predominant features of our world. Zuboff argues that these features are unprecedented, that they mark an extreme deviation from capitalism as it has been. They therefore require both a new name and new analytic tools. The name
    “surveillance capitalism” describes information-gathering enterprises that are unprecedented in human history, and that information, Zuboff writes, is used to predict “our futures for the sake of others’ gain, not ours” (11). As tech companies increasingly use our data to steer behavior towards products and advertising, our ability to experience a deep interiority where we can exercise autonomous choice shrinks. Importantly for Zuboff, these companies collect not just data willingly giving, but the data exhaust that we often unknowingly and unintentionally emit as we move through a world mediated by our devices. Behavioral nudges mark for Zuboff the ultimate endpoint for a capitalism gone awry, a capitalism drives humans to abandon free will in favor of being governed by corporations that use aggregate data about individual interactions to determine future human action.

    Zuboff’s flat alarm usefully takes the reader through the philosophical underpinnings of behaviorism, following the work of B.F. Skinner, a psychologist working at Harvard in the mid-twentieth century who believed adjusting human behavior was a matter of changing external environments through positive and negative stimuli, or reinforcements. Zuboff argues that behaviorist attitudes toward the world, considered outré in their time, have moved to the heart of Silicon Valley philosophies of disruption, where they meet a particular kind of mode of capital accumulation driven by the logics of venture, neutrality, and macho meritocracies. The result is a kind of ideology of tools and of making humans into tools, that Zuboff terms instrumentarianism, at once driven to produce companies that are profitable for venture capitalists and investors and to treat human beings as sources of data to be turned toward profitability. Widespread surveillance is a necessary feature of this new world order because it is through that observation of every detail of human life that these companies can amass the data they need to turn a profit by predicting and ultimately controlling, or tuning, human behavior.

    Zuboff identifies key figures in the development of surveillance capitalism, including the aforementioned Skinner. Her particular mode of critique tends to focus on CEOs, and Zuboff reads their pronouncements as signs of the legacy of behaviorism in the C-Suites of contemporary firms. Zuboff also spends several chapters situating the critics of these surveillance capitalists as those who need to raise the flat world alarm. She compares this need to both her personal experience with the house fire and the experience of thinkers such as Hanah Arendt writing on totalitarianism. Here, she draws an explicit critique that conjoins totalitarianism and surveillance capital. Zuboff argues that just as totalitarianism was unthinkable as it was unfolding, so too does surveillance capitalism seem an impossible future given how we like to think about human behavior and its governance. Zuboff’s argument here is highly persuasive, since she is suggesting that the critics will always come to realize what it is they are critiquing just before it is too late to do anything about it. She also argues that behaviorism is in some sense the inverse of state-governed totalitarianism, since while totalitarianism attempted to discipline humans from the inside out, surveillance capitalism is agnostic when it comes to interiority–it only deals in and tries to engineer surface effects. For all this ‘neutrality’ over and against belief, it is equally oppressive, because it aims at social domination.

    Previous reviews have provided an overview of the chapters in this book; I will not repeat the exercise, except to say that the introduction nicely lays out her overall argument and could be used effectively to broach the topic of surveillance for many audiences. The chapters outlining B.F. Skinner’s imprint on behaviorist ideologies are also useful to provide historical context to the current age, as is the general story of Google’s turn toward profitability as told in Part I. And, yet, the promise of these earlier chapters–particularly the nice turn of phrase, the “‘behavioral means of production” yield in the latter chapters to an impoverished account of our options and of the contradictions at work within tech companies. These lacunae are due at least in part to Zuboff’s choice of revolutionary subject–the middle class consumer.

    Toward the end of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff rebuilds her house, this time with thicker walls. She uses her house’s regeneration to argue for a philosophical concept she calls the “right to sanctuary,” based largely on the writings of Gaston Bachelard, whose Poetics of Space describes for Zuboff how the shelter of home shapes “many of our most fundamental ways of making sense of experience” (477). Zuboff believes that surveillance capitalists want to bring down all these walls, for the sake of opening up our every action to collection and our every impulse to guidance from above. One might pause here and wonder whether the breaking down of walls is not fundamental to capitalism from the beginning, rather than an aberration of the current age. In other words, does the age of surveillance mark such a radical break from the general thrust of capital’s need to open up new markets and exploit new raw materials? Or, more to the point, for whom does it signify a radical aberration?  Posing this question would bring into focus the need to interrogate the complicitness of the very categories of autonomy, agency, and privacy in the extension of capitalism across geographies, and to historicize the production of interiority within that same frame.

    Against the contemporary tendency toward effacing the interior life of families and individuals, Zuboff offers sanctuary as the right to protection from surveillance. In this moment, that protection needs thick walls. For Zuboff, those walls need to be built by young people–one gets the sense that she is speaking across these sections to her own children and those of her children’s generation. The problem with describing sanctuary in this way is that it narrows the scope for both understanding the stakes of surveillance and recognizing where the battles for control over data will be fought.

    As a broadside, Surveillance Capitalism works through a combination of rhetoric and evidence. Zuboff hopes that a younger generation will fight the watchers for control over their own data. Yet, by addressing largely a well-off, college-educated, and young audience, Zuboff restricts the people who are being asked to take up the cause, and fails to ask the difficult question of what it would take to build a house with thicker walls for everyone.

    A persistent concern while reading this book is whether its analysis can encompass otherwheres. The populations that are most at risk under surveillance capitalism include immigrants, minorities, and workers, both within and outside the United States. The framework of data exhaust and its use to predict and govern behavior does not quite illuminate the uses of data collection to track border crossers, “predict” crime, and monitor worker movements inside warehouses. These relationships require an analysis that can get at the overlap between corporate and government surveillance, which Surveillance Capitalism studiously avoids. The book begins with an analysis of a system of exploitation based on turning data into profits, and argues that the new mode of production makes the motor of capitalism shift from products to information, a point well established by previous literature. Given this analysis, it astonishing that the last section of the book returns to a defense of individual rights, without stopping to question whether the ‘hive’ forms of organization that Zuboff finds in the logics of surveillance capital may have been a cooptation of radical kinds of social organizing arranged against a different model of exploitation. Leaderless movements like Occupy should be considered fully when describing hives, along with contemporary initiatives like tech worker cooperatives and technical alternatives like local mesh networks. The possibility that these radical forms of social organization may be subject to cooptation by the actors Zuboff describes never appears in the book. Instead, Zuboff appears to mistranslate theories of the subject that locate agency above or below the level of the individual to political acquiescence to a program of total social control. Without taking the step considering the political potential in ‘hive-like’ social organization, Zuboff’s corrective falls back on notions of individual rights and protections and is unable to imagine a new kind of collective action that moves beyond both individualism and behaviorism. This failure, for instance, skews Zuboff’s arguments toward the familiar ground of data protection as a solution rather than toward the more radical stances of refusal, which question data collection in the first place.

    Zuboff’s world is flat. It is a world in which there are Big Others that suck up an undifferentiated public’s data, Others whose objective is to mold our behavior and steal our free will. In this version of flatness, what was once described positively is now described negatively, as if we had collectively turned a rosy-colored smooth world flat black. Yet, how collective is this experience? How will it play out if the solutions we provide rely on bracketing out the question of what kinds of people and communities are afforded the chance to build thicker walls? This calls forth a deeper issue than simply that of a lack of inclusion of other voices in Zuboff’s account. After all, perhaps fixing the surveillance issue through the kinds of rights to sanctuary that Zuboff suggests would also fix the issue for those who are not usually conceived of as mainstream consumers.

    Except, historical examples ranging from Simone Browne’s explication of surveillance and slavery in Dark Matters to Achille Mbembe’s articulation of necropolitcs teach us that consumer protection is a thin filament on which to hang protection for all from overweaning surveillance apparati–corporate or otherwise. One could easily imagine a world where the privacy rights of well-heeled Americans are protected, but those of others continue to be violated. To reference one pertinent example, companies who are banking on monetizing data through a contractual relationship where individuals sell the data that they themselves own are simultaneously banking on those who need to sell their data to make money. In other words, as legal scholar Stacy-Ann Elvy notes (2017), in a personal data economy low-income consumers will be incentivized to sell their data without much concern for the conditions of sale, even while those who are well-off will have the means to avoid these incentives, resulting in the illusion of individual control and uneven access to privacy determined by degrees of socioeconomic vulnerability. These individuals will also be exposed to a greater degree of risk that their information will not stay secure.

    Simone Browne demonstrates that what we understand as surveillance was developed on and through black bodies, and that these populations of slaves and ex-slaves have developed strategies of avoiding detection, which she calls dark sousveillance. As Browne notes, “routing the study of contemporary surveillance” through the histories of “black enslavement and captivity opens up the possibility for fugitive acts of escape” even while it shows that the normative surveillance of white bodies was built on long histories of experimentations with black bodies (Browne 2015, 164). Achille Mbembe’s scholarship on necropolitics was developed through the insight that some life becomes killable, or in Jasbir Puar’s (2017) memorable phrasing, maimable, at the same time that other life is propagated. Mbembe proposes “necropolitcs” to describe “death worlds” where “death” not life, “is the space where freedom and negotiation happen” where “vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring on them the status of living dead” (Mbembe 2003, 40). The right to sanctuary appears to short circuit the spaces where life has already been configured as available for expropriation through perpetual wounding. Crucial to both Browne and Mbembe’s arguments is the insight that the study of the uneven harms of surveillance concomitantly surfaces the tactics of opposition and the archives of the world that provide alternative models of refuge outside the contractual property relationship evoked across the pages of Surveillance Capitalism.

    All those considered outside the ambit of individualized rights, including those in territories marked by extrajudicial measures, those deemed illegal, those perennially under threat, those who while at work are unprotected, those in unseen workplaces, and those simply unable to exercise rights to privacy due to law or circumstance, have little place in Zuboff’s analysis. One only has to think of Kashmir, and the access that people with no ties to this place will now have to building houses there, to begin to grasp the contested politics of home-building.[2] Without an acknowledgement of the limits of both the critique of surveillance capitalism and the agents of its proposed solutions, it seems this otherwise promising book will reach the usual audiences and have the usual effect of shoring up some peoples’ and places’ rights even while making the rest of the world and its populations available for experiments in data appropriation.

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    Sareeta Amrute is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington. Her scholarship focuses on contemporary capitalism and ways of working, and particularly on the ways race and class are revisited and remade in sites of new economy work, such as coding and software economies. She is the author of the book Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2016) and recently published the article “Of Techno-Ethics and Techno-Affects” in Feminist Review.

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    Notes

    [1] Friedman (2005) attributes this phrase to Nandan Nilekani, then Co-Chair, of Indian Tech company Infosys (and subsequently Chair of the Unique Identification Authority of India).

    [2] Until 2019, Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution granted the territories of Jammu and Kashmir special status, which allowed the state to keep on it’s books laws restricting who could buy land and property in Kashmir by allowing the territories to define who counted as a permanent resident.. After the abrogation of Article 370, rumors swirled that the rich from Delhi and elsewhere would now be able to purchase holiday homes in the area. See e.g. Devansh Sharma, “All You Need to Know about Buying Property in Jammu and Kashmir“; Parvaiz Bukhari, “Myth No 1 about Article 370: It Prevents Indians from Buying Land in Kashmir.”

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    Works Cited

    • Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    • Elvy, Stacy-Ann. 2017. “Paying for Privacy and the Personal Data Economy.” Columbia Law Review 117:6 (Oct). 1369-1460.
    • Friedman, Thomas. 2005. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
    • Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15:1 (Winter). 11-40.
    • Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    • Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

     

  • Richard Hill — Knots of Statelike Power (Review of Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age)

    Richard Hill — Knots of Statelike Power (Review of Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age)

    a review of Bernard Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard, 2015)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    This is a seminal and important book, which should be studied carefully by anyone interested in the evolution of society in light of the pervasive impact of the Internet. In a nutshell, the book documents how and why the Internet turned from a means to improve our lives into what appears to be a frightening dystopia driven by the collection and exploitation of personal data, data that most of us willingly hand over with little or no care for the consequences. “In our digital frenzy to share snapshots and updates, to text and videochat with friends and lovers … we are exposing ourselves‒rendering ourselves virtually transparent to anyone with rudimentary technological capabilities” (page 13 of the hardcover edition).

    The book meets its goals (25) of tracing the emergence of a new architecture of power relations; to document its effects on our lives; and to explore how to resist and disobey (but this last rather succinctly). As the author correctly says (28), metaphors matter, and we need to re-examine them closely, in particular the so-called free flow of data.

    As the author cogently points out, quoting Media Studies scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, we “assumed digitization would level the commercial playing field in wealthy economies and invite new competition into markets that had always had high barriers to entry.” We “imagined a rapid spread of education and critical thinking once we surmounted the millennium-old problems of information scarcity and maldistribution” (169).

    “But the digital realm does not so much give us access to truth as it constitutes a new way for power to circulate throughout society” (22). “In our digital age, social media companies engage in surveillance, data brokers sell personal information, tech companies govern our expression of political views, and intelligence agencies free-ride off e-commerce. … corporations and governments [are enabled] to identify and cajole, to stimulate our consumption and shape our desires, to manipulate us politically, to watch, surveil, detect, predict, and, for some, punish. In the process, the traditional limits placed on the state and on governing are being eviscerated, as we turn more and more into marketized malleable subjects who, willingly or unwillingly, allow ourselves to be nudged, recommended, tracked, diagnosed, and predicted by a blurred amalgam of governmental and commercial initiative” (187).

    “The collapse of the classic divide between the state and society, between the public and private sphere, is particular debilitating and disarming. The reason is that the boundaries of the state had always been imagined in order to limit them” (208). “What is emerging in the place of separate spheres [of government and private industry] is a single behemoth of a data market: a colossal market for personal data” (198). “Knots of statelike power: that is what we face. A tenticular amalgam of public and private institutions … Economy, society, and private life melt into a giant data market for everyone to trade, mine, analyze, and target” (215). “This is all the more troubling because the combinations we face today are so powerful” (210).

    As a consequence, “Digital exposure is restructuring the self … The new digital age … is having profound effects on our analogue selves. … it is radically transforming our subjectivity‒even for those, perhaps even more, who believe they have nothing to fear” (232). “Mortification of the self, in our digital world, happens when subjects voluntarily cede their private attachments and their personal privacy, when they give up their protected personal space, cease monitoring their exposure on the Internet, let go of their personal data, and expose their intimate lives” (233).

    As the book points out, quoting Software Freedom Law Center founder Eben Moglen, it is justifiable to ask whether “any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with the kind of massive, pervasive, surveillance into which the United States government has led not only its people but the world” (254). “This is a different form of despotism, one that might take hold only in a democracy: one in which people loose the will to resist and surrender with broken spirit” (255).

    The book opens with an unnumbered chapter that masterfully reminds us of the digital society we live in: a world in which both private companies and government intelligence services (also known as spies) read our e-mails and monitor our web browsing. Just think of “the telltale advertisements popping up on the ribbon of our search screen, reminding us of immediately past Google or Bing queries. We’ve received the betraying e-mails in our spam folders” (2). As the book says, quoting journalist Yasha Levine, social media has become “a massive surveillance operation that intercepts and analyses terabytes of data to build and update complex psychological profiles on hundreds of millions of people all over the world‒all of it in real time” (7). “At practically no cost, the government has complete access to people’s digital selves” (10).

    We provide all this data willingly (13), because we have no choice and/or because we “wish to share our lives with loved ones and friends” (14). We crave digital connections and recognition and “Our digital cravings are matched only by the drive and ambition of those who are watching” (14). “Today, the drive to know everything, everywhere, at every moment is breathtaking” (15).

    But “there remain a number of us who continue to resist. And there are many more who are ambivalent about the loss of privacy or anonymity, who are deeply concerned or hesitant. There are some who anxiously warn us about the dangers and encourage us to maintain reserve” (13).

    “And yet, even when we hesitate or are ambivalent, it seems there is simply no other way to get things done in the new digital age” (14), be it airline tickets, hotel reservations, buying goods, booking entertainment. “We make ourselves virtually transparent for everyone to see, and in so doing, we allow ourselves to be shaped in unprecedented ways, intentionally or wittingly … we are transformed and shaped into digital subjects” (14). “It’s not so much a question of choice as a feeling of necessity” (19). “For adolescents and young adults especially, it is practically impossible to have a social life, to have friends, to meet up, to go on dates, unless we are negotiating the various forms of social media and mobile technology” (18).

    Most have become dulled by blind faith in markets, the neoliberal mantra (better to let private companies run things than the government), fear of terrorism‒dulled into believing that, if we have nothing to hide, then there is nothing to fear (19). Even though private companies, and governments, know far more about us than a totalitarian regime such as that of East Germany “could ever have dreamed” (20).

    “We face today, in advanced liberal democracies, a radical new form of power in a completely altered landscape of political and social possibilities” (17). “Those who govern, advertise, and police are dealing with a primary resource‒personal data‒that is being handed out for free, given away in abundance, for nothing” (18).

    According to the book “There is no conspiracy here, nothing untoward.” But the author probably did not have access to Shawn M. Powers and Michael Jablonski’s The Real Cyberwar: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom (2015), published around the same time as Harcourt’s book, which shows that actually the current situation was created, or at least facilitated, by deliberate actions of the US government (which were open, not secret), resulting in what the book calls, quoting journalist James Bamford, “a surveillance-industrial empire” (27).

    The observations and conclusions outlined above are meticulously justified, with numerous references, in the numbered chapters of the book. Chapter 1 explains how analogies of the current surveillance regime to Orwell’s 1984 are imperfect because, unlike in Orwell’s imagined world, today most people desire to provide their personal data and do so voluntarily (35). “That is primarily how surveillance works today in liberal democracies: through the simplest desires, curated and recommended to us” (47).

    Chapter 2 explains how the current regime is not really a surveillance state in the classical sense of the term: it is a surveillance society because it is based on the collaboration of government, the private sector, and people themselves (65, 78-79). Some believe that government surveillance can prevent or reduce terrorist attacks (55-56), never mind that it might violate constitutional rights (56-57), or be ineffective, or that terrorist attacks in liberal democracies have resulted in far fewer fatalities than, say, traffic accidents or opiod overdose.

    Chapter 3 explains how the current regime is not actually an instantiation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, because we are not surveilled in order to be punished‒on the contrary, we expose ourselves in order to obtain something we want (90), and we don’t necessarily realize the extent to which we are being surveilled (91). As the book puts it, Google strives “to help people get what they want” by collecting and processing as much personal data as possible (103).

    Chapter 4 explains how narcissism drives the willing exposure of personal data (111). “We take pleasure in watching [our friends], ‘following’ them, ‘sharing’ their information‒even while we are, unwittingly, sharing our every keyboard stroke” (114). “We love watching others and stalking their digital traces” (117).

    Yet opacity is the rule for corporations‒as the book says, quoting Frank Pasquale (124-125), “Internet companies collect more and more data on their users but fight regulations that would let those same users exercise some control over the resulting digital dossiers.” In this context, it is worth noting the recent proposals, analyzed here, here, and here, to the World Trade Organization that would go in the direction favored by dominant corporations.

    The book explains in summary fashion the importance of big data (137-140). For an additional discussion, with extensive references, see sections 1 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation. As the book correctly notes, “In the nineteenth century, it was the government that generated data … But now we have all become our own publicists. The production of data has become democratized” (140).

    Chapter 5 explains how big data, and its analysis, is fundamentally different from the statistics that were collected, analyzed, and published in the past by governments. The goal of statistics is to understand and possibly predict the behavior of some group of people who share some characteristics (e.g. they live in a particular geographical area, or are of the same age). The goal of big data is to target and predict individuals (158, 161-163).

    Chapter 6 explains how we have come to accept the loss of privacy and control of our personal data (166-167). A change in outlook, largely driven by an exaggerated faith in free enterprise (168 and 176), “has made it easier to commodify privacy, and, gradually, to eviscerate it” (170). “Privacy has become a form of private property” (176).

    The book documents well the changes in the US Supreme Court’s views of privacy, which have moved from defending a human right to balancing privacy with national security and commercial interests (172-175). Curiously, the book does not mention the watershed Smith vs. Maryland case, in which the US Supreme Court held that telephone metadata is not protected by the right to privacy, nor the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act, under which many e-mails are not protected either.

    The book mentions the incestuous ties between the intelligence community, telecommunications companies, multinational companies, and military leadership that have facilitated the implementation of the current surveillance regime (178); these ties are exposed and explained in greater detail in Powers and Jablonski’s The Real Cyberwar. This chapter ends with an excellent explanation of how digital surveillance records are in no way comparable to the old-fashioned paper files that were collected in the past (181).

    Chapter 7 explores the emerging dystopia, engendered by the fact that “The digital economy has torn down the conventional boundaries between governing, commerce, and private life” (187). In a trend that should be frightening, private companies now exercise censorship (191), practice data mining on scales that are hard to imagine (194), control worker performance by means beyond the dreams of any Tayorlist (196), and even aspire to “predict consumer preferences better than consumers themselves can” (198).

    The size of the data brokerage market is huge and data on individuals is increasingly used to make decision about them, e.g. whether they can obtain a loan (198-208). “Practically none of these scores [calculated from personal data] are revealed to us, and their accuracy is often haphazard” (205). As noted above, we face an interdependent web of private and public interests that collect, analyze, refine, and exploit our personal data‒without any meaningful supervision or regulation.

    Chapter 8 explains how digital interactions are reconfiguring our self-images, our subjectivity. We know, albeit at times only implicitly, that we are being surveilled and this likely affects the behavior of many (218). Being deprived of privacy affects us, much as would being deprived of property (229). We have voluntarily given up much of our privacy, believing either that we have no choice but to accept surveillance, or that the surveillance is in our interests (233). So it is our society as a whole that has created, and nurtures, the surveillance regime that we live in.

    As shown in Chapter 9, that regime is a form of digital incarceration. We are surveilled even more closely than are people obliged by court order to wear electronic tracking devices (237). Perhaps a future smart watch will even administer sedatives (or whatever) when it detects, by analyzing our body functions and comparing with profiles downloaded from the cloud, that we would be better off being sedated (237). Or perhaps such a watch will be hijacked by malware controlled by an intelligence service or by criminals, thus turning a seemingly free choice into involuntary constraints (243, 247).

    Chapter 10 show in detail how, as already noted, the current surveillance regime is not compatible with democracy. The book cites Tocqueville to remind us that democracy can become despotic, and result is a situation where “people lose the will to resist and surrender with broken spirit” (255). The book summarily presents well-known data regarding the low voter turnouts in the United States, a topic covered in full detail in Robert McChesney’s  Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (2014) which explains how the Internet is having a negative effect on democracy. Yet “it remains the case that the digital transparency and punishment issues are largely invisible to democratic theory and practice” (216).

    So, what is to be done? Chapter 11 extols the revelations made by Edward Snowden and those published by Julian Assange (WikiLeaks). It mentions various useful self-help tools, such as “I Fight Surveillance” and “Security in a Box” (270-271). While those tools are useful, they are not at present used pervasively and thus don’t really affect the current surveillance regime. We need more emphasis on making the tools available and on convincing more people to use them.

    As the book correctly says, an effective measure would be to carry the privatization model to its logical extreme (274): since personal data is valuable, those who use it should pay us for it. As already noted, the industry that is thriving from the exploitation of our personal data is well aware of this potential threat, and has worked hard to attempt to obtain binding international norms, in the World Trade Organization, that would enshrine the “free flow of data”, where “free” in the sense of freedom of information is used as a Trojan Horse for the real objective, which is “free” in the sense of no cost and no compensation for those the true owners of the data, we the people. As the book correctly mentions, civil society organizations have resisted this trend and made proposals that go in the opposite direction (276), including a proposal to enshrine the necessary and proportionate principles in international law.

    Chapter 12 concludes the book by pointing out, albeit very succinctly, that mass resistance is necessary, and that it need not be organized in traditional ways: it can be leaderless, diffuse, and pervasive (281). In this context, I refer to the work of the JustNet Coalition and of the fledgling Internet Social Forum (see also here and here).

    Again, this book is essential reading for anybody who is concerned about the current state of the digital world, and the direction in which it is moving.

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    Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2o Review Digital Studies magazine.

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  • All Hitherto Existing Social Media

    All Hitherto Existing Social Media

    Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2013)a review of Christian Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction
    by Zachary Loeb
    ~
    Legion are the books and articles describing the social media that has come before. Yet the tracts focusing on Friendster, LiveJournal, or MySpace now appear as throwbacks, nostalgically immortalizing the internet that was and is now gone. On the cusp of the next great amoeba-like expansion of the internet (wearable technology and the “internet of things”) it is a challenging task to analyze social media as a concept while recognizing that the platforms being focused upon—regardless of how permanent they seem—may go the way of Friendster by the end of the month. Granted, social media (and the companies whose monikers act as convenient shorthand for it) is an important topic today. Those living in highly digitized societies can hardly avoid the tendrils of social media (even if a person does not use a particular platform it may still be tracking them), but this does not mean that any of us fully understand these platforms, let alone have a critical conception of them. It is into this confused and confusing territory that Christian Fuchs steps with his Social Media: A Critical Introduction.

    It is a book ostensibly targeted at students. Though when it comes to social media—as Fuchs makes clear—everybody has quite a bit to learn.

    By deploying an analysis couched in Marxist and Critical Theory, Fuchs aims not simply to describe social media as it appears today, but to consider its hidden functions and biases, and along the way to describe what social media could become. The goal of Fuchs’s book is to provide readers—the target audience is students, after all—with the critical tools and proper questions with which to approach social media. While Fuchs devotes much of the book to discussing specific platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks, Wikipedia), these case studies are used to establish a larger theoretical framework which can be applied to social media beyond these examples. Affirming the continued usefulness of Marxist and Frankfurt School critiques, Fuchs defines the aim of his text as being “to engage with the different forms of sociality on the internet in the context of society” (6) and emphasizes that the “critical” questions to be asked are those that “are concerned with questions of power” (7).

    Thus a critical analysis of social media demands a careful accounting of the power structures involved not just in specific platforms, but in the larger society as a whole. So though Fuchs regularly returns to the examples of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, he emphasizes that the narratives that dub these “Twitter revolutions” often come from a rather non-critical and generally pro-capitalist perspective that fail to embed adequately uses of digital technology in their larger contexts.

    Social media is portrayed as an example, like other media, of “techno-social systems” (37) wherein the online platforms may receive the most attention but where the, oft-ignored, layer of material technologies is equally important. Social media, in Fuchs’s estimation, developed and expanded with the growth of “Web 2.0” and functions as part of the rebranding effort that revitalized (made safe for investments) the internet after the initial dot.com bubble. As Fuchs puts it, “the talk about novelty was aimed at attracting novel capital investments” (33). What makes social media a topic of such interest—and invested with so much hope and dread—is the degree to which social media users are considered as active creators instead of simply consumers of this content (Fuchs follows much recent scholarship and industry marketing in using the term “prosumers” to describe this phenomenon; the term originates from the 1970s business-friendly futurology of Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave). Social media, in Fuchs’s description, represents a shift in the way that value is generated through labor, and as a result an alteration in the way that large capitalist firms appropriate surplus value from workers. The social media user is not laboring in a factory, but with every tap of the button they are performing work from which value (and profit) is skimmed.

    Without disavowing the hope that social media (and by extension the internet) has liberating potential, Fuchs emphasizes that such hopes often function as a way of hiding profit motives and capitalist ideologies. It is not that social media cannot potentially lead to “participatory democracy” but that “participatory culture” does not necessarily have much to do with democracy. Indeed, as Fuchs humorously notes: “participatory culture is a rather harmless concept mainly created by white boys with toys who love their toys” (58). This “love their toys” sentiment is part of the ideology that undergirds much of the optimism around social media—which allows for complex political occurrences (such as the Arab Spring) to be reduced to events that can be credited to software platforms.

    What Fuchs demonstrates at multiple junctures is the importance of recognizing that the usage of a given communication tool by a social movement does not mean that this tool brought about the movement: intersecting social, political and economic factors are the causes of social movements. In seeking to provide a “critical introduction” to social media, Fuchs rejects arguments that he sees as not suitably critical (including those of Henry Jenkins and Manuel Castells), arguments that at best have been insufficient and at worst have been advertisements masquerading as scholarship.

    Though the time people spend on social media is often portrayed as “fun” or “creative,” Fuchs recasts these tasks as work in order to demonstrate how that time is exploited by the owners of social media platforms. By clicking on links, writing comments, performing web searches, sending tweets, uploading videos, and posting on Facebook, social media users are performing unpaid labor that generates a product (in the form of information about users) that can then be sold to advertisers and data aggregators; this sale generates profits for the platform owner which do not accrue back to the original user. Though social media users are granted “free” access to a service, it is their labor on that platform that makes the platform have any value—Facebook and Twitter would not have a commodity to sell to advertisers if they did not have millions of users working for them for free. As Fuchs describes it, “the outsourcing of work to consumers is a general tendency of contemporary capitalism” (111).

    screen shot of Karl Marx Community Facebook Page
    screen shot of a Karl Marx Community Page on Facebook

    While miners of raw materials and workers in assembly plants are still brutally exploited—and this unseen exploitation forms a critical part of the economic base of computer technology—the exploitation of social media users is given a gloss of “fun” and “creativity.” Fuchs does not suggest that social media use is fully akin to working in a factory, but that users carry the factory with them at all times (a smart phone, for example) and are creating surplus value as long as they are interacting with social media. Instead of being a post-work utopia, Fuchs emphasizes that “the existence of the internet in its current dominant capitalist form is based on various forms of labour” (121) and the enrichment of internet firms is reliant upon the exploitation of those various forms of labor—central amongst these being the social media user.

    Fuchs considers five specific platforms in detail so as to illustrate not simply the current state of affairs but also to point towards possible alternatives. Fuchs analyzes Google, Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia as case studies of trends to encourage and trends of which to take wary notice. In his analysis of the three corporate platforms (Google, Facebook and Twitter) Fuchs emphasizes the ways in which these social media companies (and the moguls who run them) have become wealthy and powerful by extracting value from the labor of users and by subjecting users to constant surveillance. The corporate platforms give Fuchs the opportunity to consider various social media issues in sharper relief: labor and monopolization in terms of Google, surveillance and privacy issues with Facebook, the potential for an online public sphere and Twitter. Despite his criticisms, Fuchs does not dismiss the value and utility of what these platforms offer, as is captured in his claim that “Google is at the same time the best and the worst thing that has ever happened on the internet” (147). The corporate platforms’ successes are owed at least partly to their delivering desirable functions to users. The corrective for which Fuchs argues is increased democratic control of these platforms—for the labor to be compensated and for privacy to pertain to individual humans instead of to businesses’ proprietary methods of control. Indeed, one cannot get far with a “participatory culture” unless there is a similarly robust “participatory democracy,” and part of Fuchs’s goal is to show that these are not at all the same.

    WikiLeaks and Wikipedia both serve as real examples that demonstrate the potential of an “alternative” internet for Fuchs. Though these Wiki platforms are not ideal they contain within themselves the seeds for their own adaptive development (“WikiLeaks is its own alternative”—232), and serve for Fuchs as proof that the internet can move in a direction akin to a “commons.” As Fuchs puts it, “the primary political task for concerned citizens should therefore be to resist the commodification of everything and to strive for democratizing the economy and the internet” (248), a goal he sees as at least partly realized in Wikipedia.

    While the outlines of the internet’s future may seem to have been written already, Fuchs’s book is an argument in favor of the view that the code can still be altered. A different future relies upon confronting the reality of the online world as it currently is and recognizing that the battles waged for control of the internet are proxy battles in the conflict between capitalism and an alternative approach. In the conclusion of the book Fuchs eloquently condenses his view and the argument that follows from it in two simple sentences: “A just society is a classless society. A just internet is a classless internet” (257). It is a sentiment likely to spark an invigorating discussion, be it in a classroom, at a kitchen table, or in a café.

    * * *

    While Social Media: A Critical Introduction is clearly intended as a text book (each chapter ends with a “recommended readings and exercises” section), it is written in an impassioned and engaging style that will appeal to anyone who would like to see a critical gaze turned towards social media. Fuchs structures his book so that his arguments will remain relevant even if some of the platforms about which he writes vanish. Even the chapters in which Fuchs focuses on a specific platform are filled with larger arguments that transcend that platform. Indeed one of the primary strengths of Social Media is that Fuchs skillfully uses the familiar examples of social media platforms as a way of introducing the reader to complex theories and thinkers (from Marx to Habermas).

    Whereas Fuchs accuses some other scholars of subtly hiding their ideological agendas, no such argument can be made regarding Fuchs himself. Social Media is a Marxist critique of the major online platforms—not simply because Fuchs deploys Marx (and other Marxist theorists) to construct his arguments, but because of his assumption that the desirable alternative for the internet is part and parcel of a desirable alternative to capitalism. Such a sentiment can be found at several points throughout the book, but is made particularly evident by lines such as these from the book’s conclusion: “There seem to be only two options today: (a) continuance and intensification of the 200-year-old barbarity of capitalism or (b) socialism” (259)—it is a rather stark choice. It is precisely due to Fuchs’s willingness to stake out, and stick to, such political positions that this text is so effective.

    And yet, it is the very allegiance to such positions that also presents something of a problem. While much has been written of late—in the popular press in addition to by scholars—regarding issues of privacy and surveillance, Fuchs’s arguments about the need to consider users as exploited workers will likely strike many readers as new, and thus worthwhile in their novelty if nothing else. Granted, to fully go along with Fuchs’s critique requires readers to already be in agreement or at least relatively sympathetic with Fuchs political and ethical positions. This is particularly true as Fuchs excels at making an argument about media and technology, but devotes significantly fewer pages to ethical argumentation.

    The lines (quoted earlier) “A just society is a classless society. A just internet is a classless internet” (257) serve as much as a provocation as a conclusion. For those who ascribe to a similar notion of “a just society” Fuchs book will likely function as an important guide to thinking about the internet; however, to those whose vision of “a just society” is fundamentally different from his, Fuchs’s book may be less than convincing. Social Media does not present a complete argument about how one defines a “just society.” Indeed, the danger may be that Fuchs’s statements in praise of a “classless society” may lead to some dismissing his arguments regarding the way in which the internet has replicated a “class society.” Likewise, it is easy to imagine a retort being offered that the new platforms of “the sharing economy” represent the birth of this “classless society” (though it is easy to imagine Fuchs pointing out, as have other critics from the left, that the “sharing economy” is simply more advertising lingo being used to hide the same old capitalist relations). This represents something of a peculiar challenge when it comes to Social Media, as the political commitment of the book is simultaneously what makes it so effective and that which threatens the book’s potential political efficacy.

    Thus Social Media presents something of a conundrum: how effective is a critical introduction if its conclusion offers a heads-and-tails choice between “barbarity of capitalism or…socialism”? Such a choice feels slightly as though Fuchs is begging the question. While it is curious that Fuchs does not draw upon critical theorists’ writings about the culture industry, the main issues with Social Media seem to be reflections of this black-and-white choice. Thus it is something of a missed chance that Fuchs does not draw upon some of the more serious critics of technology (such as Ellul or Mumford)—whose hard edged skepticism would nevertheless likely not accept Fuchs’s Marxist orientation. Such thinkers might provide a very different perspective on the choice between “capitalism” and “socialism”—arguing that “technique” or “the megamachine” can function quite effectively in either. Though Fuchs draws heavily upon thinkers in the Marxist tradition it may be that another set of insights and critiques might have been gained by bringing in other critics of technology (Hans Jonas, Peter Kropotkin, Albert Borgmann)—especially as some of these thinkers had warned that Marxism may overvalue the technological as much as capitalism does. This is not to argue in favor of any of these particular theorists, but to suggest that Fuchs’s claims would have been strengthened by devoting more time to considering the views of those who were critical of technology, capitalism and of Marxism. Social Media does an excellent job of confronting the ideological forces on its right flank; it could have benefited from at least acknowledging the critics to its left.

    Two other areas that remain somewhat troubling are in regards to Fuchs’s treatment of Wiki platforms and of the materiality of technology. The optimism with which Fuchs approaches WikiLeaks and Wikipedia is understandable given the dourness with which he approaches the corporate platforms, and yet his hopes for them seem somewhat exaggerated. Fuchs claims “Wikipedians are prototypical contemporary communists” (243), partially to suggest that many people are already engaged in commons based online activities and yet it is an argument that he simultaneously undermines by admitting (importantly) the fact that Wikipedia’s editor base is hardly representative of all of the platform’s users (it’s back to the “white boys with toys who love their toys”), and some have alleged that putatively structureless models of organization like Wikipedia’s actually encourage oligarchical forms of order. Which is itself not to say anything about the role that editing “bots” play on the platform or the degree to which Wikipedia is reliant upon corporate platforms (like Google) for promotion. Similarly, without ignoring its value, the example of WikiLeaks seems odd at a moment when the organization seems primarily engaged in a rearguard self-defense whilst the leaks that have generated the most interest of late has been made to journalists at traditional news sources (Edward Snowden’s leaks to Glenn Greenwald, who was writing for The Guardian when the leaks began).

    The further challenge—and this is one that Fuchs is not alone in contending with—is the trouble posed by the materiality of technology. An important aspect of Social Media is that Fuchs considers the often-unseen exploitation and repression upon which the internet relies: miners, laborers who build devices, those who recycle or live among toxic e-waste. Yet these workers seem to disappear from the arguments in the later part of the book, which in turn raises the following question: even if every social media platform were to be transformed into a non-profit commons-based platform that resists surveillance, manipulation, and the exploitation of its users, is such a platform genuinely just if to use it one must rely on devices whose minerals were mined in warzones, assembled in sweatshops, and which will eventually go to an early grave in a toxic dump? What good is a “classless (digital) society” without a “classless world?” Perhaps the question of a “capitalist internet” is itself a distraction from the fact that the “capitalist internet” is what one gets from capitalist technology. Granted, given Fuchs’s larger argument it may be fair to infer that he would portray “capitalist technology” as part of the problem. Yet, if the statement “a just society is a classless society” is to be genuinely meaningful than this must extend not just to those who use a social media platform but to all of those involved from the miner to the manufacturer to the programmer to the user to the recycler. To pose the matter as a question, can there be participatory (digital) democracy that relies on serious exploitation of labor and resources?

    Social Media: A Critical Introduction provides exactly what its title promises—a critical introduction. Fuchs has constructed an engaging and interesting text that shows the continuing validity of older theories and skillfully demonstrates the way in which the seeming newness of the internet is itself simply a new face on an old system. While Fuchs has constructed an argument that resolutely holds its position it is from a stance that one does not encounter often enough in debates around social media and which will provide readers with a range of new questions with which to wrestle.

    It remains unclear in what ways social media will develop in the future, but Christian Fuchs’s book will be an important tool for interpreting these changes—even if what is in store is more “barbarity.”
    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, alternative forms of technology, and libraries as models of resistance. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian” Loeb writes at the blog librarianshipwreck. He previously reviewed The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor for boundary2.org.
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