[D66] Morozov reviews Zuboff

[A.O.]

https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov
https://www.groene.nl/artikel/de-mens-als-grondstof

Capitalism’s New Clothes

    By Evgeny Morozov, thebaffler.com
    View Original
    February 4th, 2019

In a series of remarkably prescient articles, the first of which was
published in the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the
summer of 2013, Shoshana Zuboff pointed to an alarming phenomenon: the
digitization of everything was giving technology firms immense social
power. From the modest beachheads inside our browsers, they conquered,
Blitzkrieg-style, our homes, cars, toasters, and even mattresses.
Toothbrushes, sneakers, vacuum cleaners: our formerly dumb household
subordinates were becoming our “smart” bosses. Their business models
turned data into gold, favoring further expansion.

Google and Facebook were restructuring the world, not just solving its
problems. The general public, seduced by the tech world’s youthful,
hoodie-wearing ambassadors and lobotomized by TED Talks, was clueless.
Zuboff saw a logic to this digital mess; tech firms were following
rational—and terrifying—imperatives. To attack them for privacy
violations was to miss the scale of the transformation—a tragic
miscalculation that has plagued much of the current activism against Big
Tech.

This analytical error has also led many clever, well-intentioned people
to insist that Silicon Valley should—and could—repent. To insist, as
these critics do, that Google should start protecting our privacy is,
for Zuboff, “like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand or
asking a giraffe to shorten its neck.” The imperatives of surveillance
capitalism are almost of the evolutionary kind: no clever policy, not
even in Congress, has ever succeeded in shortening the giraffe’s neck
(it has, however, done wonders for Mitch McConnell’s).

Zuboff’s  pithy term for this regime, “surveillance capitalism,” has
caught on. (That this term had been previously used—and in a far more
critical manner—by the Marxists at Monthly Review, is a minor
genealogical inconvenience for Zuboff.) Her new, much-awaited book The
Age of Surveillance Capitalism exhaustively documents its sinister
operations. From Pokemon Go to smart cities, from Amazon Echo to smart
dolls, surveillance capitalism’s imperatives, as well as its
methods—marked by constant lying, concealment, and manipulation—have
become ubiquitous. The good old days of solitary drunken stupor are now
gone: even vodka bottles have become smart, offering internet
connectivity. As for the smart rectal thermometers also discussed in the
book, you probably don’t want to know. Let’s just hope your digital
wallet is stocked with enough Bitcoins to appease the hackers.

Zuboff’s book makes clear that the promises of “surveillance
capitalists” are as sweet as their lobbying is ruthless. Tech companies,
under the pompous cover of disrupting everything for everyone’s benefit,
have developed a panoply of rhetorical and political tricks that
insulate them from any pressure from below. It helps, of course, that
the only pressure coming from below is usually the one directed at the
buttons and screens of their data-sucking devices.

Had Donald Trump not been elected president—reportedly by that
accidental data wizard of Steve Bannon, his hapless colleagues at
Cambridge Analytica, and a bunch of Russians who managed to use Facebook
as it was always intended to be used—the power of Silicon Valley might
have remained a niche topic: good for nerdy Twitter banter on the
renegade think-tank circuit but pretty useless for anything else.

Zuboff stepped into this global conversation five years ago, just as the
first signs of discontent about the power of Big Tech began to bubble
up. Silicon Valley was no stranger to criticism, but Zuboff was no
ordinary critic. One of the first female professors to receive tenure at
Harvard Business School, she has also worked as a columnist for Fast
Company and Businessweek, two bastions of techno-optimism not exactly
known for anti-capitalist sentiment. If members of the establishment
were beginning to bash Silicon Valley, something, it seemed, was truly
rotten in the digital kingdom. What was it?

II.

While Zuboff’s use of the phrase “surveillance capitalism” first
appeared in 2014, the origins of her critique date further back. They
can be traced to the late 1970s, when she began studying the impact of
information technology on the workplace—a forty-year project that, in
addition to leading to several books and articles, has also inundated
her with utopian hopes and bitter disappointments. The mismatch between
the possible and the real has framed the intellectual context in which
Zuboff—previously cautiously optimistic about both capitalism and
technology—constructed her theory of surveillance capitalism, the
darkest and most dystopian tool in her intellectual arsenal to date.

The depressing conclusions of her latest book are a far cry from what
Zuboff was saying just a decade ago. As late as 2009, she argued that
the likes of Amazon, eBay, and Apple were “releas[ing] massive
quantities of value by giving people what they wanted on their own terms
in their own space.” Zuboff arrived at this sunny diagnosis via her
overarching analysis of how information technology was changing society;
in this respect, she was one of a cohort of thinkers to argue that a new
era—some called it “post-industrial,” others “post-Fordist”—was upon us.

It is from within that analysis—and the initial positive expectations it
engendered—that Zuboff’s current critique of surveillance capitalism has
emerged. It’s also why her latest tome often ventures, in content and
language alike, into the turf of the melodramatic: Zuboff, together with
the entire American business-managerial establishment, besotted with the
promises of the New Economy, had hoped that something very different was
in the offing.

Her first book, In the Age of the Smart Machine, appeared to much
acclaim in 1988. In it, Zuboff laid out a conceptual apparatus and a set
of questions that would resurface in all her subsequent writings.
Drawing on years of ethnographic work in industrial and office settings,
the book painted an ambiguous future. Information technology, argued
Zuboff, might exacerbate the worst features of automation, strip workers
of their autonomy, and condemn them to undignified tasks. But when used
wisely, it might have the opposite effect: boosting workers’ capacities
for abstract and imaginative thinking and reversing the de-skilling
process decried by many Marxist critics of work under capitalism.

Stitched together by information technology, modern enterprises, in
Zuboff’s account, had to choose between “automating” or “informating.”
The latter was her term for their novel ability to gather data—the
“electronic text”—related to computer-mediated work. Under the prior era
of Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management, such data was gathered
manually, through observation and time-motion studies. By extracting
workers’ tacit knowledge about the work process, managers, abetted by
engineers, could rationalize it, dramatically lowering costs and raising
living standards.

Thanks to advances in information technology, the writing of the
electronic text was becoming cheap and ubiquitous. Were this text made
available to workers, it might even undermine the foundation of
managerial control: the assumption that the manager knows best. The
electronic text begat what Zuboff, following Michel Foucault, described
as “panoptical power.” Wedded to authoritarian practices of the earlier,
heavily centralized workplace, this power was likely to entrench
existing hierarchies; managers would hide behind numbers and rule
remotely instead of risking the ambiguity of personal communication.
Amplified by workplace democracy and egalitarian rules of access to the
electronic text, however, this power might enable workers to challenge
managers’ interpretations of their own activities and grab some
institutional power for themselves.

In the Age of the Smart Machine, a book about the future of work and
also, inevitably, about its past, was remarkably silent about
capitalism. Its extensive bibliography aside, this ambitious tome of
nearly five hundred pages mentions the word “capitalism” only once—in a
quotation by Max Weber. This seems odd, given that Zuboff was hardly an
apologist for the firms that she studied. She harbored no illusions
about the authoritarian nature of the modern workplace, rarely a place
for workers’ self-realization, and she delighted in bashing
self-obsessed and power-hungry managers.

Despite such occasional critical notes, Zuboff trained her analytical
lens on the institutional conflicts over knowledge and its role in
perpetuating or undermining organizational hierarchies. Private
property, class, the ownership of the means of production—the stuff of
earlier conflicts related to work—were mostly excluded from her
framework. This was by design rather than oversight. The goal of the
study, after all, was to understand the future of the workplace mediated
by information technology. Zuboff’s ethnographic approach was simply
better suited to interviewing managers and workers about what drove them
apart than to sketching out the economic imperatives that connected each
enterprise to the whole of the global economy. So the smart machine of
Zuboff’s imagining operated largely outside the invisible constraints
that capitalism imposed on managers and owners.

While “capital” fared better—the book did mention it a dozen
times—Zuboff did not see it, as many on the Marxist left are wont to do,
as a social relation or an eternal antagonist of labor. Instead, she
followed neoclassical economists in viewing it as machinery or money
tied up in investments; “labor,” in its turn, was mostly treated as a
physical activity. Even though Zuboff also mentioned the historical role
of the trade unions, her readers would not necessarily grasp the
antagonistic character of “labor” and “capital”—instead, they heard
mostly about situational conflicts within individual workplaces, between
workers and managers.

That was scarcely surprising: Zuboff was no Marxist. In addition, she
was an aspiring professor at Harvard Business School. However, her
advocacy for more equal and dignified workplaces suggested that she
might be, at least on some issues, a fellow traveler to leftist causes.
What set her apart from the more radical voices in these debates was her
continued insistence on the ambiguous effects of information technology.
The choice between “automating” and “informating” was not just an
analytical byproduct of her framework or a mere rhetorical prop. Rather,
she presented it as an actual, existential choice facing modern firms
struggling with information technology.

Such binary choices—between “distributed capitalism” and “managerial
capitalism,” and between “advocacy-oriented capitalism” and
“surveillance capitalism”—would also animate Zuboff’s later books. But
even at this early stage, it was unclear whether she was justified in
making the analytical leap from observing, based on ethnographic work,
that some of the firms under study did face the choice between
“informating” and “automating,” to the broader conclusion that the
external conditions of modern and increasingly high-tech capitalism
universalized that choice for all firms, representing a new juncture in
capitalist development itself.

Accepted at face value, the possibility of a real rather than postulated
choice between “automating” and “informating” undermined the traditional
critiques of capitalism as a system of structural (and hence inevitable)
exploitation or de-skilling. In Zuboff’s new digital era, a nimble and
harmonious alliance between workers and managers could allow clever,
enlightened firms to unlock the emancipatory power of “informating.”

Here we could glimpse the broader contours of Zuboff’s approach to
capitalism: its ills, some of which she was happy to acknowledge, were
not the unavoidable byproduct of systemic forces, such as the pursuit of
profitability. Rather, they were the avoidable consequence of particular
organizational arrangements, which, while having their uses in earlier
eras, could now be made obsolete by information technology. This hopeful
conclusion was derived almost entirely from observing capitalist firms,
as capitalism itself—viewed as a historical structure, not as a mere
aggregation of economic actors—was mostly absent from the analysis.

III.

[...] (lang)

Zuboff’s Copernican revolution is much easier to explain by its debt to
Chandler than Foucault. Chandler’s own prescriptions were usually
limited to demanding that managers be more responsible. Zuboff
transcends such defeatism. But her double movement will not win before
both managerial capitalism and surveillance capitalism are theorized as
“capitalism”—a complex set of historical and social relationships
between capital and labor, the state and the monetary system, the
metropole and the periphery—and not just as an aggregate of individual
firms responding to imperatives of technological and social change. That
the latter, miniaturized account of competitive enterprise is the
working definition of “capitalism” in American business schools is no
reason to impoverish the broader discussion of the system’s rationales
and shortcomings.