Humanism in the Era of Surveillance Capitalism

Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart.

In October of 2018 Shoshana Zuboff published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism—a very long history and analysis of the internet economy. I bought the book soon after its publication, feeling very urgently that I should learn the dark secrets of the web. After all, I spent so much time online: hours and hours of my life sucked away with no trace by the little glowing icons on my phone, by the thrilling pings and pongs of messenger apps, by the lure of the endless scroll.

The book arrived and I skimmed the first chapter. I learned that the internet economy (what Zuboff dubs “Surveillance Capitalism”) functions through the systematic extraction of data from the online activities of its users. This data, which she calls “digital exhaust” is not simply the decisions a given user consciously makes, but also the residual information (dwell times, typing speeds, geolocation, spelling etc.) that users produce incidentally, by simply existing on the internet. This data, a minute rendering of users’ online behavior, is analyzed by tech companies and used to harness predictions about users’ future behaviors, and these predictions are in turn traded to advertisers in the expanding “behavioral futures” market. This is an economy, Zuboff observes, in which users are no longer the subjects, nor even the products of trade—but rather its objects. 

At this point I put the book down and didn’t pick it up again for two years. I was easily distracted, I guess, by other things. By pings and pongs, most likely.

I took it up again in 2021—by which time, I was a little more resigned to the state of things. I was not scandalized to learn that my inner world was the site of something like a coordinated incursion by technocapitalists wishing to turn a profit. As Zuboff writes, in the era of Surveillance Capitalism the “undefended space” of daily life is lost to us: “your interests and tastes, your digestion, your tears, your attention, your feelings, your face.” By then, it was in the air. We all sensed that these things were no longer ours in the ways they once were.

Though Zuboff’s was not the first articulation of these concerns, the book generated a lot of buzz—mainly because it highlighted the extent to which the average user of the internet does not have a sufficient concept of how it works. Most people act like “the internet” as we know it arrived spontaneously, wholesale, and according to something other than human decision-making. This illusion, Zuboff explains in exhaustive, eerie detail, is a feature, not a bug, of the digital economy. 

As I re-read the early chapters of the book, I was struck by a familiar feeling. A kind of disorientation at some of Zuboff’s rhetoric. Although The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is not, by any stretch, a philosophical text, Zuboff’s personal philosophy does not fail to come through—not the least in the subtitle of the book: “The Fight for a Human Future.” I realized in a flash why I had put the book down the first time. Zuboff’s primary defence against the dangers of Surveillance Capitalism is always some version of this subtitle, some insistence on this idea of a “human future,” on “human values,” or once, on “the text of human possibility.” None of these phrases made sense to me. I understood, on a basic level, that such appeals to the “human” are supposed to move me, to stir up a sense of fellow feeling. But to me it just sounded like sentimentality—cloying and ineffective. Sentences like “...human beings whose bodies, thoughts, and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature's once-plentiful meadows and forests before they fell to the market dynamic” simply misfired.They failed to communicate anything to me beyond a kind of sickly nostalgia. 

My own sense of alienation from this moral language, the morality of the “old world,” confused me. After all, I was on her side! I am on her side. I like the morality of the old world and treasure certain kinds of humanism. So this confusion was part of why I put the book down. The other part was my poor attention span. Like I said: the pings and the pongs, they get to me!

Anyways. Where was I?

So I read the book eventually. In early July. I was still in Atlanta, trudging through my master’s thesis. I remember I went swimming on the fourth of July and couldn’t understand why there were so many people in the water. I was in the kind of stress-induced haze that causes you to lose track of dates and times. I sat by the pool and read. Then I swam back and forth, weaving through, losing count of the laps. I remember I felt quite alienated from the smiling pool-partiers and the pleasure they took in each other. I remember thinking: I need to remain in a narrow lane and not to disperse myself. I thought of Saint Augustine, how he said it is not virtuous to be spilled and scattered in time.

Actually, I find Augustine quite relatable when I consider the particular kinds of malaise brought about by internet overuse. When I re-download twitter for the third time in a single day, Augustine’s line “Lord give me chastity, but not yet” seems shamefully pertinent. Scrolling on instagram through a rush of images, watching colors flick by in quick succession, one can start to feel a particularly Augustinian kind of despair: “I was tossed here and there, spilled on the ground, scattered abroad; I boiled over in my fornications.” Damn, he’s just like me for real.

Here is a similar sentiment in Rousseau, describing a young man’s first experience of city life:

"A multitude of new experiences offer themselves; but anyone who wants to enjoy them must be more pliable than Alcibiades, ready to change his principles with his audience, to adjust his spirit with every step. After a few months in this environment, I'm beginning to feel the drunkenness that this agitated, tumultuous life plunges you into. With such a multitude of objects passing before my eyes, I'm getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I forget what I am and who I belong to.”

I remember reading this excerpt as an undergraduate and being struck at how accurately it described what it felt like to be on the internet. Rousseau (who is famously sentimental) can make me believe, as Zuboff believes, in the sovereignty, integrity and sanctity of the human individual. Is this ideology? Maybe.

Of course, as Zuboff reminds us, it is not any less ideological to submit to an “inevitable” internet age. “Silicon Valley,” she writes, “is the axis mundi of inevitabilism.” It wants us to believe that “everything will be connected, knowable, and actionable in the near future.” Clinging onto the perceived neutrality or “non-ideological” valence of the sciences, the human agents—in particular, the economic beneficiaries—behind its operations are effectively concealed. Yet, as Zuboff points out, “each smart object is a kind of marionette; for all its ‘smartness,’ it remains a hapless puppet dancing to the puppet master’s hidden economic imperatives.” In the process, we are also changed into marionettes: “people habituate to the incursion with some combination of agreement, helplessness, and resignation” so that “the incursion itself, once unthinkable, slowly worms its way into the ordinary.”

A big reference in the book is some guy named B.F. Skinner, who you may know as the father of behavioral psychology. He basically sidestepped all the woo-woo stuff we may associate with the human psyche in favor of studying our observable behaviors—how we respond to measurable systems of reward and punishment. He determined that living organisms develop certain stimulus-response mechanisms that enable behavioral “reinforcement” (= control), depending, of course, on how the stimuli is administered. The free internet, which needs lots of eyeballs fixed on lots of ads, relies on this principle of dopamine-stimulation to keep you hooked. It's like how you teach a cat or a puppy to sit and lie down with the help of a delicious treat. Skinner (imagining some future utopia) thought that, given the right technology, living organisms could be manipulated like pieces of clay. 

The pings and the pongs, the mindless doom scrolling—how all of it drags on, seemingly against your will, into the dead of night…! It does make you feel manipulated. Just like a piece of clay.

Zuboff’s main ethical critique of Surveillance Capitalism is that it smothers and extinguishes human will, freedom, and autonomy—all of which are regarded by the likes of Skinner as evolutionary accidents. In Skinner’s utopia, the political community is a single manipulable organism which runs smoothly in an integrated, dynamic, and self-regulated manner, without the inefficient impediments that would be introduced by resistance or democratic processes. For Zuboff this is not politics but anti-politics. Democracy, she emphasizes, is slow, deliberative, inherently inefficient and un-mechanistic. So a world under Surveillance Capitalism is, in her view, inherently antidemocratic and antisocial: “the word trust lingers, but its referent in human experience dissolves into reminiscence, an archaic footnote to a barely remembered dream of a dream that has long since faded for the sake of a new dictatorship of market reasons.” 

For Zuboff, freedom has an inherent temporal element: it entails a right to future decision making. But what permits us this freedom is, as Hanah Arednt has shown, structurally uncertain. The form of freedom is undecided, indeterminate. This means we cannot have freedom in a world where our future behaviors are controlled, determined, produced by outside forces. This is a central pillar of classical liberalism—that being fully human is tied to freedom in some radical sense. Hence, for Zuboff, our free will is something “organic, intrinsic, inalienable” in us, and “the deletion of uncertainty” entailed by behaviorist methods is, in the end, “a victory over human nature.”  

I don’t entirely disagree with Zuboff, and admire many of her insights. However, I think the success and present ubiquity of behaviorist techniques reveals a basic weakness of the humanist approach. Namely: humanism (with its emphasis on the spiritual, rational, or otherwise immaterial aspects of the individual subject) cannot contend with the materiality of the human body and, indeed, the materiality of thought itself. It is always in danger of falling into various iterations of what M.F. (see footnote) calls the “overvaluing of belief—in the sense of inner subjective attitude—at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior.” The illusion is a sentimental one: “so long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.” Yet, as granddaddy Zizek has hammered into our minds, “capitalism in general *sniffle* relies on this structure of disavowal *cough*”...and so on and so forth.

In addition to being sentimental, Zuboff’s deployment of humanism strikes me on multiple occasions as incoherent. She expresses a belief in some stable and self-evident “human nature” which is under threat of corruption by Surveillance Capitalism’s behaviorist machinations, which infringe upon our natural sanctity in a vulgar way. Where Industrial Capitalism entailed the radical appropriation of the “natural” world into the market dynamic, Surveillance Capitalism appropriates the human interior: “now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project.” Because the human is rightfully a subject and not an object, there is something scandalous for Zuboff in this treatment of a human as a thing, a “raw material,” the way the natural world was the “raw material” of the industrial age. Put otherwise, for Zuboff the unique danger of Surveillance Capitalism as compared to previous forms of capitalism is that the threat is no longer something out there, it is in here. It is the icky contamination of the inside by the outside.

I will do you the favor of skipping over Derrida and going back to Freud (the more entertaining option?), to make this argument. In a little book called Future of an Illusion Freud argues that in order to participate in society man must act against his instincts (which are naturally destructive) and submit to a set of privations—ethical, legal, and otherwise. This is how a child (who is naturally impulsive, unruly, selfish) becomes “a moral and social being.” Our sense of social and civic responsibility, our “ethical” self, (what Freud calls the “super-ego”), results when “external coercion gradually becomes internalized.” In this sense, being a human being in society with other human beings inherently entails the entry of the outer (social, institutional) world into the inner world. This is the history of civilization and of human subject-formation. What we call “inner” is always already produced by the “outer,” and what we call “outer” inextricably entwined with the inner. In this sense, Zuboff’s paranoia seems a little weak to me, dewy-eyed and misdirected.

She does, however, make an illuminating comparison between the operation of Surveillance Capitalism and the role of cartography in the formation of Empire, writing that:

“the cartographer is the instrument of power as the author of that order, reducing reality to only two conditions: the map and oblivion. The cartographer's truth crystallizes the message that google and all surveillance capitalists must impress upon all humans: if you are not on our map, you do not exist.”(154)

Glissant has described colonial knowledge production as an impulse to “enclose” and “appropriate” the Other through knowing them. It is no coincidence, then, that this desire to map and predict human behavior is also a desire to dominate it. Zuboff is therefore correct in her assessment of surveillance technologies as establishing what is, in effect, a digital age of conquest. Nonetheless, her critical angle is ultimately ironic. Freud has pointed out that “the narcissistic satisfaction provided by the cultural ideal is also among the forces which are successful in combating the hostility to the culture within the culture.” This is the value of mythology or metanarrative, and thus part of the value of humanism as a unifying element of the Western self-concept. As Tony Davies has argued, “all humanisms, until now, have been imperial” and, notably, “it is almost impossible to think of a crime that has not been committed in the name of humanity.” Funny, that!

In the end, however, I am not an unbeliever. Before I read Zuboff, I read Jaron Lanier, and found this moving:

“Enlightened designers leave open the possibility of either metaphysical specialness in humans or in the potential for unforeseen creative processes that aren't explained by ideas like evolution that we already believe we can picture in software systems. That kind of modesty is the signature quality of being human-centered.” 

So I guess I am an inconsistent person. I contradict myself. I don’t require things to add up, strictly speaking, to believe in them. I am sleepy now, and feeling deranged staring into my computer. I will go to bed before the Augustinian despair kicks in.

 *M.F. = I was too embarrassed to write “Mark Fisher” in full form, sorry.