surveillance capitalism

We live in an era where our private experiences have been appropriated by companies that control digital algorithms and used by them as raw material for digital products with enormous added value. This is the thesis developed by Shoshana Zuboff, a retired professor from Harvard Business School, in her book. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the summary of which can be found in the documentary Shoshana Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism.

At this stage of capitalist development, operations with economic objectives are carried out that are difficult to detect, indecipherable, and masked by liberal rhetoric. These operations are shrouded in justifications that emphasize the freedom and protection of the individual, which leads to their acceptance and, often, their defense by those who are their greatest victims. 

Surveillance capitalism develops products that, under the guise of making life easier for citizens so they can better organize their time and enjoy their lives, require them to provide personal data if they want to monitor their homes through remotely controlled cameras, install a new application on their digital devices, or even purchase a simple product online. The most visible aspect of this capitalism is the targeted advertising we receive from the moment we search for products online or, even more frighteningly, simply say aloud in front of our computers, tablets, or cell phones that we want to travel to a certain place or purchase a particular product or service.

According to Zuboff, people believe they have control over the data they provide, and that the only personal information companies possess is that which consumers consciously transfer to them. For Zuboff, this information is the least important part of all the data that digital companies collect.

The free navigation and search system allows Google to know in real time where we are and what we are thinking. Every silly game about "who would you be in history" or "what will you look like when you get old," or every piece of information you share on Facebook or other social networks, allows these companies to know our family, friends, favorite hobbies, as well as our personal tastes. 

Things become more serious when we realize that the process of wealth concentration and company mergers inherent to capitalism has made Mark Zuckerberg the main controller of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. This control gives him access to personal tastes, private images, and private conversations made available to him by billions of people without their knowledge. We leave digital traces with a huge amount of personal data that is transformed into algorithms without us being aware that a simple search on a specific topic allows these companies to capture more and more information. This data is more valuable than what we consciously provide, and companies use it and transform it into capital without the knowledge of internet users and without them receiving a single cent for it.

Transformed into algorithms, this data will form a valuable behavioral surplus that large internet companies – Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube – will turn into a commodity and make available to those who want to pay to access the billions of profiles of potential consumers of their products and services, or they will use it in the development of products that will generate even more data about consumers. 

All technological development within capitalism seeks to increase the production of relative surplus value and results in the release of labor and the increasing impoverishment of workers, accompanied by an increase in the means of domination and exploitation of the worker. It demands greater training for this workforce, concomitant with the growth of worker exclusion, leading to the formation of an unskilled industrial reserve army whose main function is to drive down the value of this labor. It also reduces the consumption of goods and services with higher added value because the enormous mass of unskilled or poorly skilled workers do not earn enough to consume these products. If, on the one hand, we have an increase in the quantity of products that utilize a great deal of technology and innovation and, because of this, reach the market at a price that is not accessible to most workers, on the other hand we have a reduction in the number of workers who receive a salary that allows them to satisfy their essential reproductive needs and have a surplus for the consumption of non-essential goods and services, generally those with higher added value. 

To ensure that this "reduced" mass of workers consumes and to retain them, access to behavioral surplus becomes fundamental. The large companies that control the algorithms become the big winners of this process, and one only needs to analyze the balance sheets of Google, Microsoft, Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp to understand who the major controllers and beneficiaries of behavioral surplus are, the great privileged by surveillance capitalism.

In the 1970s, when neoliberal theories began to become hegemonic, there was a massive expansion of urban workers due to the advance of capitalist production relations over rural areas with peasant economies in regions of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as due to the actions of governments seeking the industrialization of their economies, as occurred in China. The result was a huge amount of labor that lost access to the means of production and needed to become wage laborers. This negatively impacted the living standards of workers in wealthier countries and, at the same time, did not represent a significant improvement in the living standards of these new urban workers. Neoliberal economic practices and strategies resulted in the exponential growth of wealth with its increasing accumulation and a rise in poverty.

As Marx already showed, the principle dear to economic liberalism—that free competition in an unregulated market will regulate and control production, its distribution and consumption, as well as distribute wealth—has proven to be a utopia because it did not take into account that the logic of capital leads to monopoly and the concentration of wealth. We only need to compare the current global economic situation with that of forty years ago, before neoliberal theories became hegemonic, to see that wealth accumulates and concentrates in the hands of increasingly smaller and more powerful capitalist segments. 

Behavioral surplus and algorithms have broadened the horizon for these capitalists to such an extent that they can control the behaviors and attitudes of billions of people worldwide, dictating their consumption preferences. Politics and politicians have been transformed into products, and voters into consumers. In this way, the dominance of algorithms allows a small number of billionaires to control democratic institutions in any country in the world, through the manipulation of the tastes, gestures, and attitudes of less politically aware voters, whose votes are directed towards the candidates that interest these capitalists.

In the 2018 Brazilian elections, these billionaires managed to elect their representatives to positions in the executive branch—president and governors—and in the legislative branch. Renova Brasil, created and supported by major Brazilian capitalists like Jorge Paulo... Lemann – the richest man in Brazil and owner of Ambev, among other businesses – elected federal and state deputies in several Brazilian states to defend his interests. These deputies were elected by supposedly left-wing parties, such as federal deputy Tábata Amaral (PDT/SP) and federal deputy Felipe Rigoni (PSB/ES), parties which, being left-wing, should radically oppose the influence of big capital in politics.

Another use of logarithms in the Brazilian context is the identification of politically more impressionable consumers. To a large extent, these consumers are the same as those voters who, depending on the socio-economic situation, lean to the left or to the right. The data that this group makes available on social media is used by the so-called "hate cabinet" created by Bolsonaro supporters to influence them through a daily whirlwind of fake news and disinformation.

Algorithms and behavioral surplus have already influenced the 2016 US presidential election, the Brexit referendum, and the UK prime ministerial election, as well as the 2018 Brazilian presidential election. In all these elections, algorithms worked to elect far-right candidates whose economic and political programs sought to implement measures that favored activities typical of surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism becomes a risk to the civilizing process of all humanity by favoring an ever-smaller group of capitalist billionaires, to the detriment of the majority of human beings, relegated to a miserable living condition. Between these two extremes, middle social strata, divided between supporting billionaires and supporting public policies of social inclusion, try to balance themselves in a fragile way of life from which few manage to escape through social ascension; the majority will descend socially and join the social outcasts or, as Zygmunt Bauman aptly described, a few will become "tourists" and many will become "vagrants."