Opinion
The Coup We Are Not Talking About
We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance
society, but we cannot have both.
By Shoshana
Zuboff
Dr. Zuboff,
a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is the author of “The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism.”
Jan. 29,
2021
I have
spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving
our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades,
I’ve observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity
as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global
architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that
I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance
capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires
engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by
unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power
that accrues to such knowledge.
In an
information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how
it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power
that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who
decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each
question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the
epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting
ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with
the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.
The horrific
depths of Donald Trump’s attempted political coup ride the wave of this shadow
coup, prosecuted over the last two decades by the antisocial media we once
welcomed as agents of liberation. On Inauguration Day, President Biden said
that “democracy has prevailed” and promised to restore the value of truth to
its rightful place in democratic society. Nevertheless, democracy and truth
remain under the highest level of threat until we defeat surveillance
capitalism’s other coup.
The
epistemic coup proceeds in four stages.
The first
is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all
that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that
companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the
extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property.
The second
stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the
difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third
stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by
the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting
of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation.
Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality,
poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate
violence and death.
In the
fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic
governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The
machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the
illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance
capital. Each stage builds on the last. Epistemic chaos prepares the ground for
epistemic dominance by weakening democratic society — all too plain in the
insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
We live in
the digital century during the formative years of information civilization. Our
time is comparable to the early era of industrialization, when owners had all
the power, their property rights privileged above all other considerations. The
intolerable truth of our current condition is that America and most other
liberal democracies have, so far, ceded the ownership and operation of all
things digital to the political economics of private surveillance capital,
which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that
will define our social order in this century.
This past
year of pandemic misery and Trumpist autocracy magnified the effects of the
epistemic coup, revealing the murderous potential of antisocial media long
before Jan. 6. Will the growing recognition of this other coup and its threats
to democratic societies finally force us to reckon with the inconvenient truth
that has loomed over the last two decades? We may have democracy, or we may
have surveillance society, but we cannot have both. A democratic surveillance
society is an existential and political impossibility. Make no mistake: This is
the fight for the soul of our information civilization.
Welcome to
the third decade.
The
Surveillance Exception
The public
tragedy of Sept. 11 dramatically shifted the focus in Washington from debates
over federal privacy legislation to a mania for total information awareness,
turning Silicon Valley’s innovative surveillance practices into objects of
intense interest. As Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, observed, the
intelligence community would have to “rely on private enterprise to collect and
generate information for it,” in order to reach beyond constitutional, legal,
or regulatory constraints, controversies that are central today. By 2013, the
CIA’s chief technology officer outlined the agency’s mission “to collect
everything and hang on to it forever,” acknowledging the internet companies,
including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Fitbit and telecom companies,
for making it possible. The revolutionary roots of surveillance capitalism are
planted in this unwritten political doctrine of surveillance exceptionalism,
bypassing democratic oversight, and essentially granting the new internet companies
a license to steal human experience and render it as proprietary data.
Young
entrepreneurs without any democratic mandate landed a windfall of infinite
information and unaccountable power. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey
Brin, exercised absolute control over the production, organization and
presentation of the world’s information. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has had
absolute control over what would become a primary means of global communication
and news consumption, along with all the information concealed in its networks.
The group’s membership grew, and a swelling population of global users
proceeded unaware of what just happened.
The license
to steal came with a price, binding the executives to the continued patronage
of elected officials and regulators as well as the sustained ignorance, or at
least learned resignation, of users. The doctrine was, after all, a political
doctrine, and its defense would require a future of political maneuvering,
appeasement, engagement and investment.
Google led
the way with what would become one of the world’s richest lobbying machines.In
2018 nearly half the Senate received contributions from Facebook, Google and
Amazon, and the companies continue to set spending records.
Most
significant, surveillance exceptionalism has meant that the United States and
many other liberal democracies chose surveillance over democracy as the guiding
principle of social order. With this forfeit, democratic governments crippled
their ability to sustain the trust of their people, intensifying the rationale
for surveillance.
The
Economics and Politics of Epistemic Chaos
To
understand the economics of epistemic chaos, it’s important to know that
surveillance capitalism’s operations have no formal interest in facts. All data
is welcomed as equivalent, though not all of it is equal. Extraction operations
proceed with the discipline of the Cyclops, voraciously consuming everything it
can see and radically indifferent to meaning, facts and truth.
In a leaked
memo, a Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, describes this willful disregard
for truth and meaning: “We connect people. That can be good if they make it
positive. Maybe someone finds love. … That can be bad if they make it negative.
… Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack. … The ugly truth is … anything that
allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”
In other
words, asking a surveillance extractor to reject content is like asking a
coal-mining operation to discard containers of coal because it’s too dirty.
This is why content moderation is a last resort, a public-relations operation
in the spirit of ExxonMobil’s social responsibility messaging. In Facebook’s
case, data triage is undertaken either to minimize the risk of user withdrawal
or to avoid political sanctions. Both aim to increase rather than diminish data
flows. The extraction imperative combined with radical indifference to produce
systems that ceaselessly escalate the scale of engagement but don’t care what
engages you.
I’m homing
in now on Facebook not because it’s the only perpetrator of epistemic chaos but
because it’s the largest social media company and its consequences reach
farthest.
The
economics of surveillance capitalism begot the extractive Cyclops, turning
Facebook into an advertising juggernaut and a killing field for truth. Then an
amoral Mr. Trump became president, demanding the right to lie at scale.
Destructive economics merged with political appeasement, and everything became infinitely
worse.
Key to this
story is that the politics of appeasement required little more than a refusal
to mitigate, modify or eliminate the ugly truth of surveillance economics.
Surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives turned Facebook into a societal
tinderbox. Mr. Zuckerberg merely had to stand down and commit himself to the
bystander role.
Internal
research presented in 2016 and 2017 demonstrated causal links between
Facebook’s algorithmic targeting mechanisms and epistemic chaos. One researcher
concluded that the algorithms were responsible for the viral spread of divisive
content that helped fuel the growth of German extremist groups. Recommendation
tools accounted for 64 percent of “extremist group joins,” she found — dynamics
not unique to Germany.
The
Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018 riveted the world’s attention on
Facebook in a new way, offering a window for bold change. The public began to
grasp that Facebook’s political advertising business is a way to rent the
company’s suite of capabilities to microtarget users, manipulate them and sow
epistemic chaos, pivoting the whole machine just a few degrees from commercial
to political objectives.
The company
launched some modest initiatives, promising more transparency, a more robust
system of third-party fact checkers and a policy to limit “coordinated
inauthentic behavior,” but through it all, Mr. Zuckerberg conceded the field to
Mr. Trump’s demands for unfettered access to the global information
bloodstream.
Mr.
Zuckerberg rejected internal proposals for operational changes that would
reduce epistemic chaos. A political whitelist identified over 100,000 officials
and candidates whose accounts were exempted from fact-checking, despite
internal research showing that users tend to believe false information shared
by politicians. In September 2019 the company said that political advertising
would not be subject to fact-checking.
To placate
his critics in 2018, Mr. Zuckerberg commissioned a civil rights audit led by
Laura Murphy, a former director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office.
The report published in 2020 is a cri de coeur expressed in a river of words
that bear witness to dashed hopes — “disheartened,” “frustrated,” “angry,”
“dismayed,” “fearful,” “heartbreaking.”
The report
is consistent with a nearly complete rupture of the American public’s faith in
Big Tech. When asked how Facebook would adjust to a political shift toward a
possible Biden administration, a company spokesman, Nick Clegg, responded,
“We’ll adapt to the environment in which we’re operating.” And so it did. On
Jan. 7, the day after it became clear that Democrats would control the Senate,
Facebook announced that it would indefinitely block Mr. Trump’s account.
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.
Epistemic
Chaos Meets a Mysterious Microorganism
As early as
February 2020, the World Health Organization reported a Covid-19 “infodemic,”
with myths and rumors spreading on social media. By March, researchers at the
University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center concluded that medical
misinformation related to the coronavirus was “being propagated at an alarming
rate on social media,” endangering public safety.
The
Washington Post reported in late March that with nearly 50 percent of the
content on Facebook’s news feed related to Covid-19, a very small number of
“influential users” were driving the reading habits and feeds of a vast number
of users. A study released in April by the Reuters Institute confirmed that
high-level politicians, celebrities and other prominent public figures produced
20 percent of the misinformation in their sample, but attracted 69 percent of
social media engagements in their sample.
A study
released in May by Britain’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue identified a core
group of 34 extremist right-wing websites disseminating Covid disinformation or
linked to established health misinformation hubs now focused on Covid-19. From
January to April of 2020, public Facebook posts linking to these websites
garnered 80 million interactions, while posts linking to the W.H.O.’s website
received 6.2 million interactions, and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention received 6.4 million.
An Avaaz
study released in August exposed 82 websites spreading Covid misinformation
reaching a peak of nearly half a billion Facebook views in April. Content from
the 10 most popular websites drew about 300 million Facebook views, compared
with 70 million for 10 leading health institutions. Facebook’s modest content moderation
efforts were no match for its own machine systems engineered for epistemic
chaos.
In October
a report from the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia
University estimated the number of avoidable Covid-19 deaths. More than 217,000
Americans had died. Tragically, the analysis concluded that at least 130,000 of
those deaths could have been avoided. Of the four key reasons cited, details of
each one, including the “lack of mask mandate” and “misleading the public,”
reflect the orgy of epistemic chaos loosed upon America’s daughters and sons.
This is the
world in which a deadly mysterious microorganism flourished. We turned to
Facebook in search of information. Instead we found lethal strategies of
epistemic chaos for profit.
Epistemic
Terrorism
In 1966,
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann wrote a short book of seminal importance, “The
Social Construction of Reality.” Its central observation is that the “everyday
life” we experience as “reality” is actively and perpetually constructed by us.
This ongoing miracle of social order rests on “common sense knowledge,” which
is “the knowledge we share with others in the normal self-evident routines of
everyday life.”
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.
“All
societies are constructions in the face of chaos,” write Berger and Luckmann.
Because norms are summaries of our common sense, norm violation is the essence
of terrorism — terrifying because it repudiates the most taken-for-granted
social certainties. “Norm violation creates an attentive audience beyond the
target of terror,” write Alex P. Schmid and Albert J. Jongman in “Political
Terrorism,” a widely cited text on the subject. Everyone experiences the shock,
disorientation, and fear. The legitimacy and continuity of our institutions are
essential because they buffer us from chaos by formalizing our common sense.
Deaths of
kings and peaceful transfers of power in democracies are critical moments that
heighten society’s vulnerability. The norms and laws that guide these junctures
are rightly treated with maximum gravity. 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.
Like
baseball, everyday reality is an adventure that begins and ends at home base,
where we are safe. No society can police everything all the time, least of all
a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a
deviation and what is normal. We venture out from the norm, but we know the
difference between the outfield and home, the reality of everyday life. Without
that, as we have now experienced, things fall apart. Democrats drinking blood?
Sure, why not? Hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19? Right this way! Storm the
Capitol and make Mr. Trump dictator? Yeah, we’ve got that!
Society
renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent,
respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree.
Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world
dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine
for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue.
Social
media’s no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted
rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a
private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives,
incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal
from destruction.
For many
who hold freedom of speech as a sacred right, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s
1919 dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States is a touchstone. “The
ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,” he wrote. “The
best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the
competition of the market.” The corrupt information that dominates the private
square does not rise to the top of a free and fair competition of ideas. It
wins in a rigged game. No democracy can survive this game.
Our
susceptibility to the destruction of common sense reflects a young information
civilization that has not yet found its footing in democracy. Unless we
interrupt surveillance economics and revoke the license to steal that
legitimates its antisocial operations, the other coup will continue to
strengthen and produce fresh crises. What must be done now?
Three
Principles for the Third Decade
Let’s begin
with a thought experiment: Imagine a 20th century with no federal laws to
regulate child labor or assert standards for workers’ wages, hours and safety;
no workers’ rights to join a union, strike or bargain collectively; no consumer
rights; and no governmental institutions to oversee laws and policies intended
to make the industrial century safe for democracy. Instead, each company was
left to decide for itself what rights it would recognize, what policies and
practices it would employ and how its profits would be distributed.
Fortunately, those rights, laws and institutions did exist, invented by people
over decades across the world’s democracies. As important as those
extraordinary inventions remain, they do not protect us from the epistemic coup
and its anti-democratic effects.
The deficit
reflects a larger pattern: The United States and the world’s other liberal
democracies have thus far failed to construct a coherent political vision of a
digital century that advances democratic values, principles and government.
While the Chinese have designed and deployed digital technologies to advance
their system of authoritarian rule, the West has remained compromised and
ambivalent.
This
failure has left a void where democracy should be, and the dangerous result has
been a two-decade drift toward private systems of surveillance and behavioral
control outside the constraints of democratic governance. This is the road to
the final stage of the epistemic coup. The result is that our democracies march
naked into the third decade without the new charters of rights, legal
frameworks and institutional forms necessary to ensure a digital future that is
compatible with the aspirations of a democratic society.
We are
still in the early days of an information civilization. The third decade is our
opportunity to match the ingenuity and determination of our 20th-century
forebears by building the foundations for a democratic digital century.
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.
I offer
three principles that can help guide these beginnings:
The
democratic rule of law
The digital
must live in democracy’s house, not as an arsonist but as a member of the
family, subject to and thriving on its laws and values. The sleeping giant of
democracy finally stirs, with important legislative and legal initiatives
underway in America and Europe. In the United States, five comprehensive bills,
15 related bills, and one important legislative proposal, each with material
significance for surveillance capitalism, were introduced in Congress from 2019
to mid-2020. Californians welcomed landmark privacy legislation. In 2020 the
Congressional Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law
issued a far-reaching analysis of the antitrust case against the tech giants.
In October the Department of Justice, joined by 11 states, initiated a federal
antitrust suit against Google for abuse of its online search monopoly. By
December the Federal Trade Commission filed a landmark lawsuit against Facebook
for anticompetitive actions, joined by a suit from 48 attorneys general. Those
were swiftly followed by a suit launched by 38 attorneys general challenging
Google’s core search engine as an anticompetitive means of blocking rivals and
privileging its own services.
Antitrust
arguments are important for two reasons: They signal that democracy is once
again on the move, and they legitimate more regulatory attention to companies
designated as market dominant. But when it comes to defeating the epistemic
coup, the antitrust paradigm falls short. Here’s why.
The turn to
antitrust recalls the anticompetitive practices and concentrations of economic
power in the Gilded Age monopolies. As Tim Wu, an antitrust champion, explained
in The Times, “Facebook’s strategy was similar to John D. Rockefeller’s at
Standard Oil during the 1880s. Both companies scanned the horizon of the
marketplace, searching for potential competitors, and then bought them or
buried them.” He added that “it was precisely this business model that Congress
banned in 1890” with the Sherman Antitrust Act.
It’s true
that Facebook, Google and Amazon, among others, are ruthless capitalists as
well as ruthless surveillance capitalists, but exclusive focus on their
Standard Oil-style monopoly power raises two problems. First, antitrust did not
succeed that well, even on the terms of its late-19th- and early-20th-century
prosecutors and their aim of ending unfair concentrations of economic power in
the oil industry. In 1911 a Supreme Court decision broke up Standard Oil into
34 fossil fuel industry companies. The combined value of the companies proved
greater than the original. The largest of the 34 had all the advantages of
Standard Oil’s infrastructure and scale and quickly moved toward mergers and
acquisitions, becoming fossil fuel empires in their own right, including Exxon
and Mobil (which became ExxonMobil), Amoco and Chevron.
A second
and far more significant problem with antitrust is that while it may be
important to address anticompetitive practices in ruthless companies, it is not
sufficient to address the harms of surveillance capitalism, any more than the
1911 decision addressed the harms of fossil fuel production and consumption.
Rather than assess Facebook, Amazon or Google through a 19th-century lens, we
should reinterpret the case of Standard Oil from the perspective of our
century.
Another
thought experiment: Imagine that the America of 1911 understood the science of
climate change. The court’s breakup decision would have addressed Standard
Oil’s anticompetitive practices while ignoring the far more consequential case
— that the extraction, refining, sale and use of fossil fuels would destroy the
planet. If the jurists and lawmakers of that era had ignored these facts, we
would have looked on their actions as a stain on American history.
Indeed, the
court’s decision did ignore the far more pressing threats to American workers
and consumers. A historian of American law, Lawrence Friedman, describes the
Sherman Antitrust Act as “something of a fraud” that accomplished little but to
satisfy “political needs.” He explains that Congress “had to answer the call
for action — some action, any action — against the trusts” and the act was
their answer. Then as now, people wanted a giant killer.
They turned
to law as the only force that could right the balance of power. But it took
decades for lawmakers to finally address the real sources of harm by codifying
new rights for workers and consumers. The National Labor Relations Act, which
guaranteed the right to unionize while regulating the actions of employers,
wasn’t enacted until 1935, 45 years after the Sherman Antitrust Act. We do not
have 45 years — or 20 or 10 — to linger before we address the real harms of the
epistemic coup and their causes.
There may
be sound antitrust reasons to break up the big tech empires, but carving up
Facebook or any of the others into the surveillance capitalist equivalents of
Exxon, Chevron and Mobil would not shield us from the clear and present dangers
of surveillance capitalism. Our time demands more.
New
conditions summon new rights
New legal
rights are crystallized in response to the changing conditions of life. Justice
Louis Brandeis’s commitment to privacy rights, for example, was stimulated by
the spread of photography and its ability to invade and steal what was regarded
as private.
A
democratic information civilization cannot progress without new charters of
epistemic rights that protect citizens from the massive-scale invasion and
theft compelled by surveillance economics. During most of the modern age, citizens
of democratic societies have regarded a person’s experience as inseparable from
the individual — inalienable. It follows that the right to know about one’s
experience has been considered elemental, bonded to each of us like a shadow.
We each decide if and how our experience is shared, with whom and for what
purpose.
Writing in
1967, Justice William Douglas argued that the authors of the Bill of Rights
believed “the individual should have the freedom to select for himself the time
and circumstances when he will share his secrets with others and decide the
extent of that sharing.” That “freedom to select” is the elemental epistemic
right to know ourselves, the cause from which all privacy flows.
For
example, as the natural bearer of such rights, I do not give Amazon’s facial
recognition the right to know and exploit my fear for targeting and behavioral
predictions that benefit others’ commercial aims. It’s not simply that my
feelings are not for sale, it’s that my feelings are unsale-able because they are
inalienable. I do not give Amazon my fear, but they take it from me anyway,
just another data point in the trillions fed to the machines that day.
Our
elemental epistemic rights are not codified in law because they had never come
under systematic threat, any more than we have laws to protect our rights to
stand up or sit down or yawn.
But the
surveillance capitalists have declared their right to know our lives. Thus
dawns a new age, founded on and shielded by the unwritten doctrine of
surveillance exceptionalism. Now the once taken-for-granted right to know and
to decide who knows about us must be codified in law and protected by
democratic institutions, if it is to exist at all.
Unprecedented
harms demand unprecedented solutions
Just as new
conditions of life reveal the need for new rights, the harms of the epistemic
coup require purpose-built solutions. This is how law evolves, growing and
adapting from one era to the next.
When it
comes to the new conditions imposed by surveillance capitalism, most
discussions about law and regulation focus downstream on arguments about data,
including its privacy, accessibility, transparency and portability, or on
schemes to buy our acquiescence with (minimal) payments for data. Downstream is
where we argue about content moderation and filter bubbles, where lawmakers and
citizens stamp their feet at recalcitrant executives.
Downstream
is where the companies want us to be, so consumed in the details of the
property contract that we forget the real issue, which is that their property
claim itself is illegitimate.
What
unprecedented solutions can address the unprecedented harms of the epistemic
coup? First, we go upstream to supply, and we end the data collection
operations of commercial surveillance. Upstream, the license to steal works its
relentless miracles, employing surveillance strategies to spin the straw of
human experience — my fear, their breakfast conversation, your walk in the park
— into the gold of proprietary data supplies. We need legal frameworks that
interrupt and outlaw the massive-scale extraction of human experience. Laws
that stop data collection would end surveillance capitalism’s illegitimate
supply chains. 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.
Next, we
need laws that tie data collection to fundamental rights and data use to public
service, addressing the genuine needs of people and communities. Data is no
longer the means of information warfare waged on the innocent.
Third, we
disrupt the financial incentives that reward surveillance economics. We can
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.
These
principles are already shaping democratic action. The Federal Trade Commission
initiated a study of social media and video-streaming companies less than a
week after filing its case against Facebook and said it intended to “lift the
hood” of internal operations “to carefully study their engines.” A statement by
three commissioners took aim at tech companies “capable of surveilling and
monetizing … our personal lives,” adding that “too much about the industry
remains dangerously opaque.”
Groundbreaking
legislative proposals in the European Union and Britain will, if passed, begin
to institutionalize the three principles. The E.U. framework would assert
democratic governance over the largest platforms’ black boxes of internal
operations, including comprehensive audit and enforcement authority.
Fundamental rights and the rule of law would no longer vaporize at the
cyberborder, as lawmakers insist on “a safe, predictable, and trusted online
environment.” In Britain the Online Harms Bill would establish a legal “duty of
care” that would hold the tech companies responsible for public harms and
include broad new authorities and enforcement powers.
Two
sentences often attributed to Justice Brandeis feature in the congressional
subcommittee’s impressive antitrust report. “We must make our choice. We may
have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but
we cannot have both.” The statement so relevant to Brandeis’s time remains a
pungent commentary on the old capitalism we know, but it ignores the new
capitalism that knows us. Unless democracy revokes the license to steal and
challenges the fundamental economics and operations of commercial surveillance,
the epistemic coup will weaken and eventually transform democracy itself. We
must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have surveillance
society, but we cannot have both. We have a democratic information civilization
to build, and there is no time to waste.
Shoshana
Zuboff is a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and the author of
“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”
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