Yesterday's episode of "Start the Week" is intoxicatingly...sobering. From the BBC about the episode:

Society is at a turning point, warns Professor Shoshana Zuboff. Democracy and liberty are under threat as capitalism and the digital revolution combine forces. She tells Andrew Marr how new technologies are not only mining our minds for data, but radically changing them in the process. As Facebook celebrates its 15th birthday she examines what happens when a few companies have unprecedented power and little democratic oversight.

hy are the Giants of Silicon Valley so reluctant to engage with democracy and politicians? Is there something in their business model perhaps which makes them so secretive and unenthusiastic about changing their algorithms.

Shoshana Zuboff has written "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power", which is a book that boils down how companies have gone from traditional advertising to knowing exactly what you do on a plethora of levels.

Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism diverges pretty sharply from that old model in the sense that we are no longer its customers. We are no longer its employees, but let's start with one feature that it has in common with the old model of capitalism because that that actually becomes pretty interesting for all of us. It's long been understood that capitalism evolves by taking things that live outside the marketplace and bringing them into the marketplace, turning them into what people call commodities, that can be sold and can be purchased, and of course, perhaps the most famous example of this we go back to the 19th century the idea that industrial capitalism took nature, something that exists in its own time and space outside the market brought into the market. Woods, meadows, forests, rivers, and so forth."

In the market it all becomes real estate, land that can be sold and bought. So this is the overall template. Now, with surveillance capitalism, one way that it emulates this old history of capitalism is that it also takes something that lives outside the market and brings it in, but it does so with a dark, dark twist, and that is it claims private human experience for the marketplace.

Andrew Marr: So the raw material is our imaginations, our ideals, our choices.

Shoshana Zuboff: Everything in our private experience is claimed as free raw material for a new kind of production process, and that free raw material includes everything from not so much what you post on Facebook, for example, but whether you use exclamation points, for example, if you say that you will meet with your friends later. Do you say I meet you this afternoon or do you say I'll meet you at 3:45?

Andrew Marr: So the algorithms are watching quite subtle and sophisticated aspects of my imagination, my brain working online, and making judgments about how I think and what I might want to purchase eventually on the basis of that?

Shoshana Zuboff: Yes. Ultimately, this can include everything from how the muscles in your face are working and what that betrays about your emotional state, and what your emotional state is likely to become; how you walk the slope of your shoulders that the cadence of your gait; all of these things become part of these vast new piles of behavioral data that are now treated as proprietary surplus for a new kind of production process.

Andrew Marr: It's very easy to get to get too abstract by this, I suppose. So, let's be very clear the likes of Google and Facebook are not making their money by selling ads. They're making their money by handing over data, which tells other companies how we might behave, and what we might buy in the future. And selling that data to them, as it were. It's passing on data.

Shoshana Zuboff: That's absolutely right. So, when you see a tech titan on the telly, saying "We don't sell your personal information", I struggled with that for quite a while, "how can they say that without their nose growing long?", but what they're doing is in fact, they're taking our experience—without asking, of course, because no-one would give permission if they knew what they were taking—they take our experience, they convert it into behavioural data, those data are then combined with their vast proprietary capabilities in machine intelligence—computation—out of that come predictive patterns: what we will do now, soon, and later. They sell these predictions into a new kind of marketplace that trades exclusively in future predictions of our behaviour. I call these behavioural futures markets.

Andrew Marr: So, this allows other companies to know, in advance, what we are going to want, a month ahead, a week ahead, a year ahead, and that is the crucial aspect of the new model.

Shoshana Zuboff: that's where the revenue comes from. This began with online targeted advertising. But, when you think about it, what were those advertisers? They were simply businesses that had an interest in what we were gonna do later, which is, whether or not we were gonna click on a certain kind of ad. These are future behaviours.

Andrew Marr: Quite a lot of people listening might think, "I'm going to stay away from my keyboard a little bit, I'm gonna be slightly more careful about what I type in, in response to this scary new world. But one of the points about this book, is that it's not about computers any longer, not in the traditional sense.

Shoshana Zuboff: No, as the competitive dynamics in surveillance capitalism heated up, it was all about "who was gonna have the best predictions?" To get the best predictions, you need the best predictive data. And to get the best predictive data, and to get the best predictive data, you've got to throw your nets much, much wider than the online world. So, we are now way beyond what do you search for, what do you browse, what do you click on? We're into real life, we're into where you walk, what your breakfast conversation is, and how you sleep at night, and what's going on inside your house.

Hearing Zuboff break down how Nest—a Google-owned temperature-controlling company—works, and it's simply how to understand Google's entire business model.

Andrew Marr: Endless microphones eavesdropping on us. You use the example of a home thermometer called Nest, I think, early in the book.

Shoshana Zuboff: Yes, it's a very interesting example, particularly compared to where we began, before surveillance capitalism, with the idea of the smart home. Just, very briefly, in the year 2000, an auspicious group of scientists published a report called "The aware home". All the things that we talk about now, as the smart home; make your home more efficient, give you feedback that can help your health, and other aspect—

Andrew Marr: The heating comes on at the right time, nothing goes off in your fridge, all that stuff.

Shoshana Zuboff: Yes. When they published this report, they did the schematics, and the schematics showed a simple, closed loop: you had sensors in the house itself, all the data went to the occupant of the house, and no one else. The occupant was the only one who decided how data would be shared. The scientists said "These are very intimate data. Obviously, privacy is of paramount standard here, and this is how it will all be organised."

Now you fast-forward to the year 2017, with almost two decades of surveillance capitalism in development. Two University of London Scholars did an analysis of one simple Nest thermostat—Nest is a company that is owned by Google—and what they concluded was, that if you install this one thermostat, a conscientious consumer must review a minimum of one thousand privacy contracts, in order to be able to understand where all these data from your home are flowing, and what might be happening with them.

Andrew Marr: So, we are being followed, and eavesdropped, and observed by all sorts of aspects of the new world that are gathering our data without us knowing it.

One example that you use in your book, I think, that will surprise people, those little cars that are sent around for Google Street View, they have been hoovering up IP addresses, passwords, and details of what people have been watching, or logging on their computers.

Shoshana Zuboff: It's such an interesting example. These Street View data have been collected quite a few years ago, and it was one of the first glimpses into the operations of surveillance capitalism, that they present themselves as doing one thing, but they're really doing another thing, because the economic imperative is to get as much data as possible. So, every one of these things is a supply-chain interface for these huge pipelines of data flow.

From Zuboff's book:

By 2018, the global “smart-home” market was valued at $36 billion and expected to reach $151 billion by 2023. The numbers betray an earthquake beneath their surface. Consider just one smart-home device: the Nest thermostat, which was made by a company that was owned by Alphabet, the Google holding company, and then merged with Google in 2018. The Nest thermostat does many things imagined in the Aware Home. It collects data about its uses and environment. It uses motion sensors and computation to “learn” the behaviors of a home’s inhabitants. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected products such as cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds. Such systems can, for example, trigger lights if an anomalous motion is detected, signal video and audio recording, and even send notifications to homeowners or others. As a result of the merger with Google, the thermostat, like other Nest products, will be built with Google’s artificial intelligence capabilities, including its personal digital “assistant.” Like the Aware Home, the thermostat and its brethren devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power—but for whom?

Should the customer refuse to agree to Nest’s stipulations, the terms of service indicate that the functionality and security of the thermostat will be deeply compromised, no longer supported by the necessary updates meant to ensure its reliability and safety. The consequences can range from frozen pipes to failed smoke alarms to an easily hacked internal home system.

Zuboff's book is, so far—and I'm just 10% into it—a marvellous study into surveillance capitalism, and is a must-read for our age.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002b8l

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/technology/google-facebook-surveillance-capitalism.html