The lunacy afoot inside the halls of Congress and in the streets outside, while dazzling to behold, is a shiny distraction from deeper societal ills. Our sound-bite, video-clip culture chews up complex information and regurgitates it in bite-size pieces that obscure the whole. It may be how you eat an elephant but, not unlike like the blind men of the parable, it leaves us with little idea what it is we are eating.
Shoshana Zuboff, author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” offers a detailed look at the “fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.” That’s an academic’s way of saying “surveillance capitalism” is more than a threat to privacy, but to democracy as well as to society as know/knew it.
Zuboff believes that if knowledge is power, surveillance capitalists have progressed in stages to concentrate it in their hands. Surveillance capitalism “now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century.” By now, the effects of epistemic chaos “are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death.”
Her New York Times essay is too long to summarize, but a few paragraphs may suffice to see where she is headed. A couple of metaphors are clarifying:
We are meant to believe that the destructive effects of epistemic chaos are the inevitable cost of cherished rights to freedom of speech. No. Just as catastrophic levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere are the consequence of burning fossil fuels, epistemic chaos is a consequence of surveillance capitalism’s bedrock commercial operations, aggravated by political obligations and set into motion by a 20-year-old dream of total information that slid into nightmare. Then a plague came to America, turning the antisocial media conflagration into a wildfire.
Disinformation about COVID-19 is killing people. A social-media-driven breakdown in trust has fractured society, making us all less safe.
Think about traffic: There are not enough police officers in the world to ensure that every car stops at every red light, yet not every intersection triggers a negotiation or a fight. That’s because in orderly societies we all know that red lights have the authority to make us stop and green lights are authorized to let us go. This common sense means that we each act on what we all know, while trusting that others will too. We’re not just obeying laws; we are creating order together. Our reward is to live in a world where we mostly get where we are going and home again safely because we can trust one another’s common sense. No society is viable without it.
The consequences of that breakdown are still reverberating.
Mr. Trump and his allies prosecuted an election-fraud disinformation campaign that ultimately translated into violence. It took direct aim at American democracy’s point of maximum institutional vulnerability and its most fundamental norms. As such, it qualifies as a form of epistemic terrorism, an extreme expression of epistemic chaos. Mr. Zuckerberg’s determination to lend his economic machine to the cause makes him an accessory to this assault.
Some of us anyway are looking for an exit.
Democracy is under the kind of siege that only democracy can end. If we are to defeat the epistemic coup, then democracy must be the protagonist.
Zuboff offers some ideas for ending the madness. The antitrust approach of the Gilded Age addressed concerns of a different century and was never that effective. Assertion of digital rights is one area she believes has promise, including a person’s right not to be reduced to product.
Stop untrammeled data collection. “The algorithms that recommend, microtarget and manipulate, and the millions of behavioral predictions pushed out by the second cannot exist without the trillions of data points fed to them each day.”
We might “prohibit commercial practices that exert demand for rapacious data collection. Democratic societies have outlawed markets that trade in human organs and babies. Markets that trade in human beings were outlawed, even when they supported whole economies.” There is precedent.
But Zuboff’s focus on surveillance capitalism still misses a much of the elephant. One could argue that the core issue with surveillance capitalism is capitalism. I have argued that even that is not necessarily the issue so much as one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise that has become dominant over the last few centuries: coporate capitalism. It has become so ubiquitous — the water we swim in — as to be nearly invisible and difficult to analyze as a thing in itself. Yet we invented it. We can reinvent it. If democracy is the protagonist in reining in surveillance capitalism, it might still be the protagonist in civilizing corporate capitalism. Admittedly, I am not optimistic.
Where once we held the corporate leash, now humans wear the collar. The Market wants what it wants. The Giant Pool of Money wants to grow and reproduce. The corporation as well. Mary Shelley warned us.