The episode started off with a question to all participants, namely:

“What made you decide to attend the session today, what thought or concern? Come up with one word and post in the chat.”

The word cloud that ensued can be seen below:

 

The Unprecedented - “we cannot prepare for what we cannot imagine”

Kicking off the interview with our highly esteemed guest speaker Shoshana Zuboff, Otto started with asking her about the personal anecdote she describes early on in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: Fighting for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power”. It concerns an episode from her life where lightning struck and burned down her house, which she elaborates on in the video recap below, concluding: “Had I been able to conceive of the fact that our house would not exist, I would have acted very differently.” About this anecdote, she said:

“It teaches us that in a moment of discontinuity, when an unprecedented phenomenon is washing over us, we have very little cognitive capacity to grasp the unprecedented.”

Shoshana’s work has focused on helping people accelerate their grasp on the unprecedented, as this has been unfolding in technology. She says: “the forces that drive the unprecedented have the advantage of time. They have the first mover advantage. They can shape the landscape before we have woken up to what is happening.”

 

Burning House vs. Burning Home

Otto then remarked that the anecdote reminded him of our house (the planet) burning now, and our collective lack of response. He asked Shoshana: “Where do you see a world on fire today, without us noticing it?” Shoshana responded:

“While the climate crisis forces us to reckon with the fact that our house is on fire, surveillance capitalism is actually not aimed at our house, but aimed at our home… If the planet is our house, society is our home. Our home is also on fire.”

She stressed that we keep thinking of privacy from an individual perspective. Surveillance capitalism puts us all in our tiny little bubbles. “But it’s not about us, it’s about all of us,” she says. It is our collective privacy and collective way of living together that is actually being threatened. In other words: “our human nature. The way we develop our inner resources in order to be able to participate in a democratic society.”

 

Defining Surveillance Capitalism

In defining surveillance capitalism, Shoshana highlighted how capitalism has historically grown by claiming things outside the market dynamic, for example with respect to nature; instead of forests and fields, we now have real estate that can be sold and purchased. She went on to elaborate on a parallel she draws in her book between surveillance capitalism and colonization by the likes of Columbus and peers. It is essentially about the notion of commodity fiction, e.g., the idea that nature can be turned into real estate, that people can say “this land is now mine, I can own it and do with it what I want.” She points out that:

“For a declaration to hold any weight, it needs to be bought into by others and needs to be backed up by power.”

Surveillance capitalism, in Shoshana’s view, works similarly by claiming our private human experience for the marketplace, “as a free source of raw material for its new processes of production and sales.” It turns our experience into data, without our awareness, and “without our awareness, so there is no question of permission,” she stresses. Therefore, she stated: “We are now the native people, whose homes are being commandeered by an illegitimate power.”

“Surveillance capitalists move in a new kind of marketplace that sells predictions that are about us, but not for us,” Shoshana explained. “They trade exclusively in predictions of human futures.” As she explains in the interview, “surveillance” is not a word Shoshana chose to “bring drama” to the topic. It simply describes the fact that companies like Google knew from the start that they could not get the predictive information from us if they asked us for it. “It could only get that information if it secretly took it, captured it, stole it.” 

She refers to this being a social relationship of the one-way mirror:

“They can see us, we can’t see them. They can know about us, we can’t know about them. They know what we’re doing, we don’t know what they’re doing.”

 

Big Other and Instrumentarian Power 

Instead of the concept of Big Brother -- which, Shoshana points out, is based on an old frame of reference to make sense of our current, unprecedented situation -- she has coined the term Big Other. 

“Big Other is not Big Brother; it does not want to murder us, it just wants the data from our feelings and experience.”

Shoshana highlighted that because Big Other appears to be benign -- working through our daily digital structures, remotely and silently -- it has the ability to root and grow all around us. “This is a new kind of power that surveillance capitalism has produced,” she emphasized, referring to that as “instrumentarian power,” which “works through digital instruments and instrumentalizes our behavior.” 

Moreover, she pointed to the trend of surveillance capitalists moving from wanting to predict human behavior, to wanting to control it - to “nudge it”. Shoshana furthermore “behavior modification is taking away the possibility of a democracy.” Therefore, she stated unapologetically:

“Surveillance Capitalism is on a collision course with democracy.” 

 

Audience Questions 

After the intriguing dialogue between Otto and Shoshana, the audience obviously had many questions to ask. Understandably, the main question that came up was: “In the face of all this, what can we do?”

Shoshana’s answer was crystal clear: “We need to interrupt and outlaw the specific mechanisms and methods of surveillance capitalism.” Essentially, her message is that each and every one of us needs to “get political”, gather in collectives, and pressure our government and legislative bodies to limit the powers that surveillance capitalists now have access to so freely. She encourages us:

“This is now a time for real questioning. So much of surveillance capitalists’ success is because it has been able to operate behind the scenes and it hasn’t had to answer tough questions. Our ignorance is their bliss, so we have a responsibility of fixing that at our end.”

In closing, Olaf Baldini shared the image below, which he scribed during the session, and offered it to Shoshana.

 

Participants were then invited into another zoom room for breakout sessions, discussing in groups of 5:

• Check in with your name and location

• What resonated most for you from the dialogue?

• How does it relate to your personal experience? 

• What questions emerge around your own agency?

 

Watch the recap video of the DoTS webinar here:

 

 

Want to join our next Dialogue session?

Stay tuned for announcements around DoTS Episode 5.