The New Masters of the UniverseNovember/December 2019 197provoke—not only in the United States
but also around the world. The global
reach o American surveillance capital-
ism may be only a temporary phase.
Nationalism is on the march today, and
the technology industry is in its path:
countries that want to chart their own
destiny will not continue to allow U.S.
companies to control their platforms for
communication and politics.
The competition o rival Ärms and
political systems may also complicate any
eorts to reform the technology indus-
try in the United States. Would it be a
good thing, for example, to heavily
regulate major U.S. technology Ärms i
their Chinese rivals gained as a result?
The U.S. companies at least profess
liberal democratic values. The trick is
passing laws to hold them to these
values. I Zubo’s book helps awaken a
countermovement to achieve that
result, we may yet be able to avoid the
dark future she sees being born today.∂history and a commitment to human
freedom. Zubo seems, however,
unable to resist the most dire, over-
the-top formulations o her argument.
She writes, for example, that the indus-
try has gone “from automating infor-
mation Áows about you to automating
you.” An instrumentarian system o
behavior modiÄcation, she says, is not
just a possibility but an inevitability,
driven by surveillance capitalism’s own
internal logic: “Just as industrial
capitalism was driven to the continuous
intensiÄcation o the means o produc-
tion, so surveillance capitalists are...
now locked in a cycle o continuous
intensiÄcation o the means o behav-
ioral modiÄcation.”
As a warning, Zubo’s argument
deserves to be heard, but Americans
are far from mere puppets in the hands
o Silicon Valley. The puzzle here is
that Zubo rejects a rhetoric o
“inevitabilism”—“the dictatorship o no
alternatives”—but her book gives little
basis for thinking we can avoid the new
technologies o control, and she has
little to say about speciÄc alternatives
herself. Prophecy you will Änd here;
policy, not so much. She rightly argues
that breaking up the big technology
companies would not resolve the prob-
lems she raises, although antitrust action
may well be justiÄed for other reasons.
Some reformers have suggested creating
an entirely new regulatory structure to
deal with the power o digital platforms
and improve “algorithmic accountabil-
ity”—that is, identifying and remedying
the harms from algorithms. But all o
that lies outside this book.
The more power major technology
platforms exercise over politics and
society, the more opposition they will