Surveillance Capitalism

Most of continental Europe, and Germany in particular, is highly critical of the disruption that the Internet wreaks on traditional companies. One such article by Shoshana Zuboff was a criticism that a new form of capitalism is taking over the world. She calls it “surveillance capitalism”:
“(It is) a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior.”
And who’s doing this surveillance? The big bad wolf, aka the Internet companies. She elaborates what she means:
“The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.”
Why is it so easy for companies to collect data about us?
“(Because it combines) the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism (of people).”

It’s hard to argue with any of that. But typical of such criticisms, she then goes overboard:
“The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying.”
Really? Does she not get that the reason such “surveillance” is possible is because of the ubiquitous smartphone, something owned in every corner of the world by people of all incomes? Besides, does she really not know that the fraction of global GDP that comes from the Internet sector is very small?

Zuboff also can’t seem to get why most people have such “radical indifference” to the collection and use of data about them: it’s because they get the service (like Google or Facebook) for free. Which is why the “radical indifference” is not going away any time soon.

Such ignorance of the facts and willful ignoring of the obvious relation to the free’ness of Internet services is commonplace among the critics from continental Europe. But she made a remark in passing that this don’t-care-about-such-data-collection attitude is “especially (true) in the Anglo economies.” It’s ironical that she doesn’t see that very remark also dooms the probability of any global change in the attitude towards surveillance capitalism:
-         Anglo economies constitute a huge chunk of the world (US, Britain, Australia, Canada, and in their attitude on most things, the former colonies of Britain): in other words, most of the planet.
-         China is a fan of it for altogether different reasons!
So who does that leave? Oh yes, as Donald Rumsfeld contemptuously said, “Old Europe”.

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