The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n. 1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

saudade, a word said to capture the homesickness and longing of separation from the homeland among emigrants across the centuries. Now the disruptions of the twenty-first century have turned these exquisite anxieties and longings of dislocation into a universal story that engulfs each one of us.3

the team assumed that for all of its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take its place as a modern incarnation of the ancient conventions that understand “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its walls.

Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.

We are not surveillance capitalism’s “customers.” Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.

Surveillance capitalism is not technology; it is a logic that imbues technology and commands it into action. Surveillance capitalism is a market form that is unimaginable outside the digital milieu, but it is not the same as the “digital.”

When a firm collects behavioral data with permission and solely as a means to product or service improvement, it is committing capitalism but not surveillance capitalism. Each of the top five tech companies practices capitalism, but they are not all pure surveillance capitalists, at least not now.

The great sociologist Emile Durkheim made this point at the dawn of the twentieth century, and his insight will be a touchstone for us throughout this book. Observing the dramatic upheavals of industrialization in his time—factories, specialization, the complex division of labor—Durkheim understood that although economists could describe these developments, they could not grasp their cause. He argued that these sweeping changes were “caused” by the changing needs of people and that economists were (and remain) systematically blind to these social facts: The division of labor appears to us otherwise than it does to economists. For them, it essentially consists in greater production. For us, this greater productivity is only a necessary consequence, a repercussion of the phenomenon. If we specialize, it is not to produce more, but it is to enable us to live in the new conditions of existence that have been made for us.7

Karl Polanyi wrote eloquently on the rise of the market economy. Polanyi’s studies led him to conclude that the operations of a self-regulating market are profoundly destructive when allowed to run free of countervailing laws and policies. He described the double movement: “a network of measures and policies… integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land, and money.”

“In the age of new consensus financial policy stabilization,” one US economist wrote, “the economy has witnessed the largest transfer of income to the top in history.”44 A sobering 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund warned of instability, concluding that the global trends toward neoliberalism “have not delivered as expected.” Instead, inequality had significantly diminished “the level and the durability of growth” while increasing volatility and creating permanent vulnerability to economic crisis.45

Two years after the North London riots, research in the UK showed that by 2013, poverty fueled by lack of education and unemployment already excluded nearly a third of the population from routine social participation.46 Another UK report concluded, “Workers on low and middle incomes are experiencing the biggest decline in their living standards since reliable records began in the mid-19th Century.”47 By 2015, austerity measures had eliminated 19 percent, or 18 billion pounds, from the budgets of local authorities, had forced an 8 percent cut in child protection spending, and had caused 150,000 pensioners to no longer enjoy access to vital services.48 By 2014 nearly half of the US population lived in functional poverty, with the highest wage in the bottom half of earners at about $34,000.49 A 2012 US Department of Agriculture survey showed that close to 49 million people lived in “food-insecure” households.

Many scholars have taken to describing these new conditions as neofeudalism, marked by the consolidation of elite wealth and power far beyond the control of ordinary people and the mechanisms of democratic consent.55 Piketty calls it a return to “patrimonial capitalism,” a reversion to a premodern society in which one’s life chances depend upon inherited wealth rather than meritocratic achievement.

We now have the tools to grasp the collision in all of its destructive complexity: what is unbearable is that economic and social inequalities have reverted to the preindustrial “feudal” pattern but that we, the people, have not. We are not illiterate peasants, serfs, or slaves. Whether “middle class” or “marginalized,” we share the collective historical condition of individualized persons with complex social experiences and opinions. We are hundreds of millions or even billions of second-modernity people whom history has freed both from the once-immutable facts of a destiny told at birth and from the conditions of mass society. We know ourselves to be worthy of dignity and the opportunity to live an effective life. This is existential toothpaste that, once liberated, cannot be squeezed back into the tube. Like a detonation’s rippling sound waves of destruction, the reverberations of pain and anger that have come to define our era arise from this poisonous collision between inequality’s facts and inequality’s feelings.

Individualization has sent each one of us on the prowl for the resources we need to ensure effective life, but at each turn we are forced to do battle with an economics and politics from whose vantage point we are but ciphers. We live in the knowledge that our lives have unique value, but we are treated as invisible. As the rewards of late-stage financial capitalism slip beyond our grasp, we are left to contemplate the future in a bewilderment that erupts into violence with increasing frequency. Our expectations of psychological self-determination are the grounds upon which our dreams unfold, so the losses we experience in the slow burn of rising inequality, exclusion, pervasive competition, and degrading stratification are not only economic. They slice us to the quick in dismay and bitterness because we know ourselves to be worthy of individual dignity and the right to a life on our own terms.

Surveillance capitalism commandeered the wonders of the digital world to meet our needs for effective life, promising the magic of unlimited information and a thousand ways to anticipate our needs and ease the complexities of our harried lives.

Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. In the absence of a decisive societal response that constrains or outlaws this logic of accumulation, surveillance capitalism appears poised to become the dominant form of capitalism in our time.

Peter Drucker’s field studies for his seminal Concept of the Corporation, the 1946 book that codified the practices of the twentieth-century business organization and established Drucker’s reputation as a management sage.

“Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is talking about when they talk about big data.” “Data” are the raw material necessary for surveillance capitalism’s novel manufacturing processes. “Extraction” describes the social relations and material infrastructure with which the firm asserts authority over those raw materials to achieve economies of scale in its raw-material supply operations.

“Analysis” refers to the complex of highly specialized computational systems that I will generally refer to in these chapters as “machine intelligence.”

These machine intelligence operations convert raw material into the firm’s highly profitable algorithmic products designed to predict the behavior of its users. The inscrutability and exclusivity of these techniques and operations are the moat that surrounds the castle and secures the action within.

For now let’s say that users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply. As we shall see, surveillance capitalism’s unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior while remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us.

Google’s declared state of exception was the backdrop for 2002, the watershed year during which surveillance capitalism took root. The firm’s appreciation of behavioral surplus crossed another threshold that April, when the data logs team arrived at their offices one morning to find that a peculiar phrase had surged to the top of the search queries: “Carol Brady’s maiden name.” Why the sudden interest in a 1970s television character? It was data scientist and logs team member Amit Patel who recounted the event to the New York Times, noting, “You can’t interpret it unless you know what else is going on in the world.”37

Google would no longer mine behavioral data strictly to improve service for users but rather to read users’ minds for the purposes of matching ads to their interests, as those interests are deduced from the collateral traces of online behavior.

No moral, legal, or social constraints will stand in the way of finding, claiming, and analyzing others’ behavior for commercial purposes.

The Google founders’ response to the fear that stalked their community effectively declared a “state of exception” in which it was judged necessary to suspend the values and principles that had guided Google’s founding and early practices.

surveillance capitalism was invented by a specific group of human beings in a specific time and place. It is not an inherent result of digital technology, nor is it a necessary expression of information capitalism. It was intentionally constructed at a moment in history,

The discovery of behavioral surplus had produced a stunning 3,590 percent increase in revenue in less than four years.

Google’s inventions revolutionized extraction and established surveillance capitalism’s first economic imperative: the extraction imperative.

users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends.

Journalist John Battelle, who chronicled Google during the 2002–2004 period, described the company’s “aloofness,” “limited information sharing,” and “alienating and unnecessary secrecy and isolation.”

In the larger societal pattern, privacy is not eroded but redistributed, as decision rights over privacy are claimed for surveillance capital.

Page’s vision perfectly reflects the history of capitalism, marked by taking things that live outside the market sphere and declaring their new life as market commodities. In historian Karl Polanyi’s 1944 grand narrative of the “great transformation” to a self-regulating market economy, he described the origins of this translation process in three astonishing and crucial mental inventions that he called “commodity fictions.” The first was that human life could be subordinated to market dynamics and reborn as “labor” to be bought and sold. The second was that nature could be translated into the market and reborn as “land” or “real estate.” The third was that exchange could be reborn as “money.”3 Nearly eighty years earlier, Karl Marx had described the taking of lands and natural resources as the original “big bang” that ignited modern capital formation, calling it “primitive accumulation.”

human experience is subjugated to surveillance capitalism’s market mechanisms and reborn as “behavior.

A third set of answers requires an appreciation of the political and cultural circumstances and strategies that advanced surveillance capitalism’s claims and protected them from fatal challenge. It is this third domain that we pursue in the sections that follow. No single element is likely to have done the job, but together a convergence of political circumstances and proactive strategies helped enrich the habitat in which this mutation could root and flourish. These include (1) the relentless pursuit and defense of the founders’ “freedom” through corporate control and an insistence on the right to lawless space; (2) the shelter of specific historical circumstances, including the policies and juridical orientation of the neoliberal paradigm and the state’s urgent interest in the emerging capabilities of behavioral surplus analysis and prediction in the aftermath of the September 2001 terror attacks; and (3) the intentional construction of fortifications in the worlds of politics and culture, designed to protect the kingdom and deflect any close scrutiny of its practices.

Schmidt, Brin, and Page have ardently defended their right to freedom from law even as Google grew to become what is arguably the world’s most powerful corporation.23 Their efforts have been marked by a few consistent themes: that technology companies such as Google move faster than the state’s ability to understand or follow, that any attempts to intervene or constrain are therefore fated to be ill-conceived and stupid, that regulation is always a negative force that impedes innovation and progress, and that lawlessness is the necessary context for “technological innovation.”

Business Insider covered Schmidt’s remarks at the Mobile World Congress that same year, writing, “When asked about government regulation, Schmidt said that technology moves so fast that governments really shouldn’t try to regulate it because it will change too fast, and any problem will be solved by technology. ‘We’ll move much faster than any government.’”

Google and Facebook vigorously lobby to kill online privacy protection, limit regulations, weaken or block privacy-enhancing legislation, and thwart every attempt to circumscribe their practices because such laws are existential threats to the frictionless flow of behavioral surplus.

These claims to lawless space are remarkably similar to those of the robber barons of an earlier century. Like the men at Google, the late-nineteenth-century titans claimed undefended territory for their own interests, declared the righteousness of their self-authorizing prerogatives, and defended their new capitalism from democracy at any cost. At least in the US case, we have been here before.

Adam Winkler, a historian of corporate rights, reminds us, “Throughout American history the nation’s most powerful corporations have persistently mobilized to use the Constitution to fight off unwanted government regulations.”48 Although today’s mobilizations are not original, Winkler’s careful account demonstrates the effects of past mobilizations on the distribution of power and wealth in US society and the strength of democratic values and principles in each era.

CIA Director Michael Hayden conceded as much in 2013 when he told an audience that in the years following 9/11, the CIA “could be fairly charged with the militarization of the world wide web.”65 Legislation to regulate online privacy was an immediate casualty. Marc Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), testified to the 9/11 Commission on the sudden reversal of privacy concerns, observing that before 9/11, “There was hardly any positive discussion about the development of techniques that would enable massive surveillance while attempting to safeguard privacy.”66 Swire concurred, noting that as a result of the new emphasis on information sharing, “Congress lost interest in regulating information usage in the private sector.… Without the threat of legislation, the energy went out of many of the self-regulatory efforts that industry had created.”67 At the FTC, the focus shifted from the broader concerns of privacy rights to a more politically palatable “harms-based” strategy, pursuing cases in which concrete physical harms or economic injuries could be defined, such as identify theft or database security.

The government’s need to evade constitutional oversight, argues legal scholar Jon Michaels, leads to secret public-private intelligence collaborations that tend to be “orchestrated around handshakes rather than legal formalities, such as search warrants, and may be arranged this way to evade oversight and, at times, to defy the law.”88 He observed that intelligence agencies are irresistibly drawn to “and in some respects dependent upon” firms’ privately held data resources.

“The government needs Silicon Valley more than ever as it seeks to defend from security threats in cyberspace.”

Fortifications have been erected in four key arenas to protect Google, and eventually other surveillance capitalists, from political interference and critique: (1) the demonstration of Google’s unique capabilities as a source of competitive advantage in electoral politics; (2) a deliberate blurring of public and private interests through relationships and aggressive lobbying activities; (3) a revolving door of personnel who migrated between Google and the Obama administration, united by elective affinities during Google’s crucial growth years of 2009–2016; and (4) Google’s intentional campaign of influence over academic work and the larger cultural conversation so vital to policy formation, public opinion, and political perception.

Journalist Sasha Issenberg, who documented these developments in his book The Victory Lab, quotes one of Obama’s 2008 political consultants who likened predictive modeling to the tools of a fortune-teller: “We knew who… people were going to vote for before they decided.”

Political correspondent Jim Rutenberg’s New York Times account of the data scientists’ seminal role in the 2012 Obama victory offers a vivid picture of the capture and analysis of behavioral surplus as a political methodology. The campaign knew “every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex, and income,” and it had figured out how to target its television ads to these individuals. One breakthrough was the “persuasion score” that identified how easily each undecided voter could be persuaded to vote for the Democratic candidate.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy’s investigatory research report, “The Googlization of the Far Right,” the corporation’s 2012 list of grantees featured a new group of antigovernment groups known for their opposition to regulation and taxes and their support for climate-change denial, including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Koch brothers–funded Heritage Action, and other antiregulatory groups such as the Federalist Society and the Cato Institute.

Surveillance capitalism’s ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts. Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world’s information. One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks.

The four stages of the cycle are incursion, habituation, adaptation, and redirection. Taken together, these stages constitute a “theory of change” that describes and predicts dispossession as a political and cultural operation supported by an elaborate range of administrative, technical, and material capabilities.

The April 2012 FCC report is heart wrenching in its way, a melancholic depiction of democracy’s vulnerability in the face-off with a wealthy, determined, and audacious surveillance capitalist opponent. In November 2010 the FCC sent Google a letter of inquiry requesting necessary information. Little was forthcoming. By March of the next year, a second “supplemental” letter was sent. Google’s response was incomplete information and lack of cooperation, which produced another “demand letter” in August. Google’s continued lack of engagement required yet another letter in late October. The FCC staff was burdened with following up and chasing down evasive corporate executives and their representatives for an entire year.

• We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking. On the basis of this claim, we can ignore considerations of individuals’ rights, interests, awareness, or comprehension. • On the basis of our claim, we assert the right to take an individual’s experience for translation into behavioral data. • Our right to take, based on our claim of free raw material, confers the right to own the behavioral data derived from human experience. • Our rights to take and to own confer the right to know what the data disclose. • Our rights to take, to own, and to know confer the right to decide how we use our knowledge. • Our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide confer our rights to the conditions that preserve our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide.