Re: <nettime> James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

While Zuboff popularized the term "surveillance capitalism" in 2015, she wasn't the first person who wrote about it. The underlying issues had already been analyzed in Wendy Chun's "Control and Freedom" from 2008. Regarding the specific surveillance capitalism of the big social media companies, Christian Fuchs' 2011 paper "An Alternative View of Privacy on Facebook" strikes me as notable:

"Abstract: The predominant analysis of privacy on Facebook focuses on personal information revelation. This paper is critical of this kind of research and introduces an alternative analytical framework for studying privacy on Facebook, social networking sites and web 2.0. This framework is connecting the phenomenon of online privacy to the political economy of capitalism—a focus that has thus far been rather neglected in research literature about Internet and web 2.0 privacy. Liberal privacy philosophy tends to ignore the political economy of privacy in capitalism that can mask socio-economic inequality and protect capital and the rich from public accountability. Facebook is in this paper analyzed with the help of an approach, in which privacy for dominant groups, in regard to the ability of keeping wealth and power secret from the public, is seen as problematic, whereas privacy at the bottom of the power pyramid for consumers and normal citizens is seen as a protection from dominant interests. Facebook's understanding of privacy is based on an understanding that stresses self-regulation and on an individualistic understanding of privacy. The theoretical analysis of the political economy of privacy on Facebook in this paper is based on the political theories of Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. Based on the political economist Dallas Smythe's concept of audience commodification, the process of prosumer commodification on Facebook is analyzed. The political economy of privacy on Facebook is analyzed with the help of a theory of drives that is grounded in Herbert Marcuse's interpretation of Sigmund Freud, which allows to analyze Facebook based on the concept of play labor (= the convergence of play and labor).

Keywords: Facebook; social networking sites; political economy; privacy; surveillance; capitalism"

https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/2/1/140/htm

blog: https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
bio: http://floriancramer.nl

On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 1:38 PM Francis Hunger <francis.hunger@irmielin.org> wrote:

Indirectly related to Morozov's insightful discussion of Zuboffs "surveillance capitalism" is my own short blurb on "surveillancism" at http://databasecultures.irmielin.org/surveillancism (which I wrote without having read Zuboff)

This tries to provide a kind of self-critique of how often discussions of that might become interesting, turn to "surveillance" instead. Comments would be welcome.

best

Francis
On Tue, Feb 5, 2019, 9:00 AM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com wrote:

I found Mozorov's massive review more interesting.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/capitalisms-new-clothes-morozov

Yes I totally agree. Morozov presents the most important Marxist analyses that Zuboff doesn't bother to reference - exactly the ones that have been nettime mainstays for 20 years. He also shows the narrowness of an account centered only on corporate consumerism, remarking that the resistance and transformation Zuboff calls for

" will not win before both managerial capitalism and surveillance capitalism are theorized as “capitalism”—a complex set of historical and social relationships between capital and labor, the state and the monetary system, the metropole and the periphery—and not just as an aggregate of individual firms responding to imperatives of technological and social change. "

That said, to judge by chapter 1, Surveillance Capitalism is worth reading. It provokes and infuriates me by what it leaves out, but it's fascinating at points and hopefully gets better as you go. Morozov has written the perfect intro for a critical read of what might become a landmark book- if the situation it describes does not again suddenly change beyond recognition, as it easily could.

Best, Brian
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