By Shoshana Zuboff
The first few chapters of this book discuss the introduction of surveillance capitalism, and chapters 6 through 8 dive deeper into the ethical implications that this practice raises. To start off, in Chapter 6, Zuboff begins with a historical analogy of Christopher Columbus’ colonization efforts of the Cuban islands and what she calls a “conquest pattern”, a process that transforms into 3 phases of the conquering: creation of legal justifications to defend the invasion, declaring ownership of new territory, and establishing a settlement to formalize and institutionalize the conquest. Throughout the chapter, it is implied that this pattern can be compared to modern technological companies and their “conquest” over individual user data like trying to build legal justifications to defend data collection and risks to privacy, proclaiming online territory as their own in order to maintain a strong influence, and establishing platforms that become increasingly relied upon in people’s everyday lives. She also notes that the classical “division of learning system” has been disrupted with the surge of surveillance capitalism because large tech companies are taking control of the primary sources of knowledge and learning. A prominent argument in this chapter is that surveillance capitalism weakens democracy by giving unequal power to such corporations since they have more resources to predict and understand behavior. This can lead to manipulation of individuals in society when they make decisions, thus infringing on their true and genuine autonomy. The next chapter, Chapter 7, shifts the focus to ethical risks when surveillance capitalists shape digital environments, potentially coercing them to make choices they would not normally make. It can also promote monetary interests of these companies, as from gathering a surplus of personalized data, business ads will be more geared towards their real lives which produces more revenue and keeps the overall cycle running like a “feedback loop”. She draws attention to a solution that monitors and contains the amount of power that surveillance capitalists have obtained by suggesting more transparency about methods of data abstraction and implementation, and stronger efforts to protect users’ rights to privacy and autonomy. Lastly, in Chapter 8, Zuboff emphasizes the concept of “rendition” which she argues has negatively turned data collection into slowly modifying human behavior, being very different from its original purpose of undisclosed reports and improvement of service. She warns readers of the exploitation that can arise in these situations because something as simple as the wording of policy documents can actually fool consumers in the long run. She ends the chapter by reflecting on how revealing personal experiences and contributing to statistics is now not about preference, but instead due to our lack of awareness of these occurrences. She states that surveillance capitalists are not being transparent to the public about how and what they are using individual data for, which could lead to a dangerously tricky situation in the near future.
I thought that the central ideas of these chapters were easy to grasp after reading, but sometimes got caught up in the many extensive examples that the author provided. Furthermore, I felt like I could connect much of the argument to something I previously read about recommender systems, which was nice to realize, and all in all, this was definitely an interesting read!