Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and infrastructure imperialism

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I just tripped over a diatribe by a member of the info elite, Shoshana Zubin[Bio NOTE]. It is in that diatribe that I discovered the terminology used in the title of this OP.

The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life – your reality — in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit. This is the gateway to a new universe of monetization opportunities: restaurants who want to be your destination. Service vendors who want to fix your brake pads.

Shops who will lure you like the fabled Sirens. The “various people” are anyone, and
everyone who wants a piece of your behavior for profit. Small wonder, then, that Google
recently announced that its maps will not only provide the route you search but will also
suggest a destination.

The goal: to change people’s actual behavior at scale.

- Shoshana Zubin, The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism

Her diatribe resonated with my current state of mind, as "Fake News" escalates into algorithmic censorship (Twitter bans RT.). For the past few years, I have had deepening misgivings about where the internet is taking us. Increasingly, I refuse to hand out personal info to get access to websites. I use DuckDuckGo when I can. Etc.

Ms. Zubin has crystallized all my inchoate dread and my seemingly quixotic behavior into some useful terminology.

I must warn you that she is a Harvard-educated organizational psychologist/anthropologist, so her terminology makes Henry Giroux seem folksy. I have struggled to get through the paper from which the following points are excerpted. (I mean, why use "layered" when you can say "imbricated" - WTF? had to look it up. Its a zoology term.)

Here are some excerpts. But the work is so prolix and convoluted that it is hard to get concise quotes. My advice is to read the paper, if you have the endurance and the vocabulary.

In Street View, Google developed a declarative method that it has repeated in other data ventures. This modus operandi is that of incursion into undefended private territory until resistance is encountered. As one consumer watchdog summarized it for the New York Times, ‘Google puts innovation ahead of everything and resists asking permission’ (Streitfeld, 2013; see also Burdon and McKillop, 2013). The firm does not ask if it can photograph homes for its databases. It simply takes what it wants. Google then exhausts its adversaries in court or eventually agrees to pay fines that represent a negligible investment for a significant return.4 It is a process that Siva Vaihyanathan has called ‘infrastructure imperialism’ (Vaidhyanathan, 2011). EPIC maintains a comprehensive online record of the hundreds of cases launched against Google by countries, states, groups, and individuals, and there are many more cases that never become public (EPIC, 2014a, b).

‘extraction’ sheds light on the social relations implied by formal indifference. First, and most obvious, extraction is a one-way process, not a relationship. Extraction connotes a ‘taking from’ rather than either a ‘giving to,’ or a reciprocity of ‘give and take.’ The extractive processes that make big data possible typically occur in the absence of dialogue or consent, despite the fact that they signal both facts and subjectivities of individual lives. These subjectivities travel a hidden path to aggregation and decontextualization, despite the fact that they are produced as intimate and immediate, tied to individual projects and contexts (Nissembaum, 2011). Indeed, it is the status of such data as signals of subjectivities that makes them most valuable for advertisers. For Google and other ‘big data’ aggregators, however, the data are merely bits. Subjectivities are converted into objects that repurpose the subjective for commodification... (NOTE: that was one-half of one paragraph. She is not an easy read.)

‘Extraction’ summarizes the absence of structural reciprocities between the firm and its populations. This fact alone lifts Google, and other participants in its logic of accumulation, out of the historical narrative of Western market democracies. For example, the 20th-century corporation...originated in and was sustained by deep interdependencies with its populations...The ‘five dollar day’ was emblematic of this systemic logic, recognizing as it did that the whole enterprise rested upon a consuming population.

Big Other...is 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. Big Other is the sovereign power of a near future that annihilates the freedom achieved by the rule of law. It is a new regime of independent and independently controlled facts that supplants the need for contracts, governance, and the dynamism of a market democracy.

The work of surveillance, it appears, is not to erode privacy rights but rather to redistribute them. Instead of many people having some privacy rights, these rights have been concentrated within the surveillance regime. Surveillance capitalists have extensive privacy rights and therefore many opportunities for secrets. These are increasingly used to deprive populations of choice in the matter of what about their lives remains secret. This concentration of rights is accomplished in two ways. In the case of Google, Facebook, and other exemplars of surveillance capitalism, many of their rights appear to come from taking others’ without asking – in conformance with the Street View model. Surveillance capitalists have skillfully exploited a lag in social evolution as the rapid development of their abilities to surveil for profit outrun public understanding and the eventual development of law and regulation that it produces. In result, privacy rights, once accumulated and asserted, can then be invoked as legitimation for maintaining the obscurity of surveillance operations.10

Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization

I can't summarize the argument in a few snips. If you are interested, please take a look for yourself. Between her 'prose' and a turkey dinner, you should be asleep in no time. Smile

BioNOTE:

Zubin is the author of the 1988 classic "In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power". I don't know enough about her to trust that she is the information version of Jeffrey Sachs - an apostate. She comes from deep in our nomenklatura: Harvard Business School, Fast Company magazine. She says she can't tell lies anymore. Maybe. I need more data.

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incursion into undefended private territory until resistance is encountered

Kinda like the earth rapers, similar MO to the thought rapers

annihilates the freedom achieved by the rule of law

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Granma's picture

On what Facebook and Google and others are doing. Bravo for her. Somebody needs to scream from the rooftops- in plain language- about what they are doing.
The more I learn about Google, the less I like them. I've been avoiding Google for a long time, and have more reason to do so now.

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arendt's picture

@Granma

case in point, Howard Dean. (I was leery about Obama from the get go. He was packaged better than a bottle of perfume.)

Like you, I would like it if she were on our side. So, I will be doing a little more digging, to see if her change of heart is genuine. Given how difficult her manner of expression, I think the digging may require some dynamite.

BTW, that will have to wait until after the holiday.

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travelerxxx's picture

@arendt

The work of surveillance, it appears, is not to erode privacy rights but rather to redistribute them.

To me, it seems the effort of these data-miners/thieves is not even to erode privacy rights, but to simply step right over them. You complain, they ignore you and do not so much as hesitate. Much like telemarketers, they ignore the law and do whatever they please. After all, who's going to go after them? Certainly not that politician they just paid for.

My job is to throw a large wrench into their finely-tuned gears and algorithms. I don't just want to throw sand into their five-star meal, I want everyone to understand that they can crap right in their mess kit. Slowly, I think this is coming but it won't be easy or universal.

How do you mess with them? Feed them junk information. Stop your computer from contacting Google server machines, although this isn't just about Google. Make them think you're about to buy a Buick, then make them think you're interested in Uber. Make both false.

It's going to take a while, but we have to make their vaunted information gathering worthless. In fact, we have to make it less than worthless; we have to make it in error.

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@travelerxxx

Yes! Thank you! Turn the confusion tactics back on them, whenever possible! Which will also fuck up the Google AI education information program intended to enable it to ultimately know what you're thinking, even before you do.

Which inevitably could go wrong whether AI actually can detect thoughts (or potential thought crimes, depending) or not, in this surveillance state of the world, just as with drones hunting respected war journalists whether or not it was algorithms placing them on kill lists. (Their bids to be taken off US drone kill lists were denied, presumably because they were getting inconvenient facts out of war zones.)

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

lotlizard's picture

was, in effect, giving would-be terrorists bomb-making tips.

How? Buy one potential bomb-making ingredient, and Amazon would list the others you needed as further shopping suggestions — a side effect of having a “frequently purchased together with” or “people who viewed this product ended up buying” feature.

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arendt's picture

would list the others."

Unbelievable. LOL.

Thanks for the laugh. Dog bless German perfectionism.

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