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Ever since the dot com boom in the early 2000s, our lives have been saturated by technology in every aspect and have been made much more convenient by the services tech corporations provide. After two decades flew by, the Internet has become the extension of the real world and one of the most significant infrastructures of today’s society. We engage in daily activities, make important life decisions, and expose sensitive information on this platform, which allows the tech corporations to collect this user information and use it to train their algorithms. We as users, on the other hand, are unaware of which part of the traces we leave online is collected as data, and most importantly, how these tech corporations handle our data. This huge asymmetry of knowledge and transparency has exposed us to surveillance capitalism and puts democracy at stake.

Introduction to Surveillance Capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard Business School professor emerita with decades of experience studying issues of labor and power in the digital economy, defines surveillance capitalism as a “radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism” based on the commodification of “reality” and its transformation into behavioral data for analysis and sales. One important characteristic of traditional capitalists is that they claim things outside the market such as rivers and mountains and take them into the market dynamics as commodities. Similarly, surveillance capitalists like Google were also looking for their free target outside the conventional market in the early 2000s, and they saw the vast potential in commodifying people’s private experience. The surveillance capitalists build platforms such as social media to collect data, they use the data to train predictive models, and their final products are the predictions of what their users will do. In this case, it is not their users that are the business customers, but the companies that need these prediction results to make decisions like when to send the targeted ads, how much to charge for insurance for different people, etc.

Indications of Surveillance Capitalism

In Zuboff’s article “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization”, she argues that surveillance capitalism “ aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control.” Surveillance capitalists know that the monetization potentials linked to accurate data capture and analysis are enormous. In order to get the most accurate models, tech corporations need to get not only a massive amount of data but also a variety of data. Because technology is still a largely unrestricted and lawless land, tech firms have developed lots of ways to convert the real world into data points as well. Virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa are brought into people’s homes and said to be listening to people’s conversations; insurance tracking devices are promoted by auto insurance companies to decide on how much an individual should pay for insurance; CCTV surveillance cameras are installed in different neighborhoods, which leaves people’s facial expressions that are highly indicative of their future behaviors free for the companies to grab.

Unfortunately, these new opportunities and incentives to capture data can sometimes challenge people’s privacy and even violate rights and laws. This prompts the big tech corporations such as Google and Facebook to obscure their operations and algorithms in order to take advantage of the uninformed data subjects. They expect to get opposition along the way but as previously mentioned, they will already have accumulated a substantial amount of resources to defend themselves at low cost.

The technology that backs up this surveillance capitalism develops at an unprecedented speed, which puts people in a brand new position where very few people understand the logic and consequences of the work of these corporations. As a result, there is a law gap between technological development and defensive barriers. The opacity that the tech corporations choose to hide behind did not help with connecting the gap, especially knowing that their ultimate goal is to modify and swing behavior. Zuboff argues that under the framework of surveillance capitalism, the global architecture of computer mediation turns the electronic text of the bounded organization into an intelligent world-spanning organism that she defines as the Big Other. Those with the material, knowledge, and financial resources participate in the Big Other economics, and the markets in behavioral control get to decide who can gain access to the Big Other. Markets and democracies are no longer reciprocal to each other; rather, populations depend on the markets so much that the data they are supposed to own is just free data capture targets. As Zuboff said, “Under surveillance capitalism, democracy no longer functions as a means to prosperity; democracy threatens surveillance revenues.”

The opacity that big tech corporations choose to take on catalyzes the formation of a black box society where we know only the output, but not the process leading to the output. As James Arvanitakis states, “In a democracy, we assume that we understand where the information comes from, but this is no longer the case.” The asymmetry of knowledge crashes democracy from both above and below. From above, it increases the social inequality in this digital era. Internet was built to spread and democratize knowledge, but surveillance capitalists see their users’ rights of knowing as an obstacle on their way to higher efficiency. From below, it is nearly impossible for users to combat surveillance capitalism. Since the product is the certainty of behavior predictions, the surveillance capitalists aim to interfere with our own decision making without the users knowing through subliminal cues and micro-targeting.

As we entered the digital era, the Internet has become the basic infrastructure of today’s economy. However, if our infrastructure is full of cameras and strings that can be pulled to manipulate the majority, the power will naturally fall into the hands of the minority who has all the information. As Lord Acton once said, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Democracy will be threatened, and there will be bigger social inequality issues. The good news is, surveillance capitalism is still a relatively new phenomenon that has lasted for about 20 years, and legislative institutions have started to take measures to regulate the operation and ownership of the Internet. European Union has recently come up with General Data Protection Regulation, which aims to protect the users’ privacy; every state in the United States has its own breach disclosure law; pioneer tech companies such as Facebook have also shown interest in cooperating with the legislative institutions after Mark Zuckerberg was called in front of Congress. This is still a long fight, but I do have hope in everyone in the ecosystem figuring out a solution, not at the sacrifice of users’ privacy.