George Orwell repeatedly delayed crucial medical care to complete, the book still synonymous with our worst fears of a totalitarian future — published 70 years ago this month. Half a year after his novel’s debut, he was dead. Because he believed everything was at stake, he forfeited everything, including a young son, a devoted sister, a wife of three months and a grateful public that canonized his prescient and pressing novel. But today we are haunted by a question: Did George Orwell die in vain?Orwell sought to awaken British and U.S.

This led to Zuboff's first book In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) – a startlingly prophetic analysis of how.

Societies to the totalitarian dangers that threatened democracy even after the Nazi defeat. In letters before and after his novel’s completion, Orwell urged “constant criticism,” warning that any “immunity” to totalitarianism must not be taken for granted: “Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.”. For 19 years, private companies practicing an unprecedented economic logic that I call surveillance capitalism have hijacked the Internet and its digital technologies. Invented at Google beginning in 2000, this new economics covertly claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Some data are used to improve services, but the rest are turned into computational products that predict your behavior.

These predictions are traded in a new futures market, where surveillance capitalists sell certainty to businesses determined to know what we will do next. This logic was first applied to finding which ads online will attract our interest, but similar practices now reside in nearly every sector — insurance, retail, health, education, finance and more — where personal experience is secretly captured and computed for behavioral predictions. By now it is no exaggeration to say that the Internet is owned and operated by private surveillance capital.

In the competition for certainty, surveillance capitalists learned that the most predictive data come not just from monitoring but also from modifying and directing behavior. For example, by 2013, Facebook had learned how to engineer subliminal cues on its pages to shape users’ real-world actions and feelings.

Later, these methods were combined with real-time emotional analyses, allowing marketers to cue behavior at the moment of maximum vulnerability. These inventions were celebrated for being both effective and undetectable.

Later demonstrated that the same methods could be employed to shape political rather than commercial behavior.Augmented reality game, developed at Google and released in 2016 by a Google spinoff, took the challenge of mass behavioral modification to a new level. Business customers from McDonalds to Starbucks paid for “footfall” to their establishments on a “cost per visit” basis, just as online advertisers pay for “cost per click.” The game engineers learned how to herd people through their towns and cities to destinations that contribute profits, all of it without game players’ knowledge.Democracy slept while surveillance capitalism flourished. As a result, surveillance capitalists now wield a uniquely 21st century quality of power, as unprecedented as totalitarianism was nearly a century ago. I call it instrumentarian power, because it works its will through the ubiquitous architecture of digital instrumentation. Rather than an intimate Big Brother that uses murder and terror to possess each soul from the inside out, these digital networks are a Big Other: impersonal systems trained to monitor and shape our actions remotely, unimpeded by law.

Instrumentarian power delivers our futures to surveillance capitalism’s interests, yet because this new power does not claim our bodies through violence and fear, we undervalue its effects and lower our guard. Instrumentarian power does not want to break us; it simply wants to automate us. To this end, it exiles us from our own behavior. It does not care what we think, feel or do, as long as we think, feel and do things in ways that are accessible to Big Other’s billions of sensate, computational, actuating eyes and ears.Instrumentarian power challenges democracy. Big Other knows everything, while its operations remain hidden, eliminating our right to resist. This undermines human autonomy and self-determination, without which democracy cannot survive.

Dead to rights band valparaiso. Instrumentarian power creates unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge, once associated with pre-modern times. Big Other’s knowledge is about us, but it is not used for us. Big Other knows everything about us, while we know almost nothing about it.

This imbalance of power is not illegal, because we do not yet have laws to control it, but it is fundamentally anti-democratic. Surveillance capitalists claim that their methods are inevitable consequences of digital technologies. This is false. It’s easy to imagine the digital future without surveillance capitalism, but impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without digital technologies.Seven decades later, we can honor Orwell’s death by refusing to cede the digital future. Orwell despised “the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment.” Courage, he insisted, demands that we assert our moral bearings, even against forces that appear invincible. Like Orwell, think critically and criticize. Do not take freedom for granted.

Fight for the one idea in the long human story that asserts the people’s right to rule themselves. Orwell reckoned it was worth dying for.

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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism author Shoshana Zuboff considers whether “data is the new oil” and explains how data collection has fundamentally changed the economy and how big companies interact with consumers. Shoshana Zuboff breaks down how to define, understand, and fight surveillance capitalism.You can listen to the discussion in its entirety on The Vergecast right now. Below is a lightly edited excerpt from this interview between Shoshana Zuboff and Verge editor-in-cheif Nilay Patel about how surveillance capitalism works. Nilay Patel: So an example of industrial capitalism — which I’m a fan — a company like Ford buys steel on the market. They turn the steel into a car. They sell the car. We’re taking one thing, we’re applying some labor and we’re selling it in a market.

There’s competition. You’re saying surveillance capitalism upends that relationship and you buy something that’s cheap or free and you’re paying into it with your behavior, which then gets turned into behavioral data that is bought and sold on a market that you cannot see or participate in so that other things are recommended to you or your decisions are somehow influenced.Shoshana Zuboff: That’s correct. So we thought that we were using free services but they think that we are free. We thought we were using surveillance capitalism’s free services.

In fact, surveillance capitalism looks at us as free sources of raw material for its production processes. They call us users, but, in fact, they are using us as raw material for their production processes.Because what they produce is recommendations?What they produce are predictions.

I call them prediction products. So what they’re selling into these futures markets are predictions of our future behavior. What is a clickthrough rate? Just zoom out a little bit, a clickthrough rate is nothing but a prediction of a piece of future human behavior. So now we have predictions about not just clickthrough rates, but what we will purchase in the real world and whether or not we will drive insurance premiums up or down — be a positive or negative effect on the insurance company’s bottom line.We have predictions of health behavior we will engage in, predictions of what kind of driving behavior we will engage in, predictions of what kind of purchasing behavior we’ll engage in, predictions of where we will go, what we will do when we get there, who we will meet, what they will do when they get there, and so on and so forth. So all this activity — which started with grabbing our online private experience and turning it into behavioral data for prediction — this has now swept out of the online world into the real world so that it follows us with our phones, it follows us through other devices that increasingly saturate our environment, whether we’re in our car, or walking through our cities, or in our homes.And this increasingly saturated environment is collating creating data. There are complex ecosystems of players now, some players that do nothing but capture niches of behavioral data and then shunt them into these supply chains.

These pipelines that are sending them to the aggregators, that are sending them into the machine learning specialist, and so forth. So these are complex ecosystems now with complex supply chains.You know The Wall Street Journal, to some fanfare, published a report just a few days ago about their investigation of a whole range of mobile apps that people use to which they’re feeding very intimate data. Some are health apps, some are fitness apps, some are apps about your menstrual cycle, and on and on and on. These apps The Wall Street Journal discovered are taking those data and most of them are shunting that data right into Facebook supply chains.This is something that I write about in detail of course, and has been well-known to the folks who research this closely for quite a while. We are living in the center of this ecosystem and once you begin to wrap your mind around this, so you understand that we’re not the users, we’re being used. So you understand that it’s not free, we are free.

Once you make that mental switch, I promise you that your perception changes in a fundamental way.Yesterday, I got off the plane and I’m walking through LaGuardia Airport and there is a space where everybody’s sitting at counters, you know, on these little stools. Everyone’s on their laptop waiting for their plane. I’m looking at this and thinking we just don’t realize that we’re just on our laptops feeding these supply chains and all of the wealth that is amassed here. All of the surveillance capital that is accumulated, much of it goes into a design effort to make sure that these mechanisms and methods are hidden from us. To make sure that we are kept in ignorance.How do you mean? Could you give me an example of how its bypassing awareness?An example is the Facebook contagion experiments which made a lot of headlines long before Cambridge Analytica hit the streets.This is Facebook saying “We can make people feel bad if they look at this”?Well, first they said “Can we make people vote?” So that was published in 2012.

And the idea was subliminal cues in your News Feed and on your Facebook pages using social influence and other kinds of subliminal cues to see if they could actually produce more people casting real votes in the real world during the 2012 midterm elections. The conclusion was yes, they could. And when they wrote it up in a very reputable scholarly journal, the Facebook data scientists celebrated together with their academic colleagues who were part of this research. They celebrated two facts.

One was we now know that we can spread a contagion in the online world that affects real-world behavior. And number two, they celebrated the fact that this can be done while bypassing the user’s awareness.It’s all subliminal. We don’t know what’s happening to us.

While the world was mobilized in outrage at the thought that Facebook unilaterally toyed with us this way — in what they call a massive-scale experiment — while we were in outrage, they were already putting the finishing touches on a second massive-scale experiment. And this one was to see if they could manipulate our emotional state with the same kind of methodologies, bypassing awareness, subliminal cues, and so forth.

And of course, they discovered that they could. They could use subliminal cues in the online environment to make us feel either more happy or more sad.