(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It may seem disconnected, but I'm so sorry about all the talk of surveillance capitalism. Article headings such as "We live in the age of surveillance capitalism – and we have not yet understood the consequences of it" (Information.dk) give me fatigue and vomiting – the latter because of what we "do".
Who are we just?
Us, who apparently have a joint project and ... what? A common opponent? Yes, apparently, judging by another headline: "Surveillance capitalism is diagnosed – now we can fight it" (Information.dk).
Oh, this clumsy "we", which is so undefined that one can immediately sense how weak the blows must be. "So! can you then walk away, stupid surveillance capitalism. Or at least make a social contract, just like in the good old days. ”
I get the same feeling when I sit with one of the central focal points of the discussion: Soshana Zuboff's famous book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power. It is full of visions, and of references to a more savvy capitalism that behaved more responsibly or at least could be held accountable.
Knowledge and power
Be retained, I am concerned about the opportunities that someone has for manipulating my behavior, blocking me inside, denying me pension, insurance, bank loans or hospital treatment and how anyone else could use the so-called knowledge of my person and the skills that my electronic tracks provide them.
I just don't realize that the root of that problem lies in digital penetration everywhere in the public and private space, however stressful it is. Or that it should be new for that matter. As long as there existed (knowledge) technologies such as grain tax, man numbers, statistics, diagnoses and so on, authorities – political and economic – have tried to know something about populations in order to control and exploit them.
The class struggle's review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism also bears the headline "Knowledge is Power", something that has been widely known at least since Foucault's groundbreaking historical studies in the 1960s and 1970s. Zuboff's book is predicted to have the same impact as Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21. century. But what impact did it have? In addition, a number of media talked a lot about it for a surprisingly long time.
Among other things, Piketty demonstrated an increasing and galloping inequality worldwide. It hardly came as a surprise to anyone. The inequality, then, has not diminished since that release. Surveillance hardly gets any smaller after Zuboff's call for opposition to the surveillance capitalists, as she calls them in the book. Apparently, it is a very special kind of capitalist who has a very scary project.
Good old capitalism?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is useful reading if you want to learn more about exactly how tech giants like Google and Amazon operate in the digital sphere, what data they collect and what they use it for – and how the people who run the businesses themselves perceive their business and its possibilities. But I am not sure it is particularly useful in a showdown with capitalism as such, nor is it its errand.
There is no doubt that behavior and social relationships can be made even more extreme than before.
Surveillance capitalism, Zuboff writes, is "parasitic and self-referential," and it "revives Karl Marx's old image of capitalism as a vampire nourished by work, but with an unexpected dispute. Instead of work, surveillance capitalism is nourished by every aspect of human experience ».
There is no doubt that capitalism, with new digital tools, has found ways in which human experience, behavior and social relationships can be sustained to an even more extreme degree than in the past. But "instead of work" is not – the "new" capitalism, just like the "old", rests on extracting value from the people who are forced to sell their labor. That is, most of us.
In its way it has 21. century capitalism – precisely through the realization of all human experience – rather made visible forms of work, which in the past were quite free and therefore unnoticed. For example, all the work that lies in sustaining life.
It is not to be understood that I think it is of all time that several aspects of human existence can now be profited and traded. But I do not share the nostalgia of an earlier form of capitalism that Zuboff writes the book through.
It can always get worse
For example, surveillance capitalism's products and services "do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocity," and I wonder what on earth a constructive producer-consumer reciprocity might be.
Surveillance capitalism is a "rogue force driven by unprecedented economic imperatives that violate social norms and abolish fundamental rights associated with individual autonomy that are essential to the very possibility of a democratic society," Zuboff writes elsewhere.
And I wonder what social norms used to be so well-established and beneficial to all of us, and I wonder when the democratic society that guaranteed individual autonomy and the fundamental rights of all people existed and where.
In fact, I think that capitalism has in many ways evolved into the worse in that 21. century, I just can't think of when it was nice, and therefore can't pin my nostalgia in time and place. Maybe that's why I find it difficult to concentrate on the panic of the "surveillance capitalists".
If I dwell a little more on my concern that someone might use the knowledge they think they have about my person and behavior to manipulate my behavior, lock me in, deny me retirement, insurance, bank loans or hospital treatment, then it is not specifically linked to digital surveillance.
It is linked to the fact that the world is so interconnected that we are all arbitrarily – and some of us more systematically – at the mercy of states' monopoly of violence and private economic interests. Maybe it was more useful to start the "fight for the future" there.
