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Balance of power and pushing back through the rule of law
Published in Penny Crofts, Honni van Rijswijk, Technology, 2021
Penny Crofts, Honni van Rijswijk
Governments and corporations are increasingly drawing on Big Data, analytics and AI for profit, management and governance.2 In the 1990s, the internet in general and platforms such as Google in particular were tools that people used for work or entertainment. Now, when we use these tools, we are in turn being instrumentalised by these platforms for our data. An asymmetric power dynamic has arisen between those who hold, control or profit from personal data (usually the state or large multinational companies) and those who provide personal data. Shoshana Zuboff created the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe a market-driven process where the commodity for sale is personal data, and the capture and production of this data relies on mass surveillance through the internet.3 Zuboff argues that surveillance capitalism is governed by a logic of accumulation that is distinct from the market capitalism that preceded it. This new capitalism, driven by data, creates a power that Zuboff coins the “Big Other”: mechanisms that effectively alienate people from their own actions, while also modifying and generating as well as predicting that same behavior. In doing so, the power of the “Big Other” goes against democratic norms as well as normative capitalism.4 Zuboff argues that the significance of data, algorithms and AI signifies a “new form” of capitalism5 and a “new species of power”.6
Building cyber resilience through a discursive approach to “big cyber” threat landscapes
Published in Stein Haugen, Anne Barros, Coen van Gulijk, Trond Kongsvik, Jan Erik Vinnem, Safety and Reliability – Safe Societies in a Changing World, 2018
As more and more personal information is being made more or less public, and the possibility for combination increases, a new form of information economy emerges. Zuboff (2015) describes the emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere as an “Internet of Everything” (IoE) in which personal information becomes a commodity of high value for a wide range of (unknown) users. This radical new form of surveillance capitalism aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control. Zuboff (2015) launches the need for an ‘information civilization’ addressing the challenges from “Big Other”: “a ubiquitous networked institutional regime that records, modifies, and commodifies everyday experience from toasters to bodies, communication to thought, all with a view to establishing new pathways to monetization and profit” (Zuboff, 2015).
Introduction to Posthuman Property
Published in Jannice Käll, Posthuman Property and Law, 2023
Surveillance capitalism is furthermore a concept that more recently has become popularized as a term to describe certain practices deployed by digital platforms. Zuboff describes this form of capitalism as a type of practice which unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material. Characteristic for surveillance capitalism is how data is captured as a form of “behavioural surplus.” Hence, data is treated as something that organizations can harvest from the persons or things made into data points. This data is then fed into producing “prediction products” including machine learning, which become equipped with the capacity to anticipate what the user will do (based on data over previous behaviours from its own or similar users’ behaviours). This assessment of behaviour creates what Zuboff calls “behavioural future markets,” which is what companies trade upon (ibid.: 8). The effect is that “surveillance capitalists discovered that the most-predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of the play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes” (ibid.: 8). This implies a reorientation of capitalism where the goal with automated machine processes for example is no longer to automate information flows about humans but to automate the humans as such (ibid.: 8). Zuboff also significantly extends the media theoretical insight discussed above in relation to the fact that if a media is free, then oneself is the product being sold, by suggesting that “[w]e are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation” (ibid.: 10). In her diagnosis of surveillance capitalism, Zuboff furthermore cautions against conflating surveillance capitalism with the technologies it employs. Even if digital technologies enable surveillance capitalism to a degree that is unthinkable outside the current technological milieu, it is still the particular market logics of extraction of human social life that is at the core, rather than the technologies as such. This can be contrasted with the term “digital capitalism” as used by Sadowski for describing this stage as capitalism and its (more intrinsic) relationship with digital technologies. The reason he gives for using such terminology is that it is a broad enough term to incorporate other variations of how capitalism at this stage is being described while not being too narrow about specific functions of digital capitalism such as the platform capitalism by Srnicek or the surveillance capitalism by Zuboff (Sadowski 2020: 49–50). Similar to Zuboff, I however argue that this term is too narrow as the digital milieu does not just concern itself with the elements that are making it digital per se, but rather extends the previous logics of capitalism while accelerating via (some) new tools.
Surveillance and the ecology of frictions in platform urbanism: the case of delivery workers in Santiago de Chile
Published in Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 2022
Martin Tironi, Camila Albornoz
We will explore the operations deployed by the Uber Eats platform to retain, control, and monitor its “partners.” The platform deploys various strategies that we will call “friendly surveillance,” which operates as veiled nudges in which the system seeks to keep delivery staff engaged through incentives and promotions. This form of “friendly surveillance” is linked to the idea of “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019) in which sophisticated digital platforms seek to maximize earnings and productivity through monitoring based on smart designs and algorithms. What we will describe is related to the set of forms of resistance deployed by delivery workers, which distort what is established by the platform. While most of the critical literature on digital platforms has focused on analyzing forms of power asymmetry and surveillance (Cant 2019; Rosenblat and Stark 2016; Rosenblat 2019; Veen, Barratt, and Goods 2020; Woodcock 2020), in this article, we contribute to the debate by analyzing a less visible and documented dimension: the emergence of forms of resistance (De Certeau 1996) in response to algorithmic surveillance. Resistance emerges as a response to the constant surveillance of data, which delivers greater power to corporate and state actors (Hintz, Dencik, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2018). The fissures in surveillance are exploited by citizens, allowing for the emergence of creative uses of the digital to demand justice (Isin and Ruppert 2020). Thus, delivery resistance takes place outside the digital space, materializing through account rental and multi-apping (Veen, Barratt, and Goods 2020). The analysis of these practical forms of resistance (De Certeau 1996) will allow the platform to be understood from the situated experience of delivery staff, highlighting the subversive potential of these “forms of doing” (De Certeau 1996) that delivery partners deploy, generating practices that resist the control imposed by the platform’s labels and controls. Through the description of these two tactics, the article shows how the platform seeks to discipline the delivery staff. However, we show that this disciplinary effort to design the delivery staff is always placed under friction by different practices that allow delivery staff to be resilient and inhabit the platform in a variety of ways to survive.