18 The New York Review
Bigger Brother
Tim Wu
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism:
The Fight for a Human Future
at the New Frontier of Power
by Shoshana Zuboff.
PublicAffairs,
691 pp., $38.
In the 1970s, when Shoshana Zuboff
was a graduate student in Harvard’s
psychology department, she met the
behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner.
Skinner, who had perhaps the largest
forehead you’ll ever see on an adult, is
best remembered for putting pigeons
in boxes (so-called Skinner boxes)
and inducing them to peck at buttons
for rewards. Less well remembered is
the fact that he constructed a larger
box, with a glass window, for his infant
daughter, though this was revealing of
his broader ambitions.
Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveil-
lance Capitalism that her conversations
with Skinner “left me with an indel-
ible sense of fascination with a way of
construing human life that was—and
is—fundamentally different from my
own.” Skinner believed that humans
could be conditioned like any other
animal, and that behavioral psychol-
ogy could and should be used to build
a technological utopia where citizens
were trained from birth to be altruis-
tic and community- oriented. He pub-
lished a novel, Walden Two (1948), that
depicted what just such a society would
look like—a kind of Brave New World
played straight.
It would risk grave understatement
to say that Zuboff does not share Skin-
ner’s enthusiasm for the mass engineer-
ing of behavior. Zuboff, a professor at
Harvard Business School since 1981,
has made a career of criticizing the lofty
ambitions of technoprophets, making
her something of a cousin to the mass
media critic Neil Postman, author of
Technopoly (1992). Her intimate un-
derstanding of Skinner gives her an
advantage that other technoskeptics
lack. For as she posits in her latest
book, The Age of Surveillance Capi-
talism, we seem to have wandered
into a dystopian version of Skinner’s
future, thanks mainly to Google,
Facebook, and their peers in the at-
tention economy. Silicon Valley has
invented, if not yet perfected, the tech-
nology that completes Skinner’s vision,
and so, she believes, the behavioral
engineering of humanity is now within
reach.
In case you’ve been living in blissful
ignorance, it works like this. As you go
through life, phone in hand, Google,
Facebook, and other apps on your de-
vice are constantly collecting as much
information as possible about you, so
as to build a profile of who you are
and what you like. Google, for its part,
keeps a record of all your searches; it
reads your e-mail (if you use Gmail)
and follows where you go with Maps
and Android. Facebook has an unpar-
alleled network of trackers installed
around the Web that are constantly
figuring out what you are looking at
online. Nor is this the end of it: any ap-
pliance labeled “smart” would more
truthfully be labeled “surveillance-
enhanced,” like our smart TVs, which
detect what we are watching and report
back to the mothership. An alien might
someday ask how the entire population
was bugged. The answer would be that
humans gave each other surveillance
devices for Christmas, cleverly named
Echo and Home.
Most of us are, at bottom, quite pre-
dictable. Do you, perhaps, reliably
wake up at 7:21 AM, take your coffee
at 8:30 AM, and buy lunch between
12:18 PM and 12:32 PM? If you’ve just
had a fight with your spouse, might you
be expected, within the next twenty-
four hours, to spend money on some-
thing self-indulgent? Does reading
news about the latest political outrage
tend to prompt an hour of furious
clicking? And despite flirtations with
radical politics in late adolescence, do
you always vote for the presidential
candidate who is considered a safer
choice but has overarchingly progres-
sive values? Basic science suggests that
the more that is known about you, the
more predictable you become. Once
your behavior is known, to the extent
that it can be predicted, it—you—can
also be manipulated.
How? Skinner demonstrated his the-
ory of behavioral control by so-called
operant conditioning in rats. He would
place hungry rats in boxes. They came
to realize that pressing a lever on one
side of the box delivered a snack: after
several repetitions, the rat, upon being
deposited in the box, learned to head
straight for the lever. As for humans,
the idea is that if the tech industry
knows where you are and what you like,
it can use a variety of tricks and tech-
niques—updates, buttons, listicles, and
more—to create the levers we are con-
ditioned to pull (or click) on. All of this
induces us to make choices in slightly
different ways than we might have oth-erwise, which is known as behavioral
influence.To most people, the assertion that we
are living in Skinner boxes might sound
alarming, but The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism goes darker still. Skinner,
at least, saw himself as a do-gooder
who would save humanity from its own
delusions. His behavioral engineering
was meant to build a happier human-
ity, one finally at peace with our lack of
agency. “What is love,” Skinner wrote,
“except another name for the use of
positive reinforcement?”
Zuboff, in contrast, sees Silicon Val-
ley’s project of behavioral observation
in the service of behavior control as
lacking an interest in human happi-
ness (other than as a means); its goal
is profit. That’s why Zuboff calls it
“surveillance capitalism.” If “indus-
trial capitalism depended upon the ex-
ploitation and control of nature,” then
surveillance capitalism, she writes,
“depends instead upon the exploita-
tion and control of human nature.”
The term refers to the idea, just de-
scribed, that we spend our days under
constant surveillance, motivated by
the offer of small rewards and punish-
ments—radical behavioralism made
flesh.
Her book is not without flaws. It is far
too long, often overwrought, and em-
ploys far too much jargon. Its treatment
of Google, which dominates the first
half, will strike anyone who has spent
time in the industry as too conspiracy-
minded, even for those disposed to
be critical. Other books, like Bruce
Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hid-
den Battles to Collect Your Data and
Control Your World (2015), offer moretechnically sophisticated coverage of
much of the same territory.
But I view all of this as forgivable, be-
cause Zuboff has accomplished some-
thing important. She has given new
depth, urgency, and perspective to the
arguments long made by privacy advo-
cates and others concerned about the
rise of big tech and its data-collection
practices. By providing the crucial link
between technological surveillance
and power, she makes previous com-
plaints about “creepiness” or “privacy
intrusions” look quaint.
This is achieved, in part, through her
creation of a vocabulary that captures
the significance of tech surveillance.
Her best coinage is almost certainly
the title of the book, but there are
others of note, like “prediction prod-
ucts”—items that employ user data
to “anticipate what you will do now,
soon, and later” and then are traded
in “behavioral futures markets”; or
“the extraction imperative,” which is
her phrase for what motivates firms
to collect as much behavioral and
personal data as possible. The “dispos-
session cycle” is the means, for Zuboff,
by which this is accomplished. Of the
essential amorality of the tech industry,
she says, dryly, that “friction is the only
evil.”
Viewed broadly, Zuboff has made
two important contributions here. The
first is to tell us something about the
relationship between capitalism and
totalitarian systems of control. The
second is to deliver a better and deeper
understanding of what, in the future, it
will mean to protect human freedom.
It has long been a cornerstone of
Western belief that free markets are
a bulwark against the rise of tyran-
nical systems—in particular, against‘The Happy Way’ by Pushwagner; from Soft City, published by New York Review Comics in 2016©1969Pushwagner