The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism 

Shoshana Zuboff

I pored over this book, stayed with the words. Read and reread them.
Drank deeply from their wisdom.  It was not an easy read, but ultimately it gave far more than it took.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a seminal text for our age. 
Zuboff's account of surveillance capitalism is elegant, poised and persuasive.
Yet for all her brilliance, Shonanna’s central thesis suffers a number of fundamental flaws.  

Where the Age is at it’s strongest is in the articulation of surveillance capitalism. 

Consider this, ‘Who owns your face?’, ‘Who owns your behaviour?’ 
What you do, where you go, who you know, all this has value and extracting value from these data is the business model of the surveillance capitalist. 
But this is only the description, where Zuboff’s account takes a darker turn, is in the control.
Once Surveillance Capitalists have provided a description of you, the next logical step is to determine how much this description can be used to predict and control you. 
Zuboff’s account of these processes is beautifully rendered in perfect proses.  

Know thyself, unless you don’t like what you find, then, deny thyself, and pretend you are other.
Zuboff goes for the latter.  We are born of this place, this pale blue dot. We are natural phenomena.
Yet in spite of these obvious truths, many continue to advance the notion that we apes are exceptional.
We are somehow other than the mere organisms with whom we share our earth and almost our entire genetic structure.
Zuboff takes issue with humans being described as 'mere organisms'. 
She is caged by this ideology of human exceptionalism and it weakens her thesis considerably.  

There are sacred cows here and sacred cows will invariably be slaughtered. 
The first heifer into the meat factory is autonomy.
Shoshana strips us of our relations, our context and connections.
She exalts ‘autonomy’ but fails to grapple with the weakness of the presumptions it contains.
This leads her to assert that humans are and ought to be autonomous. 
But Zuboff fails to address that we are born free, but everywhere in chains.
From the traffic light to the electric chair, we are already in a context that seeks to control our behaviour.
What does she think education and justice are? If not systems of changing our behaviour?
But it's more than this, it's a scientific reality, we are our contexts, our environment, they shape us as we shape them. 
This is a reality that an insistence on ‘Freedom’ cannot wish away.   

For me the issue is not that we are organisms', we are. 
It is not that we are miraculous rational deities, we are not. 
We need to embrace our human frailty, stare it down since we are wiser for this knowledge. 
Here again, Zuboff takes issues with what she calls the ‘ideology of human frailty’.
Respectfully I would ask that we,  put down our pride and look hard in the mirror, human frailty is not an ideology, it is a fundamental truth. 

We are 'mere organisms' and to claim anything else is to cling to a pernicious ideology.
An ideology that has prompted human dominion over earth and animals, and all the ecological genocide that follows.