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Tomorrows Versus Yesterdays
Conversations in Defense of the Future
Andrew Keen
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eBook - ePub
Tomorrows Versus Yesterdays
Conversations in Defense of the Future
Andrew Keen
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About This Book
The current crisis of democracy, the growing economic inequality between rich and poor, our narcissistic social media culture and the looming menace of AI all threaten us as never before. The challenges presented by technology have long been central in these issues, but how can we take advantage of the opportunities it provides to shape a better twenty-first century? The most important division of our age is between the 'tomorrows', those who believe that the future can be better than the past, and the 'yesterdays' who harbor a nostalgic desire to return to a rose-tinted past. This division is encapsulated by how we answer a simple question: can we trust the future? In Tomorrows Versus Yesterdays, Andrew Keen discusses the issue with some of the most influential thinkers of our time. The book is split into four sections. The first identifies the challenges of our digital age. The second focuses on the failure of the internet revolution to realize its ambitious goals. The third untangles the complex relationship between populism and digital media, before the final part presents possible solutions to the challenges of our age. The result is an insightful examination of the most important issues facing us today, and essential reading for anyone interested in the impact of the digital revolution.
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E-commercePART 1
THE CRISIS
SHOSHANA ZUBOFF
In 2018, before her brilliant book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power was published, Shoshana Zuboff sent me a review copy. Astonished by its fluency, elegance, and passion, I wrote a glowing pre-publication quote comparing the book to The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Many other reviewers were equally impressed by her erudition and intelligence, with some even suggesting that it was the most important book yet published in the twenty-first century.
I admit that I was a little nervous when Shoshana agreed to be interviewed by me at my home in Berkeley, California, for the âKeen on Democracyâ podcast. I hadnât met her before and was keen to talk to the woman behind this immense book; I was pleased to discover that Shoshana is as fluent, elegant, and passionate in person as is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She is a remarkable woman and thinker, and I hope this interview does justice to her brilliance.
Andrew Keen: The most acclaimed new book about technology in 2019 is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. The Irish Times called it âThe most important book of the twenty-first centuryâ; a number of other authors have compared it to Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty in terms of its critique of the digital revolution. Shoshana Zuboff, congratulations; have you been surprised with this huge acclaim for your book?
Shoshana Zuboff: The book has been a long project of intense study and concentration for many years, and seven years of writing. I think as an author, one always hopes but one never knows. A lot of things worked out in terms of the timing for this book, because I think weâre finally at a moment when many of us in the United States, Europe, and around the world are already beginning to have doubts about this whole digital milieu â who is running it, who is controlling it, how is it affecting our lives, is it just, is it unjust? A lot of people are trying to get their minds around this and are trying to understand it and put words to a general sense of malaise â something is not right, but we donât know what to call it.
Andrew Keen: So youâve called it âsurveillance capitalismâ. What does that mean?
Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism refers to the social relations that are required in order for this kind of economic logic to be successful, so I call it âthe social relations of the oneway mirrorâ. In other words, if the methods and mechanisms of surveillance capitalists were out in the open, if they were known to us, we would be rebelling. We would be resisting. We would be saying no, and they would not be making any money.
Andrew Keen: So who are the surveillance capitalists? Is it Google? Is it Facebook? Is it Amazon? Is it Apple?
Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism was discovered, invented, and elaborated at Google in 2000, 2001, during the dot-com bust. From there it migrated to Facebook with Sheryl Sandberg, and from there it became the default option in Silicon Valley and in the tech sector in general, but whatâs most interesting is that it is no longer a function of a single corporation or a few big tech corporations or even of the tech sector. This is now an economic logic that has spread across the normal and has become the gold standard that people are chasing in virtually every economic sector: insurance, retail, health, finance, all the way to automobile manufacturing, where the great industrialists of the twentieth century got their start â because of course, Ford Motor was the crucible of twentieth-century mass production. And now itâs the CEO of Ford Motor who is publicly discussing that companyâs move toward what I describe as surveillance capitalism.
Andrew Keen: I always imagined surveillance capitalism as being built around the business model of free, but are you suggesting that it can also involve people selling products and then building data and the disruption of privacy on the back of that?
Shoshana Zuboff: We blew by free a long time ago. First of all, we pay for the devices that participate in surveillance capitalism and represent the interface for these vast supply chains of behavioral data that are shunted to machine intelligence operations. We pay for the phone. We pay for the television set that listens to our conversation. We pay for the mattress that has the sensors in it that siphons data to the Nest thermostat that siphons data to the Nest security system that just a couple of weeks ago was revealed to have a microphone built into it.
Andrew Keen: And Nest, of course, is owned by Google.
Shoshana Zuboff: So thatâs one way that weâre paying for it, but the insurance industry now is what they call âbehavioral underwritingâ, where they are trying to tap into data streams about our real-time behavior, as well as other sources of personal information, and use that for their evaluation of their premiums.
Andrew Keen: So in the old days, in the industrial age, everyone bought the same insurance and the insurance company didnât know too much about you. These days, in the age of surveillance capitalism, theyâll know how many times we go to the gym, whether we smoke, what we eat, where we walk, if we walk at all. Is that what surveillance capitalism is?
Shoshana Zuboff: Itâs the complete destruction of privacy, and I would stress that in order to have privacy, we have to have the right to make decisions about the boundaries of our own experience. And what surveillance capitalism does carefully and intentionally is engineer their methods and systems to bypass our awareness so we never know what, when, or how they are claiming our personal experience as raw material to translate into personal data, to ship to their machines, to create predictions about our future behavior.
And because we are intentionally engineered to be ignorant of this whole structure, we have lost the right to put boundaries on our own experience. Weâve lost the right to decide what is private and what is public. Weâve lost the right to exercise our own sense of self-determination and our own individual autonomy. This is intolerable because when we just zoom out a little bit, we understand that one canât even think of the possibility of a democratic society without the assumption that we have citizens who have the ability to make autonomous moral judgments. And in a whole variety of ways, compelled by their own economic imperatives, surveillance capitalism is on a collision course with human freedom.
Andrew Keen: Join the dots between the shift toward authoritarianism â Brexit, Trump, Putin, China â and surveillance capitalism.
Shoshana Zuboff: Well, those are a lot of dots.
Andrew Keen: But is there a single path between those dots, or is it an interconnected series of dots?
Shoshana Zuboff: All of those dots, certainly China, Cambridge Analytica, and what we now understand to be the Russian intelligence interventions in these elections, derive from one central source, and that is the two decades of careful invention and elaboration of the methods and mechanisms of surveillance capitalism.
What Cambridge Analytica, China, and Russia represent is a way of commandeering these mechanisms and methods and pivoting them a couple of degrees toward commercial outcomes instead of political outcomes. But they all derive from the same source, and when you understand what Cambridge Analytica was up to, those methods that they used had begun to be developed by academic researchers as early as 2010, 2011, and were already being adapted by surveillance capitalists. And even after the Cambridge Analytica revelations in March 2018, we have a leaked document from Facebook in April 2018 that is a beautiful description of Facebook doing what Cambridge Analytica did, and doing it on steroids.
Beginning with Cambridge Analytica, what we see there is a day in the life, routine life, of a solid, self-respecting surveillance capitalist.
Andrew Keen: So what do we do about it? The subtitle of your book is The Fight for a Human Future, and your definition of a human future is one with human agency. How do we reestablish human agency in a world where it seems as if weâve lost it? Where do we begin?
Shoshana Zuboff: We begin with democracy.
Andrew Keen: And democracy is the purest manifestation of human agency, the will of the people?
Shoshana Zuboff: Everything depends upon democracy. Weâre living in a moment, in the United States and Europe and other parts of the world, where democracy appears to be under siege, in a way that many of us thought was unimaginable. Democratic institutions are being tested and some have fallen, even within Western Europe which we thought was inviolable to these kinds of threats.
Andrew Keen: Well, how is it going to work? How are we going to get democracy back? Are we grabbing it back? The human future is something we have to seize â itâs not going to be given to us.
Shoshana Zuboff: I talk to young people a lot and what Iâve come to understand is that a lot of young people have the idea that democracy is like a rock, itâs like a mountain. Itâs there when youâre born and it stays there and itâs immovable. But thatâs not what democracy is. My metaphor for it is more like the hoop game that kids played in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, where youâve got a hoop and you roll it and you run after it and you try to keep it from teetering and falling over. Every generation faces the work of running after that hoop and preventing it from teetering and falling over, and thatâs where we are now. And I believe that weâve been in worse jams; look at the bloody story of the twentieth century. My grandparents and my great-grandparents have been in worse jams, and we found our way out of them.
Andrew Keen: Is this another war, Shoshana? Is this equivalent to war in some way, this fight against surveillance capitalism?
Shoshana Zuboff: Well, Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, to whom we owe a great debt, called it âinformation warfareâ. And the thing about this information warfare is that itâs not states facing off agains...