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On the demand side, Facebook’s “likes” were quickly coveted and craved, morphing into a universal reward system or what one young app designer called “our generation’s crack cocaine.” “Likes” became those variably timed dopamine shots, driving
Just as gamblers chase the zone of fusion with the machine, a young person embedded in the culture of mutuality chases the zone of fusion with the social mirror. For anyone already struggling with the challenge of the self-other balance, the “Like” button and its brethren continuously tip the scales toward regression.
As one study concluded, “Expanding one’s social network by adding a number of distant friends through Facebook may be detrimental by stimulating negative emotions for users.”50
One consequence of the new density of social comparison triggers and their negative feedback loops is a psychological condition known as FOMO (“fear of missing out”). It is a form of social anxiety defined as “the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling that . . . your peers are doing, in the know about, or in possession of more or something better than you.”
Research has identified FOMO with compulsive Facebook use: FOMO sufferers obsessively checked their Facebook feeds—during meals, while driving, immediately upon waking or before sleeping,
Instead of walking away, they typically chose to spend even more time browsing the network in the hope of feeling better, chasing the dream of a sudden and magical reversal of fortune that would justify past suffering. This cycle not only leads to more social comparison and more envy, but it can also predict depressive symptoms.
In their encounter with the self-other balance, teenagers step onto a playing field already tilted by surveillance capital to tip them into the social mirror and keep them fixed on its reflections.
Facebook, social media in general—these are environments engineered to induce and exaggerate this homing to the human herd, particularly among the young.
This artificial intensification of homing to the herd can only complicate, delay, or impede the hard psychological bargain of the self-other balance.
And if you simply crave the fusion juice that is proof of life at a certain age and stage—turn away, and you are extinguished.
Goffman assumed a backstage where you could be your true self. For us, the backstage is shrinking.
There is almost no place left where I can be my true self.
Ubiquitous connection means that the audience is never far, and this fact brings all the pressures of the hive into the world and the body.
Like the gamblers in their machine wombs, we are meant to fuse with the system and play to extinction: not the extinction of our funds but rather the extinction of our selves. Extinction is a design feature formalized in the conditions of no exit.
Home is our school of intimacy, where we first learn to be human.
The shelter of home is our original way of living in space, Bachelard
In the march of institutional interests intent on implementing Big Other, the very first citadel to fall is the most ancient: the principle of sanctuary.
The real psychological truth is this: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you are nothing.
Many hopes today are pinned on the new body of EU regulation known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which became enforceable in May 2018.
It was in late April that Facebook quietly issued new terms of service, placing those 1.5 billion users under US privacy laws and thus eliminating their ability to file claims in Irish courts.32 III.
The greatest danger is that we come to feel at home in glass life or in the prospect of hiding from it. Both alternatives rob us of the life-sustaining inwardness, born in sanctuary, that finally distinguishes us from the machines.
Surveillance capitalism thus replaces mystery with certainty as it substitutes rendition, behavioral modification, and prediction for the old “unsurveyable pattern.” This is a fundamental reversal of the classic ideal of the “market” as intrinsically unknowable.
.”6 A top Facebook engineer put it succinctly: “We are trying to map out the graph of everything in the world and how it relates to each other.”
As Google’s Eric Schmidt observed in 2010, “You give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
surveillance capitalism’s command and control of the division of learning in society are the signature feature that breaks with the old justifications of the invisible hand and its entitlements.
First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely on people as consumers.
to name a few examples—social relations are no longer founded on mutual exchange. In these and many other instances, products and services are merely hosts for surveillance capitalism’s parasitic operations.
Most startling is that GM employed more people during the height of the Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights of market capitalization.
For the sake of its own commercial success, surveillance capitalism aims us toward the hive collective. This privatized instrumentarian social order is a new form of collectivism in which it is the market, not the state, which concentrates both knowledge and freedom within its domain.
We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide. So we connect more people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that . . . anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.
This expression of equivalence without equality made Facebook’s first text exceptionally vulnerable to corruption from what would come to be called “fake news.”
This is the context in which Facebook and Google became the focus of international attention following the discovery of organized political disinformation campaigns and profit-driven “fake news” stories during the 2016 US presidential election and the UK Brexit vote earlier that year.
As radical indifference would predict, however, “fake news” and other forms of information corruption have been perennial features of Google and Facebook’s online environments.
Google continued to serve its fraudulent business customers until 2011, when the US Treasury Department finally required the company to suspend advertising relationships with “more than 500 internet advertisers associated with the 85 alleged online mortgage fraud schemes and related deceptive advertising.”30
Facebook “enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of ‘Jew hater,’ ‘How to burn jews,’ or ‘History of why jews ruin the world.’”
Google enables advertisers to target ads to people who type racist terms into the search bar and even suggests ad placements next to searches for “evil jew” and “Jewish control of banks.”
Although both Google and Facebook made modest operational adjustments to try to diminish economic incentives for disinformation and instituted warning systems to alert users to probable corruption, Zuckerberg also used his super-voting power to reject a shareholder proposal that would have required the company to report on its management of disinformation and the societal consequences of its practices, and Google executives successfully fought back a similar shareholder proposal that year.50
It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. In a surreal paradox, this coup is celebrated as “personalization,” although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.
Big Other acts on behalf of an unprecedented assembly of commercial operations that must modify human behavior as a condition of commercial success. It replaces legitimate contract, the rule of law, politics, and social trust with a new form of sovereignty and its privately administered regime of reinforcements.
Using Karl Polanyi’s lens, we see that surveillance capitalism annexes human experience to the market dynamic so that it is reborn as behavior: the fourth “fictional commodity.” Polanyi’s first three fictional commodities—land, labor, and money—were subjected to law.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offers his social network as the solution to the third modernity. He envisions a totalizing instrumentarian order—he calls it the new global “church”—that will connect the world’s people to “something greater than ourselves.” It will be Facebook, he says, that will address problems that are civilizational in scale and scope, building “the long-term infrastructure to bring humanity together” and keeping people safe with “artificial intelligence” that quickly understands “what is happening across our community.”56 Like
we are at the beginning of a new arc that I have called information civilization, and it repeats the same dangerous arrogance. The aim now is not to dominate nature but rather human nature. The focus has shifted from machines that overcome the limits of bodies to machines that modify the behavior of individuals, groups, and populations in the service of market objectives. This global installation of instrumentarian power overcomes and replaces the human inwardness that feeds the will to will and gives sustenance to our voices in the first person, incapacitating democracy at its roots.
This “seventh extinction” will not be of nature but of what has been held most precious in human nature: the will to will, the sanctity of the individual, the ties of intimacy, the sociality that binds us together in promises, and the trust they breed. The dying off of this human future will be just as unintended as any other.
