What will he do Elon Musk?’ The question is a sign of how lost we are. We become obsessed with a man and his whims because we do not yet have the necessary laws to govern our information spaces. Without law, power is dangerous.” This replied to his followers Shoshana Zuboff precisely, in Twitter, the day that Elon Musk bought the social network. The North American sociologist is one of the fundamental voices in the fight against the infinite power of Internet tycoons. To describe her business model, she coined an expression that is fashionable and with which she titles her book: “The era of surveillance capitalism” (Paidós).
Here are their basic definitions:
“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims for itself the human experience, understanding it as a free raw material that it can translate into behavioral data. Although some of this data is used to improve products or services, the rest is considered as a proprietary behavioral surplus (‘property’) of the capitalist surveillance companies themselves and is used as an input (…) with which predictive products are manufactured that anticipate what any of you will do now, shortly, and later. Finally, these predictive products are bought and sold in a new type of behavioral prediction market that I call ‘behavioral futures markets.’”
“The surveillance capitalists realized they could do whatever they wanted, and they did. They wrapped themselves up under the banner of defending a social ideal and emancipation, and thus appealed to contemporary anxieties and concerns (and took advantage of them), while hiding their real performance behind the scenes. They cloaked themselves in a cloak of invisibility woven in equal parts from the rhetoric of the web’s empowering role, the ability to move quickly, the certainty that all of this would bring them bountiful torrents of income, and the wildness, still to be defined, of the territory they were about to conquer and claim for themselves. They acted protected by the intrinsic illegibility of the automated processes that are under their control”.
“Surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge, and the power that accumulates with that knowledge. The surveillance capitalists know everything about us, but their activities are designed as they are so that they cannot be known by us. They predict our futures for the benefit of others, not ours.”
by Shoshana Zuboff
