Big Other

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

Power was once identified with the ownership of the means of production, but it is now identified with ownership of the means of behavioral modification that is Big Other. Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power reduces human experience to measurable observable behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of that experience.

Big Other does not care what we think, feel, or do as long as its millions, billions, and trillions of sensate, actuating, computational eyes and ears can observe, render, datafy, and instrumentalize the vast reservoirs of behavioral surplus that are generated in the galactic uproar of connection and communication.

Google tripled its number of machine intelligence scientists in just the last few years and has become the top contributor to the most prestigious scientific journals—four to five times the world average in 2016. Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, 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.