Nick’s Reviews > The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power > Status Update

Once dedicated to targeted online advertising, these markets now grow to encompass predictions about what human beings will do now, soon, and later, whether they make their way online, on sidewalks and roads, or through rooms, halls, shops, lobbies, and corridors. These ambitious goals foreshadow fresh incursions and dispossessions as resistance is neutralized and populations fall into dulled submission.

People habituate to the incursion with some combination of agreement, helplessness, and resignation. The sense of astonishment and outrage dissipates. The incursion itself, once unthinkable, slowly worms its way into the ordinary. Worse still, it gradually comes to seem inevitable. New dependencies develop. As populations grow numb, it becomes more difficult for individuals and groups to complain.

The extraction imperative demands that everything be possessed. In this new context, goods and services are merely surveillance-bound supply routes. It's not the car; it's the behavioral data from driving the car. It's not the map; it's the behavioral data from interacting with the map. The ideal here is continuously expanding borders that eventually describe the world and everything in it, all the time.

Google is a shape-shifter, but each shape harbors the same aim: to hunt and capture raw material...In all these cases the varied torrent of creative shapes is the sideshow to the main event: the continuous expansion of the extraction architecture to acquire raw material at scale to feed an expensive production process that makes prediction productd that attract and retain more customers.

The campaign knew "every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex, and income," and it had figured out how to target its television ads to these individuals. One breakthrough was the "persuasion score" that identified how easily each undecided voter could be persuaded to vote for the Democratic candidate.

The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit no voice, and no loyalty,only helplessness

With Google's unique access to behavioral data, it would now be possible to know what a particular individual in a particular time and place was thinking, feeling, and doing. That this no longer seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.

What is unbearable is that economic and social inequalities have reverted to the preindustrial feudal pattern but that we, the people, have not. We are not illiterate peasants, serfs, or slaves. Whether "middle class" or "marginalized," we share the collective historical condition of individualized persons with complex social experiences and opinions.

In the model of machine confluence, the "freedom" of each individual machine is subordinated to the knowledge of the system as a whole. Instrumentarian power aims to organize, herd, and tune society to achieve a similar social confluence, in which group pressure and computational certainty replace politics and democracy, extinguishing the felt reality and social function of an individualized existence.

It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, create excuses that operate like defense mechanisms ("I have nothing to hide"), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness.