The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

“Just as individual civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity. [...] This mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the possibility of a human future at the new frontier of power will be contested.” 

Industrial capitalism revolutionized the modern world, but it came at the cost of disastrous environmental effects. Similarly, surveillance capitalism offers society enticing new technologies that pose an equally destructive threat—one that instead targets mankind. As this instrumentarian power begins to mobilize on a global scale, Zuboff insists that only a popular resistance movement will be able to save our democratic future from surveillance capitalism’s exploitative grip.

“More precisely, the Apple miracle and surveillance capitalism each owes its success to the destructive collision of two opposing historical forces. One vector belongs to the longer history of modernization and the centuries-long societal shift from the mass to the individual. The opposing vector belongs to the decades-long elaboration and implementation of the neoliberal economic paradigm: It's political economics, its transformation of society, and especially its aim to reverse subdue impede and even destroy the individual urge towards psychological self-determination and moral agency.” 

Surveillance capitalism’s rise and successful integration into society was due to the collision of two forces: the evolution of society’s understanding of the “individual” through time, and evolving economic philosophies, such as neoliberalism. The collision of individualism, which championed one’s rights to self-determination, and neoliberalism, whose dire social and political ramifications threatened one’s ability to achieve self-determination, ruptured society. Surveillance capitalism seeks to exploit the vulnerabilities associated with this collision.

“Although the market form and its boss has had many failings and produced many violent facts, its populations of newly modernizing individuals were valued as the necessary resources of customers and employees. It depended upon its communities in ways that would eventually lead to a range of institutionalized reciprocities. [...] Indeed, considered from the vantage point of the last 40 years, during which this Market form was systemically deconstructed, it's reciprocity with the social order, however vexed and imperfect, appears to have been one of its most salient features.” 

Despite the fact that market capitalism had its own exploitative features between employers and employees, individuals were still relied on as valuable pieces to its economic puzzle. Capitalists needed people to produce and buy their products to gain profit. Zuboff argues that in retrospect, after considering surveillance capitalism’s operations of exploitation, one of market capitalism’s most valuable features is its consideration of the individual.

“First let’s establish that the concept of ‘individualization’ should not be confused with the neoliberal ideology of ‘individualism’ that shifts all responsibility for success or failure to a mythical atomized isolated individual doomed to a life of perpetual competition and disconnected from relationships, community, and society. Neither does it refer to the psychological process of ‘individuation’ that is associated with the lifelong exploration of self-development. Instead individualization is a consequence of long-term processes of modernization.” 

The “collision” between the modern individual and neoliberalism can be a confusing event to understand because both forces involve similar terminologies. Neoliberalism purposefully seeks to conflate individualization—the philosophy that arose out of phases of modernization that promotes one’s democracy and free will—with its more destructive philosophy of individualism, which places the burden of one’s life circumstances entirely on one’s own shoulders and ignores social circumstances. To grasp the exploitative operations of surveillance capitalism, the distinction between individualization (which it seeks to destroy) and individualism (which surveillance capitalism emphasizes) must be understood.

“Western modernity has formed around a canon of principles and laws that confer inviolable individual rights and acknowledge the sanctity of each individual life. However, it was not until the second modernity that felt experience began to catch up with formal law. This felt truth has been expressed in new demands to make actual in everyday life what is already established in law.”

Second modernity developed in the postwar years of the 20th century and came with newfound rights, acknowledgements, and privileges for individuals. These values of individualization are precisely what are at stake with the rise of surveillance capitalism. This quote also displays the Western emphasis of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

“The US, the UK, and most of Europe entered the second decade of the twenty-first century facing economic and social inequalities more extreme than anything since the Gilded Age and comparable to some of the world's poorest countries. Despite a decade of explosive digital growth that included the Apple miracle and the penetration of the internet into everyday life, dangerous social divisions suggested and even more stratified and anti-democratic future.”

Neoliberalism brought dire social and political effects upon Western society in the 21st century, such as high unemployment rates, sky-high rents, and acute class stratification. Seeking to display this era’s situation in a larger historical trajectory, Zuboff compares this specific point in time to the Gilded Age of the 19th century, which was characterized by similar social inequalities and political corruption. These negative effects of neoliberalism prove Zuboff’s previous argument that surveillance capitalism’s impressive technological innovations will come at serious socio-political costs.

“Surveillance capitalism lays claim to these decision rights. The typical complaint is that privacy is eroded, but that is misleading. In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed, as decision rights over privacy are claimed for surveillance capital. Instead of people having the rights to decide how and what they will disclose, these rights are concentrated within the domain of surveillance capitalism.”

Decision rights refer to one’s power to make information public or private, whereas privacy is reflected in the act of choosing what to make public or private. While many believe tech firms invade privacy, the larger scheme of surveillance capitalism actually violates one’s decision rights. Surveillance capitalism lays claim to one’s entire life, making unknown moments, actions, and decisions known.

“The message is that surveillance capitalism’s new instruments will render the entire world’s actions and conditions as behavioral flows. […] In the flatness of this flow, data are data, and behavior is behavior. The body is simply a set of coordinates in time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable ‘it.’” 

Surveillance capitalism’s acts of rendition objectify individuals. People’s entire lives are translated into data, with all of one’s profound or private moments taken as raw material. Surveillance capitalists view society with cold, objective eyes that do not value people’s humanity; they only seek to exploit lived experience for profit.

“Now the ubiquitous apparatus is the means to the ubiquitous rendition of human experience. [...] The prediction imperative makes boundaries and borders intolerable, and surveillance capitalists will do almost anything to eliminate them. This pursuit transforms ‘connection’ into a commercial imperative and transforms individual autonomy into a threat to surveillance revenues.” 

The ubiquitous apparatus is the extensive, nearly inescapable network of technology and machine intelligence that surveillance capitalism relies on for rendition. Because surveillance capitalism seeks total ubiquity to collect as much behavioral surplus data as possible, any borders preventing “Big Other” from casting its exploitative eyes on one’s life are intolerable. Thus, concepts such as privacy, decision rights, and autonomy must be destroyed for surveillance capitalism to succeed.

“The euphemisms of consent can no longer divert attention from the bare facts: under surveillance capitalism, rendition is typically unauthorized, unilateral, gluttonous, secret, and brazen. These characteristics summarize the asymmetries of power that put the ‘surveillance’ in surveillance capitalism. [...] it is difficult to be where rendition is not. As industries far beyond the technology sector are lured by surveillance profits, the ferocity of the race to find and render experience as data has turned rendition into a global project of surveillance capital.” 

Surveillance capitalism’s ubiquitous apparatus operates in secret, regularly breaching individuals’ decision rights to datify their lives. Its shadowy operations reflect the power imbalance inherent to surveillance capitalism, where those who observe gain a specific knowledge that those who are observed cannot gain. Surveillance capitalism is constantly chasing its mission of ubiquity, consuming all business sectors—even those that lie outside of technology—to achieve rendition of global totality. 

“In this phase of the predictive imperative, surveillance capitalists declare their rights to modify others’ behavior for profit according to methods that bypass human awareness, individual decision rights, and the entire complex of self-regulatory processes that we summarize with terms such as autonomy and self-determination.”

The prediction imperative involves economies of scope and action that seek to gain access to the intimacies of one’s life for rendition and to actively intervene in one’s life, nudging individuals towards decisions which are profitable for surveillance capitalists. Zuboff argues that this process of rendition and behavioral modification violate people’s basic human rights. The prediction imperative thus represents one of the most threatening aspects of surveillance capitalism.

“The best predictions feed on totalities of data, and on the strength of this movement toward totality, surveillance capitalists have hijacked the division of learning in society. They command knowledge from the decisive pinnacle of the social order, where they nourish and protect the shadow text: the urtext of certainty. This is the market net in which we are snared.”

To build the most accurate predictive products, surveillance capitalism relies on both ubiquity and certainty of behavior. To gain this certainty, surveillance capitalists rely on the shadow text of the public’s behavioral surplus data. They analyze the information in this exclusive secret text and gain knowledge that cannot be known or accessed by the mass public. This exclusive body of knowledge grants surveillance capitalists the power to achieve certainty through behavioral modification. Surveillance capitalism’s division of knowledge gifts surveillance capitalists the power of action while the mass public are passive prisoners.

“Instrumentarian power bends the new digital apparatus [...] to the interests of the surveillance capitalist project, finally fulfilling Skinner’s call for the ‘instruments and methods’ of ‘a behavioral technology comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology.’ The result is a pervasive means of behavioral modification whose economies of action are designed to maximize surveillance revenues.”

Surveillance capitalism’s will of ubiquitous control is exerted through instrumentarian power, which uses the digital apparatus to watch, analyze, and intervene in people’s lives. This apparatus of the “Big Other” fulfills B. F. Skinner’s wishes for a network of technology that could create his conceptions of a radical behaviorist utopia, where people’s behaviors are controlled and predetermined for the sake of unity and peace. The Big Other creates a ubiquitous network of behavioral modification designed specifically to exploit people for a minority’s profits.

“The private institutions of capital led the way in this ambitious reformation of collective life and individual experience, but they found necessary support from public institutions, especially as the declaration of a ‘war on terror’ legitimated every inclination to enshrine machine-produced certainty as the ultimate solution to societal uncertainty. These mutual affinities assured that instrumentarian power would not be a stepchild but rather an equal partner or even, with increasing regularity, the lord and master upon whom the state depends in its quest for ‘total awareness.’” 

While neoliberalism encouraged the erosion of individualization and exploitation of the public, the government also protected and enforced these philosophies. The War on Terror is one example where the state embraced surveillance tactics that it previously condemned, infringing on individual liberties to support its ideological mission at the people’s expense. This established an elective affinity between surveillance capitalism and the state. However, as surveillance capitalism’s instrumentarian strength grows, Zuboff suggests that it might become so powerful that it controls the state itself.

“Nadella’s construction site exemplifies the grand confluence in which machines and humans are united as objects in the cloud, all instrumented and orchestrated in accordance with the ‘policies.’ The magnificence of ‘policies’ lies precisely in the fact that they appear on the scene as guaranteed outcomes to be automatically imposed, monitored, and maintained by the ‘system.’ They are baked into Big Other’s operations, an infinity of uncontracts detached from any of the social processes associated with private or public governance: conflict and negotiation, promise and compromise, agreement and shared values, democratic contest, legitimation, and authority.” 

In Chapter 13, Zuboff reviews Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s partnership with a Swedish manufacturing company to bring predictive machine intelligence to their factory equipment. In this “smart factory” setting, machines and objects are viewed as the same: Both must adhere to the rules and policies of the space and are subject to behavioral control by the system at work. This example illustrates how Big Other flays away one’s individual rights, opinions, and agency, showcasing how people are objectified in the grand scheme of surveillance capitalist operations.

“In the twentieth century the critical success factors of industrial capitalism […] were discovered and crafted in the workplace and then transposed to society, where they were institutionalized in schools, hospitals, family life, and personality. As generations of scholars have documented, society became more factory-like so that we might train and socialize the youngest among us to fit the new requirements of a mass production order. We have encountered this cycle anew, but now the aim is to remake 21st century society as a ‘first-class thing’ organized in the image of the machine hive for the sake of others’ certainty.” 

Zuboff argues that economic forms determine both workplace relationships and relationships that lie outside of work, subsequently affecting how the entire society is structured. Industrial capitalism created an industrial society, and surveillance capitalism is in the process of creating a surveillance society. This order of living is imagined as a “hive” wherein all people are united under surveillance capitalism’s umbrella of ubiquity, working to modify behaviors and achieve certainty on a global scale.

“The social principles of instrumentarianism’s third modernity represent a stark break with the legacies and ideals of the liberal order. Instrumentarian society is a [...] fun-house-mirror world in which everything we cherished is turned upside down and inside out. Pentland doubles down on the illiberality of behavioral economics. In his hands the ideology of human frailty is not merely cause for contempt but a justification for the death of individuality. Self-determination and autonomous moral judgement, generally regarded as the bulwark of civilization, are recast as a threat to collective well-being.” 

Instrumentarianism has a particular vision for a third modernity that destroys the liberties that individuals gained in the second phase of modernity. Surveillance capitalism’s instrumentarian power embodies the work of radical behaviorists like B. F. Skinner and Alex Pentland, who view people as flawed beings who are incapable of creating an ideal society themselves; instead, they require outside “guidance” to achieve utopia. Instrumentarianism seeks to enforce a utopia of certainty, where behavioral modification will erase all sense of democratic civilization. It thus views ideas such as self-determination and free will as threats to the future.

“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 architecture of computer-mediated means of behavioral 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.” 

Younger generations like Generation Z are particularly important demographics to study in identifying the negative effects of an instrumentarian society. Having grown up in a completely digital age, adolescents and those in their 20’s (emerging adulthood) are uniquely affected by surveillance capitalism’s exploitative efforts because the instrumentarian world is all they know. As a result, they are highly normalized to—and suffer from—the damaging effects of surveillance capitalism, such as social media addiction, depression, and self-objectification.

“Although effective contest [against surveillance capitalism] will require determined individuals, the individual alone cannot shoulder the burden of justice, any more than an individual worker in the first years of the twentieth century could bear the burden of fighting for fair wages and working conditions. Those twentieth-century challenges required collective action, and so do our own.” 

Zuboff emphasizes the fact that although educated, dedicated individuals are required to fight the looming threat of an instrumentarian future, individual actions alone will not successfully defeat surveillance capitalism. Drawing links to successful resistance movements in history, she references workers’ rights won by labor unions in the 20th century. The instrumentarian threats of the 21st century require a similar strategy of collectivism, solidarity, and determination.

“A century ago, workers organized for collective action and ultimately tipped the scales of power, and today’s ‘users’ will have to mobilize in ways that reflect our own unique twenty-first century ‘conditions of existence’. We need synthetic declarations that are institutionalized in new centers of democratic power, expertise, and contest that challenge today’s asymmetries of knowledge and power. This quality of collective action will be required if we are finally to replace lawlessness with laws that assert the right to sanctuary and the right to the future tense as essential for effective human life.” 

This quote reflects Zuboff’s specific proposals for the future and illustrates her ideological perspective. She is not a revolutionary, but a reformist; when she advocates for a collective resistance movement, it is not to establish new governments, but to encourage people to hold their current governments accountable to their purpose of popular representation. Popular declarations are required to demand the institutionalization of protections against instrumentarian power.

“Surveillance capitalism is not the old capitalism, and its leaders are not Smith’s or even Hayek’s capitalists. Under this regime, freedom and ignorance are no longer twin born, no longer two sides of the same coin called mystery. Surveillance capitalism is instead defined by an unprecedented convergence of freedom and knowledge. [...] Surveillance capitalists claim the freedom to order knowledge, and then they leverage that knowledge advantage in order to protect and expand their freedom.” 

In previous forms of capitalism, freedom and ignorance operated together to create a “level” playing field where nobody knows the future of the market, thus necessitating freedom of action and a lack of government oversight. Surveillance capitalism, however, claims both freedom and knowledge. It uses this ownership of knowledge to extend its exploitative reach into people’s lives, gaining the power to modify behaviors to secure and ensure the future existence of its freedoms.

“Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic and antiegalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above. It is not a coup d’état in the classical sense but rather a coup de gens: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technical Trojan horse that is Big Other. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence over the division of learning in society: the privatization of the central principle of social ordering in the twenty-first century.”

Because surveillance capitalists are a class of a wealthy few, the movement to create a utopia of certainty is not a public one; rather, it is a private, market-driven movement. These surveillance capitalists hold an inordinate amount of knowledge and power and seek to use their tools to overthrow the basic human rights and liberties that were gained during second modernity. As a result of these qualifications, Zuboff classifies this instrumentarian movement as a coup from above that seeks to establish a privatized rule over the mass public.

“Should we grow weary of our own struggle for self-determination and surrender instead to the seductions of Big Other, we will inadvertently trade a future of homecoming for an arid prospect of muted, sanitized tyranny. A third modernity that solves our problems at the price of a human future is a cruel perversion of capitalism and of the digital capabilities it commands. It is also an unacceptable affront to democracy.”

Surveillance capitalism is dangerous because of its secret operations that threaten popular liberties and because its vast size and enormous influence in society are intimidating. Zuboff warns that if enough people become overwhelmed and paralyzed by instrumentarian power, society will be exchange a democratic third modernity for a dystopian one. Surveillance capitalism purports to offer a utopia, but it comes at an enormous democratic cost. Thus, the public must mobilize in unity to fight for a genuinely promising future.