The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Quería que mi primera review en BookWyrm fuese este libro. A pesar de andar por el mundo de la privacidad años antes de leérmelo, ha supuesto un antes y un después en mi concepción de lo que es la tecnología y lo que significa vivir una vida mediada a través de esta. El marco conceptual que Shoshana nos brinda permite ver de forma explícita la lógica de acumulación que hay detrás de las grandes tecnológicas. Nos enseña que un nuevo mercado se ha abierto, el de los futuros humanos, y cómo este mercado ha dado lugar a tantas cosas sin precedente. A parte de ser extremadamente rico en la cantidad y calidad de información y conceptos que aporta, también es un libro tremendamente humano y cálido. Shoshana describe con una empatía y una ternura arropadora dimensiones humanas de nuestras vidas que tenemos que defender ante el expolio del nuevo mercado de futuros humanos. Por su tremenda originalidad y por lo increíblemente transcendentes que son sus ideas, este es un libro que debería leerse cualquier persona que se haya preguntado alguna vez por el estado de nuestro mundo. Como dice ella, estamos viviendo un golpe de estado desde arriba.

I've been making my way through this (audio)book for a year or so. I realised some 15 hours in that it didn't make sense because the files weren't organised correctly (my bad). Because I listened to bits and pieces out of order, I had to work extra hard to get the concepts, which I'm glad for now even though it sucked. Zuboff's analysis here is fantastic. Her breakdown of the machinations of "surveillance capitalism" is one of the most significant contributions to understanding how this particular "species" of capitalism works that I think we are likely to get this half of the twenty-first century. And "we" sure need it.

The book falls short on political solutions however, and the way it's written was frustrating to say the least. Zuboff's faith in markets, even market capitalism, knocks more creative solutions out of her grasp reacting to attacks on liberal democracy, rather than straining for more democratic ways of governance and being in the world.

This book makes a fantastic comparison read alongside Jairus Victor Grove's thrilling/disturbing/enlightening/strange optimism generating Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (wyrms.de/book/79246/s/savage-ecology). Stay tuned for my review of that whenever I finish it.

TLDR: the book has little to say but the horrible writing spreads it on HUNDREDS OF PAGES.

The thinking is shallow and extremely naïve.
The quotations of executives of google, Facebook, Microsoft and co are believed without understanding that they are marketers who are shilling the stocks of their companies.

Same for everything else: targeted advertisement is assumed to work (every time somebody with limited conflict of interests bothered to look targeted ads were no better than un-targeted and barely better than no ads at all). The reader is supposed to believe that the big ad company can guess how we think when they manage to guess no better than a random answer the result of pseudo-scientific personality tests.

For a book about a form of capitalism, not a single line is about who pays what to whom, so the huge frauds are completely lost (cooked indicators from the ad companies, click farms, botting, etc...).
Are those issue big enough to derail the plans of the surveillance capitalist? You won't find an answer in this book.
The very small part about what can be done to change things is a sad list of a few examples without any concern about whether or not they work.

That said, just listening to the executives and reading where their thinking comes from is useful and interesting. An analogous example is what David Golumbia did with his "politics of bitcoin" (which is fascinating). The big difference is that Golumbia's book is 60 pages without the bibliography, and Age of surveillance capitalism is more than FIVE FUCKING HUNDREDS. The writing is horrible. I have never managed to pass 25 pages in one sitting, and 50 pages a day has been my limit. I often had to go back and re-read the chapter's title to know what was the point of what I was reading.

Zuboff nails the current state of privacy here. In this tome focused on the private sector, she assesses the new surveillance economy, where human experience is the raw material to be mass harvested as much as possible. Basically, it has become so easy to acquire and harvest data through hardware, software, algorithms, sensors, cameras, gps, etc., that the private sector has every incentive to focus on data acquisition if they can. The insurance sector is teaming up with the connected car and wearable health device industries. The free app that comes with your electric toothbrush, kid's toy, or fridge is ultimately for "behavioral surplus capture". The examples in the book go on.

Zuboff combines history, economics, culture, philosophy, and law to show how we got here and how things have spiraled so quickly, with little to no regulation around the world (still in almost 2022). A reliance on secrecy, normalization of the areas that aren't secret, social persuasion, and the unprecedented velocity of all of this is an overview of her assessment.

The metaphors and dystopian predictions are sometimes a little extreme, but in her defense, it's difficult to talk about the current state of privacy without quickly sounding paranoid and conspiratorial. With whatever flaws you may find with the book—flowery language, a lack of proposed solutions, many areas of privacy not covered—this is an important book about data and the new economy.