Shoshana Zuboff: Capitalism of surveillance

It is not often that you read a book and realize that you have a definitive work on your hands: that's what happens with "The capitalism of surveillance"(Ed. LUISS 2019) by Shoshana Zuboff, sociologist and teacher at Harvard.

The text gives the reader for the first time an in-depth analysis, corroborated by a great deal of scientific and research data, on the intrusiveness and pervasiveness with which the Big Companies of the network (Google, Facebook, Amazon) exploit our data.

The work is the result of years of study in which the author first delimited and then described the nature of the digital economy 4.0.

Which has been conformed to its advantage by the network companies in the utmost disregard of governments, traditionally inadequate to manage the problems related to digital innovation with the tools of democracy.

Zuboff considers the current one a form of capitalism based essentially on personalization of data of each network user, obtained through theextrapolation of the behavioral surplus, that is, of those data and tracks that we enter on the web via smartphones, tablets and computers.

Data to be transformed into individual profiles, through a process of rendering personal preferences, purchase propensities, voting or opinion arrangements, at the end of which they will be sold to the real customers of the network: the advertisers, the sellers of goods and services and the supporters of ideas that are widespread and affirmed.

To the mass production economy started by Henry Ford at the beginning of the last century, characterized by the work organization in the assembly line and the resulting division of tasks, Zuboff opposes a surveillance capitalism, which has its roots in the activities started by Google in the early 2000s when Amit Patel, a newly hired young Standford researcher, "particularly interested in data extraction", Realized that"it was possible to reconstruct, starting from the users' queries (number and pattern of the data searched, spelling, the formulation and punctuation of the online search, the dwell time and the location) a human behavior detector".

It was Patel's intuition and Page's foresight - (even Yahoo realized the possibilities offered by the data, but decided not to use them) - to lay the foundations for what Zuboff calls the knowledge sharing, which is the real purpose of surveillance capitalism.

A knowledge essentially held by the big network companies and acquired with production processes in which the raw material (the raw data of our actions on the web) is transformed, with algorithms and powerful calculation machines, in predictive products which today represent the main source of income for companies such as Facebook and Google.

The will of each network user - what to choose, what to buy, who to vote for - can thus become the target of strategies specifically designed to modify and condition it, using the most modern exponential technologies and Big Data (Facebook processes more than 6 million data every second ).

Is there then a way to oppose the dystopian, Orwellian future that seems to be looming on the horizon?

The author thinks so, and proposes the adoption of primary laws to prevent: "the illegitimate rendering of human experience in the form of behavioral data, the use of behavioral surplus as a free raw material, the manufacture of predictive products, the trading of future measures, the use of predictive products for influence and control operations, operations behavior modification, the accumulation of private and exclusive concentrations of knowledge ".

Zuboff argues that only by restricting the scope of the new capitalists will it be possible to regain space for our individual freedoms.

With a generalized awareness, which must involve each of us on the real dangers hidden behind the apparent freedom of our digital existences.

This is, for Harvard's professor, the only way to form in the public opinion the critical mass capable of urging governments to put in place the measures useful to regulate, once and for all, the aims and affairs of the Big Companies of the network.

Hoping it's not too late.

Antonio Vecchio