The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

4.5 stars. Genuinely revolutionary ideas and occasionally soaring writing are occasionally bogged down by repetitive prose. I found myself skipping a few chapters because they simply rehashed previous points. A few callbacks to central ideas are normal in any nonfiction work, but this became excessive. Still highly recommend reading, even if only the introduction and conclusion, while skimming everything else.

Should be mandatory reading for any person in tech, especially software developers (or at least sections of it)

This book was just a slog to get through. The audiobook is 24 hours long. It is full of very dense, yet interesting, material that became increasingly more daunting to get through, causing me to greatly slow down and resulting in me taking over 2 months to get through it. But i finished and I'm ready to talk about it!

This book outlines the new era of neoliberal mega-corporations' unquenchable thirst for user-generated data to better maintain systems designed to manipulate said users into buying more crap.

That's really the gist. It's genuinely depressing to think we have the brightest minds in Silicon Valley working for the largest, most valuable companies and they're putting forth all of that energy and brain power for the sole purpose of...figuring out better ways to manipulate you into buying more crap.

“Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, the corporation's scientists are not recruited to solve world hunger or eliminate carbon-based fuels. Instead, their genius is meant to storm the gates of human experience, transforming it into data and translating it into a new market colossus that creates wealth by predicting, influencing, and controlling human behavior.”

That's the dead-end of our modern late-capitalist autocracy. It's the best thing these people can do. They're all pure evil, don't get me wrong, but even comic book villains have more enticing end goals. SV is just: ‘you'll be able to more quickly know what shows you might like, so please accept this toaster's terms of service and update its firmware.' Such a boring dystopia.

There's a common turn of phrase that liberals blindly repeat whenever stuff like this gets brought up: “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. And yet when this is turned around onto the corporate ghouls, they have a tremendous amount to hide. They are never transparent about their methods of surveillance, or their reasons why. They fight tooth and nail any effort to be more transparent, or they flip the script to get ahead of any legislation by saying ‘these new transparency features are to help you, not to cover our asses from lawsuits'.

Nothing of real life-changing value has come out of SV in at least a decade. The start-ups coming out now are just better ways to suck up data or better ways to replace good paying jobs with poverty waged gig workers.

We used to gather raw materials to process, create goods, and build things. Now the raw material is data. Extremely easy to correct but hard to process into something of value without large volumes of it. Once processed, it is used to create predictive algorithms to better understand how people operate. But people are too random, so they turn their tools into a way to manipulate us into more easily predictive beings.

If you've ever seen the show “Westworld”, it's basically just season 3 with the giant robot controlling all the humans' lives, pushing them down paths of success or failure or oblivion. That very clearly appears to be the long-term goal of the corporate ghouls in charge.

The book is very thorough in its explanation of this new age; but in order to effectively explain how it all works, new nomenclature must be coined and normalized. This new nomenclature also coincides with specifically defined terms that reach a level of complexity and intellect that sometimes made me go “I should know what all of those words mean, but it's been 2 weeks since I last picked this book back up and now I've forgotten half of it, but I can't go back now because it's too damn long.” I wish I had a list of defined terms to reference back to on occasion to help me keep everything straight.

It's a very good book but very dense and highly intellectual, almost to the point of being esoteric. But maybe I'm just dumb. I still liked it though. Here's some quotes:

“Behavioral data, whose value had previously been “used up” on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal—and exclusive to Google—raw material for the construction of a dynamic online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more behavioral data than it needed to serve its users. That surplus, a behavioral surplus, was the game-changing, zero-cost asset that was diverted from service improvement toward a genuine and highly lucrative market exchange.”

That's the other thing. When you talk about this, the brain-dead neoliberal mind-prison response is always “just don't use it” or “that's the price of a free app!” No! This is bullshit. It's a false dichotomy. There is no alternative because our hellworld economic system makes less-evil options “not fiscally viable”.

“Behavioral data, whose value had previously been “used up” on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal—and exclusive to Google—raw material for the construction of a dynamic online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more behavioral data than it needed to serve its users. That surplus, a behavioral surplus, was the game-changing, zero-cost asset that was diverted from service improvement toward a genuine and highly lucrative market exchange.”

“Although the saying tells us ‘If it's free, then you are the product,' that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism's crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism's actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.”

We're not the customer. We're not the product. We're the coal miner, and we're given whatever shiny object or novelty they come up with to keep digging for them.

“We are no longer the subjects of value realization. Nor are we, as some have insisted, the ‘product' of Google's sales. Instead, we are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for Google's prediction factories.”

“If new laws were to outlaw extraction operations, the surveillance model would implode. This market form must either gird itself for perpetual conflict with the democratic process or find new ways to infiltrate, seduce, and bend democracy to its ends if it is to fulfill its own inner logic. The survival and success of surveillance capitalism depend upon engineering collective agreement through all available means while simultaneously ignoring, evading, contesting, reshaping, or otherwise vanquishing laws that threaten free behavioral surplus.”

So we can't change the laws because the ghouls own the politicians. That's why we haven't seen any meaningful laws around privacy passed.
In 2000 the FTC pushed for robust privacy policy that would have prevented all of this from happening, but, well i know you didn't forget what happened next...Privacy eroded away after 9/11 and the ghouls swooped in to suck up as much information about you as they could get their hands on. With that that power and money made at your expense, they turn back around to keep things just the way they are, or make them worse for their own benefit.

“The commodification of behavior under surveillance capitalism pivots us toward a societal future in which market power is protected by moats of secrecy, indecipherability, and expertise. Even when knowledge derived from our behavior is fed back to us as a quid pro quo for participation, as in the case of so-called ‘personalization,' parallel secret operations pursue the conversion of surplus into sales that point far beyond our interests. We have no formal control because we are not essential to this market action.”

Spying on us to learn how to manipulate us. Manipulating us into buying more crap. Calling it a feature.

“Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, content is a source of behavioral surplus, as is the behavior of the people who provide the content, as are their patterns of connection, communication, and mobility, their thoughts and feelings, and the meta-data expressed in their emoticons, exclamation points, lists, contractions, and salutations. That book on the bookshelf—along with the records of anyone who may have touched it and when, their location, behavior, networks, and so on—is now the diamond mine ready for excavation and plunder, to be rendered into behavioral data and fed to the machines on their way to product fabrication and sales.”

The book does pad its length by repeating, reiterating, and rephrasing the same point over and over again.

“...[T]he NSA paid Google for a ‘search appliance capable of searching 15 million documents in twenty-four languages.' Google extended its services for another year at no cost in April 2004.”

“...[T]he Supreme Court has imposed few privacy restrictions on business records and information that people give to third parties. E-mail is typically held in private servers, making its protection ‘limited if not nonexistent.' This absence of law made private companies attractive partners for government actors bound to democratic constraints.”

Corporate ghouls and government spying, name a better duo. Spying from your government is illegal and unethical, but utilizing the tools necessary for functioning in our modern world means that your constitutional rights are no longer valid. Sorry sweaty, you gotta build your own email if you don't want the government to spy on you.

The ghouls and their fanboys say it's inevitable that they stay in charge, so we might as well stop trying to change the world so they don't have control over every facet of our existence. Easy stance to take. I wish the book had a stronger final push about how to stop this hellworld (like, say, in the last book I read about pipelines) but it ends with a generic “don't get complacent, don't just try to fight this with obscuring softwares, vote harder” sort of boring message.

Very good book but extremely long.