The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts
Societies
that display low levels of interpersonal trust also tend to display low levels
of trust toward legitimate authority; indeed, levels of trust toward the
government have declined substantially in the US. The declaration of a “war on
terror” legitimated every inclination to enshrine machine-produced certainty as
the ultimate solution to societal uncertainty.
The
state’s continuous demands for the intensification of surveillance capitalism’s
production of instrumentarian power—expressed in the growth and elaboration of
Big Other—is the preferred solution to social breakdown, mistrust, and
uncertainty. The aim is the automation of society through tuning, herding, and
conditioning people to produce preselected behaviors judged as desirable by the
state and thus able to “preempt instability.”
Chinese
users are rendered, classified, and queued up for prediction with every digital
touch, and so are we. We are ranked on Uber, on eBay, on Facebook, and on many
other web businesses, and those are only the rankings that we see. Chinese
users are assigned a “character” score, whereas the US government urges the
tech companies to train their algorithms for a “radicalism” score.
Totalistic
rendering and control of all human behavior will serve civilization in a
hyperconnected future, and there is no sign of hesitation to assert
computational governance over the whole domain of human endeavor for the sake
of a collective destiny.
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