The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

Or, What happens when you can't stop thinking about a book

There is a part of my nerd brain that is obsessed with how the Internet took over our lives in such a stealthy, gradual way that we are now almost all entirely obsessed with being enmeshed in each other’s lives in a way that feels completely antithetical to what it means to be human.

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, which I listened to over the course of several hours after numerous library renewals because I could not make myself read another sentence of my own or another writer’s work, Shoshana Zuboff describes concepts that I found rather dense and sometimes hard to follow even as I recognized and could feel, in my body, their importance and relevance to my life.

She explains in very granular detail how tech behemoths like Google and Facebook used the political influence of their money to lobby to purposefully obscure the ways in which they rely on what she calls behavioral surplus in order to render our humanity and human experience into products which can then be (and always are) sold back to us. The phrases that have haunted me since I listened to the book are “radical indifference” which is the way she describes the way that platforms and their content moderators -- I always think of these as mostly white male engineers who are mostly concentrated in Silicon Valley, though I suppose the pandemic will change this -- who are consistently attempting to pretend to be neutral when people are threatened with violence and rape, traumatized on their platforms or worse, because the most important thing for their bottom lines is not empathy but growth and metrics at the cost of everything else. At whatever cost, actually. 

Towards the end of the book, Zuboff writes about her personal experience as a writer and scholar committed to this work, and I found this to be profoundly compelling -- maybe more so than the rest of the book. I think that’s because the other parts are an aggregation of what we all know or can sense in terms of how we willingly allow the exploitation of our time, attention and humanity in exchange for a shallow kind of connection, a surface level performance of intimacy through algorithms and platforms that track us to make us feel seen and known when all that is really known about us is used in the service of capitalism, not connection. At the very end, she essentially reminds the reader that we are not brands, our lives are not meant to have experience extracted from them, optimized and transformed into products. We are humans, not commodities.

She speaks of the “will to will” and it felt like an incredible call to action to remember that, even though it feels like we are powerless, especially in a time like the one in which we live, to catapult ourselves out of the attention economy, we are sovereign people. Our autonomy has been held hostage for too long. We can make decisions that are not mediated by technology. We just have to remember that we can. Her book is the best reminder.