The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Yesterday, for reasons unknown to God or man, I wanted to look at the weather forecast. I was waiting for a phone call so I tapped the weather app on my phone.

When I got there, there were text boxes. Essentially: we want access to your location & other material on your phone/in your cloud storage. (This app had come with the phone, I’m pretty sure. Yes, it did. I’ve been using it occasionally for going on for two years.)
Read our privacy policy
I understand / Uninstall

The app said I could alter things later in my settings. (I’m not so late to the party as to believe anything I want to do will be in the settings.)

Standover tactics have always got my back up. I Uninstalled and the thing went away. Presumably.

This meant that I needed a new weather app. Looked online, and each one I was considering wanted access to my photographs in storage “beyond [my] device,” my location, or other collections / clutches & records of information on my phone. One of them, whose name is lost to infamy by my swift decision to move on to the next possibility – also wanted access to my text messages and browsing history.

By this time I was ready to scream: why do you want access to my photos, texts, contacts, phone messages, and browsing history? You’re telling me the weather! And I pay for your app by suffering your ads to occupy part of my screen!

Why do you want access to my location? I want weather information about a particular place. Where I am is not necessarily related to my search! GET OUT OF MY STUFF!

Long story short, though I did download one of these horrors I found out how to uninstall it. I’ll get my weather information somewhere else, thank you.

I PAID FOR THIS PHONE. And it wasn’t cheap.
I OWN IT. And it wasn’t cheap.

In the world of Amazon’s self-publishing, “unpublish” does not mean “delete,” even though we might want it to. On Facebook “delete” means “unpublish,” even though we press a button or link that specifically says: Delete. Amazon and Facebook both retain our files not matter what we, the alleged owners, might have wanted or even explicitly asked them to do with them.

Even though Amazon and Facebook have long worked & traded on the difference between ownership and control: I DO NOT AGREE THAT CONTROL TRUMPS OWNERSHIP.

I know every remaining app on my phone does much the same thing, and there’s somewhere between little and nothing I can do about it.

And so we come to Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, New York, 2019).

The basic situation that Zuboff describes is this: there are two sets of activity on the internet for every single thing we do. The first, the one we are aware of, consists of the searches we make & the results we get, the pictures we put on Facebook or Instagram, the things we say on Twitter, and so on. These are the trails we are aware of, and this trail was the thing there was public concern about when website cookies were new. The concern with cookies was that our fondly imaged to be anonymous jaunts across the web could be tracked and we, money-having creatures, could be advertised to on the basis of our cyber-tracks, and persuaded to buy, or, at greater jeopardy, tracked for political or law-enforcement reasons.

However, for each of our overt and intended actions there is an unacknowledged second stream of data created simply because the net works the way it does. This data is pretty much the source of Google’s fortune: it is extremely granular, recording our behaviour in such detail that highly accurate predictions can be made about it. Selling these predictions to advertisers is what Google began doing very early on – it ceased not being evil about 2002. Selling these predictions to advertisers is Google’s core business.

Internet surveillance was ignored as a civil rights issue in the U.S. particularly because of the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. At that moment preventing another attack became the new Department of Homeland Security's highest priority, and was made highest priority of the intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Before the Spaniards invaded Mexico they first laid claim to it. They did this by means of declarations, written in charters which were kept in chests on the ships to be conveyed back to the king. They were written in a language the Indians did not understand; they made the Indians subjects of the king, subject to the king’s punishments for disobedience. “Disobedience” covered everything from existing to resisting.

Those declarations removed the land and its inhabitants, flora, fauna, minerals and other contents, from inchoate social space into private space owned and ruled by a single identifiable entity. Those declarations were the written foundation/justification for the crimes of invasion and colonialism.

Before attacking villages, as sufficient notice, the invaders whispered these declarations into their cuffs.

Zuboff points out that Google and other corporations have laid claim to the second stream of data our internet activity creates, which originated in and was also part of common, inchoate social space. Like the land and people of the Americas.

(When a declaration is made about common space that was barely conceptualized before, it is named and defined and identified, and identified as now being under the rule of a particular and foreign and other entity. In the matter of "Netiquette," I've always wondered who declared, who had the right to declare, on behalf of everyone, and despite the labels on 16mm documentary film cans everywhere, that "all caps is shouting." I have shouted above. Oh, why not. The whole thing is to scream.)

Google and later others, such as Microsoft, and lately our friendly, corporate ISPs, were never forthcoming about the second stream/set of data that everyones’s internet activity generates. They have acted at all times to obscure its existence.

Zuboff maintains that this data, created by the users of the internet, should belong to the users. That is, it should belong to us, to be used as we see fit, not as large, secretive, profit-driven companies see fit. The fact that this stream of data is not being treated as belonging to the people who create it constitutes an unimaginably large, new kind of theft.

Zuboff sees ongoing research into more ways to use this data to manipulate users through apps for commercial gain, particularly at this scale, as a new form of colonialism. Oh, says the screen you're not supposed to watch while you're driving, you’ve been to this restaurant before. How about now, since you're driving past...

But these commercial applications of highly accurate behavioural predictions are just the beginning. The next obvious application is political, surveillance of all of us and our political activity via the COINTELPRO boxes in our pockets, the face recognition technology in CCTV cameras in public spaces interior and exterior, the fridges and personal digital assistants which listen to more than our commands, the smart TVs that watch us as we watch them. An Internet of Things constantly detecting and reporting... All the dystopias anyone’s ever nightmared about, everywhere, all the time.

Nowhere will be unmonitored. Sanctuary will cease to exist.

Industrial capitalism came to terms with labour and ultimately supported the workers it employed, Zuboff says; this was a social contract that was explicitly negotiated. (Though it did take bloody battles from the Luddites to the New Deal for labour to accomplish that.)

Surveillance capitalism has made no such agreement: the sheer speed of the tech firms in seizing this data leaves the deliberative processes of democracy far behind. If lawmakers don’t know what’s being done they cannot gather information about it, debate it, legislate.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a complex and lucid book, a formidable accomplishment. However, I do think its predictions for the future may rest on a fact not often alluded to in overviews like this: most of us have less and less money.

Google & its pards can poke us all they like, point us at any point of sale they like, but we have less and less money. They can advertise what they like using all the data since the Big Bang; but without money, we just ain’t buyin’. Google, etc., are getting so rich, determined as they are to force us back into the dust from which we came, I can see them collapsing for lack of users/used to throw to their actual customers, the vendors who pay for super-reliable predictive sales data.

And so it seems to me that our general financial impoverishment will make political surveillance and ever-nastier law enforcement the enduring purposes of the net. (And Google and FB will join law enforcement to keep themselves relevant and solvent.)

A note on author photos:

Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, a formidable intellect, complex, comprehensive, and lucid:

While I was reading this I did what I always do when I’m greatly taken with a book: I gaze at the author photo wondering where and how, under the skin, between muscle and bone, the writer stores the magic that’s in the writing.

Zuboff’s both is and is not a very female photo. There are 4 circles close to its centre: the lenses in her glasses & the hoops of her earrings, a small, cheerful, symmetrical path through the picture, echoed by the curls at the end of her hair and the round pendant below her neckline. There are counter-currents creating tension, too: short hair brushed to her right but long hair falling over her left shoulder; her straight gaze.

And yet it’s a puzzling photo. Two of the fingers of her right hand are bent. I finally realized my question actually was: why is the author’s right hand in this photo at all?

Her gaze is direct. Without her hand the photo is still interesting: her hand has not been placed on her right cheek quest to enliven an otherwise boringly symmetrical composition. Without her hand cradling her right cheek, we are left with Zuboff’s very direct gaze and her perfectly symmetrical face and eyes. Perfectly matching eyes are unusual and arresting in themselves.

In Anglo culture, at least, a direct and unwavering gaze is a challenge. It’s “staring,” it’s “rude,” particularly if it’s coming from a woman.

Placed along her cheek, cradling or supporting her cheek, Zuboff’s hand is a much larger element in the image than her eyes and their remarkable gaze. The angle between her hand and her wrist is awkward and sharp; it directs the viewer’s eyes to her neck and throat, vulnerable areas, showing age, indicating fragility and mortality. Zuboff’s right hand de-emphasizes her gaze. Its positioning directs the portrait into the semantic area of I'm just a girl, works to lessen or remove any sense of challenge the reader might feel in the face of either her eyes or intellect.

And yet it also works against its intended distraction.

By stretching the skin on her cheek, her hand stretches her smile. The left side of Zuboff’s mouth seems to be smiling (the upturned end of her lips), but the right side does not. The smile has become a grimace. Her lips can still be read as smiling if the viewer isn’t paying much attention. That the positioning of her hand may not have been the original concept of the portrait seems indicated by her two bent fingers. They suggest that she isn’t committed to this placement, isn’t “authorizing” it, isn’t anxious to smooth over the subversion of the image its inclusion has led to.

A direct and close-up gaze is generally avoided in women’s author pix. After a short and informal survey of author pix on a local literary website, this is the range of poses I find:

Medium shots:
the writer’s body faces the camera/viewer but her gaze does not
the writer’s gaze is directed towards the camera/viewer but her body is not

Close-ups:
the writer’s face is turned towards the camera/viewer but her gaze is directed above the camera/viewer
the writer’s face looks upward to the camera/viewer
the writer’s body and face both fully face the camera/viewer, but her head is tilted

There are lots of smiles.

By not aligning the writers’ faces/gazes with their bodies, all these poses lessen authorial assertion, conviction, or challenge.

These conventions are so enduring and so well understood they are gleefully parodied in this portrait:

But, delightful as it is, this photo was taken a long time ago.

If parody is the best or all we can do in the face of these imperatives / conventions / imperatives, then we're already in a panopticon beyond the dreams of glass, a digital debtors' Bedlam and prison which no-frill phones won't be enough to dismantle.

untitled

on my desktop
sam beckett's
far too observant eyes
tell me
gentleness
does not
survive

Walking Bear

And so at work I changed the packaged wallpaper to Arctic animals. I don't see the wallpaper often, being in various text-screens all day. But one photo -

A plain leading back to low, snow-bearing hills under uncertain, parting, pale grey cloud. The foreground a young polar bear upright, walking, appearing to have walked to this spot on clouds, to spend a life walking on clouds, torn snow on ice on sea the colour of a deeper sky. The bear's hands hang, & would be human except for their thickness and stiffness, their lack of suppleness; a vulnerable open chest and belly, curious steady gaze, the dark centres of the ears a second, subsidiary set of eyes also watching, parsing the invisible camera & photographer, and also gazing past them, directly through the screen.

And so we play this fantasy game, the bear and I, & gaze into each others' worlds.

Bear on torn snow, on ice the colour of a deep sea of sky; me on a chair, surrounded by nothing real: screens, walls; movable walls, wobbly, pretend. Bear walking, famed for walking; me still, constrained & still, the last point of an old curved spine supporting health-life-household. Our paths are clouds and razors.

For Reasons Unknown to Me

One of my favourite photos.

Security

An errand yesterday at the Social Security office downtown. Was very apprehensive about this trip for some reason, expecting squalor and tedium and Byzantine office layouts – I remember the old social Security office in inner NE, near the house we lived in fifteen years ago. It was dismaying in a squalid way: old wooden chairs along the wall in a certain disarray, the waiting people disabled, older, whiter, swollen with diabetes, wrapped in bandages, confined to wheelchairs, or just ill; the minority poor with less obvious ailments, all needing far more than any office was offering. There was an undertone of common suffering, a small, palpable buzz of people who may not have seen each other before or for a while, but who could see & knew each others' conditions.

Yesterday's office was worn but clean, had airport-type security (minus the full-body scanner & taking off your shoes) with surveillance camera & monitor up in the corner of the ceiling. The wall facing the entrance was taken up with a huge TV screen with notices in many languages and a row of call-numbers for those waiting, who, by and large, were younger than I expected, and more of colour than not. Those who sat on the side-bench that ran the length of the waiting area - seats larger & softer, with better-angled backs - tended to be older and whiter; they sat with their backs to the wall, leaving the more obvious minorities under two sets of surveillance. The more obvious minorities sat in the pre-arranged, ordered rows of single plastic chairs facing the big TV, heads down, eyes on phones. The SoSec clerks sat on the other side of the room behind single, separate, (bullet-proof?) glass windows behind a half-glass walkway and wall, occasionally calling the next number. There were three armed guards. The room was silent.

And Speaking of Asia

I gave up on the CIA just over half-way through, just after Beirut in 1983. It was like dragging myself through dust and barbed wire. The writing was good. But the subject - the criminally insane incompetence, the smugness, the politicrats' projections of their own violent madness - and the prospect of the weeks and weeks I would need to finish the account, were destroying the only heart I have.  

 - Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner, Doubleday, New York, c2007. 

"It was early April and a warm rain pattered out of the sky. It polished the avenues to brilliant green, stirred stagnant ponds in the wells of numberless flat-blocks and hatched a swarm of pink umbrellas above the women. Whenever a wind blew, it seeped through the frames of my hotel window.

But little else entered the hotel. It was a parody of the self defeated Soviet world which had built it. It reeled across the sky in a cliff of balconies and porticoes. But inside everything fell to bits."

Who can resist writing like that - simultaneously evocative and incisive, subtle and energetic, open to all the winds that blow - the lovely sharp eyes, the fluent translation of blood and bone awareness? 

 - The Lost Heart of Asia, Colin Thubron, HarperCollins, New York, 1994.

Later:
Some of the book is dry and hard as the land and poverty it describes. And then Thubron realizes the jeep is running along the old bed of the Amu Dariya, cliffs layered and smoothed by the immense flow of old water, and that image stays with you. You run the eyes of your mind along that long striped stone the way you rub the side of your thumb along the small still lake of the glass on your watch-face. It soothes you. And you need soothing; you're afraid again that you're bleeding out into futility in your cubicle.

Later still:
The book ends at the easternmost point of Kyrgzstan with snow-capped peaks “hanging in nothing,” the Tien Shan mountains narrowing, funnelling the traveller to China. Thubron says that Tamerlane came this way. Above the open mouth of a long-pillaged burial mound for some Scythian or Turkic chieftain stands a slope of many thousands of coloured stones, some of ochre, some grey. Local legend has it that on his way to China, Tamerlane had each man of his army place a stone on the slope and, as they retreated, had each man remove one. He describes these remaining stones as a memorial “to waste, by the wasted.”

It's his ability to unite past, present, landscape and emotional perceptiveness into moments of lighting revelation that makes his writing so rewarding.

Siberia next.... I remember the Russia of the Cold War: dark and evil twin to the United States, threat, enemy, enigma; producer of great literature, ballet, music, art; prison empire. So I'm happy enough to follow Thubron to post-Soviet Siberia – the unimaginable weight of the sky – and to find people making sense of rubble, repairing, moving away or failing to outmanoeuvre destruction. (Knowing the shape of reality, needing precise and illuminating description that is also analysis.)

Later again:  

All through Siberia Thubron finds collapse: Communism, the economy, the basis of its past (the landscape, lichen poisoned by acid rain, the retreat of the reindeer, old lives impossible to resume); finds Dostoievskian types, stereotypes, orthodoxy and the Middle Ages ready to rise from the weeds; roses planted in a restored monastery to memorialize the dead and metaphorically represent them, still, in a gentled landscape and new consciousness; Old Believers losing their young to the internet and the cities. He finds the rotting infrastructure of the gulag, the never-ending dimensions of the ruin created by Stalin and his successors. He always, insistently, goes where people tell him he shouldn't or can't.

Everyone asks him why he is there. It seems the only answer is that he has to see, to the furthest the extremity of what can be seen.

He ends the book a stone's throw from the Arctic Circle, at Magadan, a city near one of the most infamous of the camps, Butugychag. He especially has to see this camp: apart from its reputation and history, it will be bulldozed soon. The camp will disappear as surely as its prisoners. Erasure will be erased, as though that will suspend the radioactivity in the area, the ecological ruination of Stalinism, the displacement and destruction of populations, the mechanics of society, chemistry, time.

The iron frame of the camp gates stands redundant in the debris of its towers. Beneath the snow our feet snag on objects we only guess at, and drag up barbed wire. Rusted machinery pokes above the surface. Beyond, we stumble through the wrecks of barracks and prison cells. In the roofless rooms the guards' benches are still in place, with a range of hooks for their coats. The snow lies on platform beds in hard, crystalline piles. A pair of boots is discarded by a stove. Everything emits a hand-to-mouth rusticity and squalor, Skeletal iron doors still swing on isolation cells a few feet square. The slots survive where the prisoners' gruel was pushed through, and the barred windows remain intact, and the stove in the guards' sauna.

It was the same through much of Kolyma. The prisoners lived and died in tents. Despairingly they pressed insulating moss and peat between the thin layers of canvas, sprinkled them with sawdust, and stacked boards outside. Inside was a single cast-iron stove.

And now gently, insistently, the snow is falling. It drifts over the low stumps and covers the buildings with its pale indifference. It floats through the roofless passages, the guard chambers, the rooms of administration, of neglect, of boredom. It fills the valley with a sick translucence.

Yuri goes on kicking at the tent foundations, then looks up at me. “You know, my grandfather was a village postman, who spent years in the camps for making a joke about Stalin.” (pp. 276-277)

In Siberia, Colin Thubron, HarperCollins, New York, 1999.

Here, and in The Lost Heart of Asia, Thubron sees such reduction in the basic possibility of life, in its necessary foundations (soil, water, food, workable occupations) that it's hard to know how he bears it. 

I can only imagine it's the exquisite precision of his writing, and the occasional moment of hope he witnesses, that make it possible. Those, and the fact that he brings them to us for our contemplation, also, and so, perhaps, to a cure.