Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, has the rare ability to take a subject that has been beaten to death and offer a fresh, provocative take on it. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs/Hachette, 2019) is such a work.

First, a brief description of surveillance capitalism. It “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets.”

Even more dangerously, automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior. “With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.”

In this nearly 700-page book Zuboff develops her thesis using Google, Facebook, and Microsoft as “the petri dishes in which the DNA of surveillance capitalism is best examined.” Her discussion is wide-ranging, from Giovanni Gentile to B. F. Skinner to Alex Pentland (the MIT applied utopianist).

Zuboff is especially concerned about the damaging social and political ramifications of surveillance capitalism. It is, she writes, a “profoundly antidemocratic social force.” It is a market-driven coup from above, a “form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. In a surreal paradox, this coup is celebrated as ‘personalization,’ although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.”

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism will undoubtedly be a deeply divisive book, somewhat along the lines of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which Zuboff cites. But it is an important read, one that makes us rethink our all too easy acquiescence to the siren call of surveillance capitalism.

Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

When Harriman House announced the publication of the “definitive edition” of Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, I wondered what made it stand out from all the other editions of this classic work. I don’t have the definitive answer myself, but I can say that, unlike many other versions, this one is complete. It contains not just the first three chapters, the ones dealing most directly with markets, but the full 15 chapters. Thus you can learn not only about money mania, the South-Sea bubble, and tulipomania, but about, among other things, modern prophecies, the influence of politics and religion on the hair and beard, the witch mania, haunted houses, popular admiration of great thieves, and duels and ordeals.

When I first read the abbreviated version, I thought I had absorbed everything Mackay had written that was relevant to the phenomenon of manias today. But, as Russell Napier notes in his preface to this new edition, “Not only has the world shown no signs of being immune to the errors within this book almost 180 years on, there are a number of trends today that make it even more pressing. The theme that runs through Mackay’s catalogue of follies is a search by reasonable people for an answer to uncertainty—sometimes, if necessary, by disregarding reason.”

Some of the things Mackay wrote about no longer seem especially relevant, although Donald Trump’s preoccupation with the phrase “witch hunt” might belie this point. Still, even though the specific delusions may change, the phenomenon of the madness of crowds remains in full force. And with social media, it may be even greater than it was in Mackay’s time, which makes his classic a must-read book in 2019.