The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - Introduction

You probably already heard the phrase: "If something is free, you are the product". Specially when we are talking about the internet, this statement seems undeniable. You can connect with people, watch videos, listen to music, everything for free. In the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at The New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff teaches us that contrary to the common sense, this is statement is incorrect, and we are not the products, but the sources of surveillance capitalism's crucial surplus: the objects of an increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation.

What is Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as "machine intelligence," and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.

The Unprecedented

One key element to understand the success of surveillance capitalism is that it is unprecedented. "When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar categories, thereby rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented". A classic example of the unprecedented is the "horseless-carriage", where the lack of a category to label the automobile made people associate it with the carriages, failing to see it as something new.

The unprecedented nature of surveillance capitalism prevents us to understand it with our existing concepts. Trying to classify it by terms like "monopoly" or "privacy" may describe some parts of it, it is not enough to visualize the full extent of the new regime. As Shoshana puts it: "this book is a journey to encounter what is strange, original, and even unimaginable in surveillance capitalism."

A Personal Journey

This introduction is not only about Shoshana's book, it is also about my learning process and the direction that I want to give to this blog. Her book created in me the desire to study more about how our society is entangled with the digital. It inspired me to start this writing project and share my journey.

Reading this book flourished in me two main sentiments. First, the relief that I could actually follow and understand a literature that is being put up to level with giants like Max Weber, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and many others. Shoshana's writing is dense and inviting at the same time, she can bring a sentence that triggers a week worth of reflection, at the same time transport you to the place where the events are developing. Second, the astonishment with her knowledge. I took months to read a few chapters, not because it was boring nor my laziness, but I simply couldn't continue reading without ruminating all the new information.

I invite you to join me in this book. My proposal is to summarize and comment each chapter, bringing the author's bright into a short read. I hope to make justice to her writing and share the epiphany that I had reading it.