http:\/\/www.faz.net\/aktuell\/feuilleton\/debatten\/the-digital-debate\/shoshan-zuboff-on-big-data-as-surveillance-capitalism-13152525-p2.html<\/a><\/p>\n(\u2026)<\/p>\n
“IV. \u201dBIG DATA\u201d IS BIG BUSINESS<\/h2>\n
"Let\u2019s see if we can use these ideas to understand some things about \u201ebig data.\u201d The analysis of massive data sets began as a way to reduce uncertainty by discovering the probabilities of future patterns in the behavior of people and systems. Now the focus has quietly shifted to the commercial\u00a0 monetization of knowledge about current behavior as well as influencing and shaping emerging behavior for future revenue streams. The opportunity is to analyze, predict, and shape, while profiting from each point in the value chain.<\/p>\n
"There are many sources from which these new flows are generated: sensors, sur-veillance cameras, phones, satellites, street view, corporate and government databases (from banks, credit card, credit rating, and telecom companies) are just a few.<\/p>\n
"The most significant component is what some call \u201cdata exhaust.\u201d This is user-generated data harvested from the haphazard ephemera of everyday life, especially the tiniest details of our online engagements\u2014 captured, datafied ( translated into machine-readable code), abstracted, aggregated, packaged, sold, and analyzed. This includes eve-rything from Facebook likes and Google searches to tweets, emails, texts, photos, songs, and videos, location and movement, purchases, every click, misspelled word, every page view, and more.<\/p>\n
"The largest and most successful \u201ebig data\u201c company is Google, because it is the most visited website and therefore has the largest data exhaust. AdWords, Google\u2019s algo-rithmic method for targeting online advertising, gets its edge from access to the most data exhaust.\u00a0 Google gives away products like \u201csearch\u201d in order to increase the amount of data exhaust it has available to harvest for its customers\u2014 its advertisers and other data buyers.\u00a0 To quote a popular 2013 book on \u201ebig data\u201c, \u201cevery action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system.\u201d\u00a0 Facebook,Linked In, Yahoo, Twitter, and thousands of companies and apps\u00a0 do something similar. On the strength of these capabilities, Google\u2019s ad revenues were $21 billion in 2008 and climbed to over $50 billion in 2013. By February 2014, Google\u2019s $400 billion dollar market value had edged out Exxon for the #2 spot in market capitalization.<\/p>\n
"V. \u201cBIG DATA\u201d IS BIG CONTRABAND<\/h2>\n
"What can an understanding of declarations reveal about \u201cbig data?\u201d I begin by suggesting that \u201ebig data\u201c is a big euphemism. As Orwell\u00a0 once observed, euphemisms are used in politics, war, and business \u201cto make lies sound truthful and murder respectable\u201d. Euphemisms like \u201cenhanced interrogation methods\u201d or \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d distract us from the ugly truth behind the words.<\/p>\n
"The ugly truth here is that much of \u201ebig data\u201c is plucked from our lives without our knowledge or informed consent. It is the fruit of a rich array of surveillance practices designed to be invisible and undetectable as we make our way across the virtual and real worlds.\u00a0 The pace of these developments is accelerating: drones, Google Glass, wearable technologies, the Internet of Everything\u00a0 (which is perhaps the biggest euphemism of all).<\/p>\n
"These surveillance practices represent profound harms\u2014material, psychological, social, and political\u2014 that we are only beginning to understand and codify, largely because of the secret nature of these operations and how long it\u2019s taken for us to understand them. As the recent outcry over the British National Health Service\u2019s plan to sell patient data to insurance companies underscored, one person\u2019s \u201ebig data\u201c is another person\u2019s stolen goods.\u00a0 The neutral technocratic euphemism, \u201ebig data\u201c, can\u00a0 more accurately be labeled \u201cbig contraband\u201d or \u201cbig pirate booty.\u201d\u00a0 My interest here is less in\u00a0 the details of these surveillance operations than in how they have been allowed to stand and what can be done about it.<\/p>\n
"VI.\u00a0 THE INTERNET COMPANIES DECLARE THE FUTURE<\/h2>\n
"The answer to how these practices have been allowed to stand is straightforward: Declaration.\u00a0 We never said they could take these things from us. They simply declared them to be theirs for the taking\u2014- by taking them. All sorts of institutional facts were established with the words and deeds of this declaration.<\/p>\n
"Users were constituted as an unpaid workforce, whether slaves or volunteers is something for reasonable people to debate.\u00a0 Our output was asserted as \u201cexhaust\u201d \u2014 waste without value\u2014that it might be expropriated without resistance.\u00a0 A wasteland is easily claimed and colonized. Who would protest the transformation of rubbish into value?\u00a0 Because the new data assets were produced through surveillance, they constitute a new asset class that I call \u201csurveillance assets.\u201d\u00a0 Surveillance assets, as we\u2019ve seen, attract significant capital and investment that I suggest we call \u201csurveillance capital.\u201d\u00a0 The declaration thus established a radically disembedded and extractive variant of information capitalism that can I label\u00a0 \u201csurveillance capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
"This new market form entails wholly new moral and social complexities along with new risks. For example, if the declarations that established surveillance capitalism are challenged, we might discover that \u201ebig data\u201c are larded with illicit surveillance assets who\u2019s ownership is subject to legal contest and liability.\u00a0 In an\u00a0 alternative social and legal regime, surveillance assets could\u00a0 become toxic assets strewn through the world\u2019s data flows in much the same way that bad mortgage debt was baked into financial instruments that abruptly lost value when their status function was challenged by new facts.<\/p>\n
"What\u2019s key to understand here is that this logic of \u201caccumulation by surveillance\u201d is a wholly new breed.\u00a0 In the past, populations were the source of employees and consumers. Under surveillance capitalism, populations are not to be employed and served.\u00a0 Instead, they are to be harvested for behavioral data\u2026.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
for our first year grad students who have just read “The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” and who are reading “Shaping Things” for tomorrow evening’s class: brucesterling: *Hmmm, there are some rather familiar sentiments here. http:\/\/www.faz.net\/aktuell\/feuilleton\/debatten\/the-digital-debate\/shoshan-zuboff-on-big-data-as-surveillance-capitalism-13152525-p2.html (\u2026) “IV. \u201dBIG DATA\u201d IS BIG BUSINESS "Let\u2019s see if we can use these ideas to understand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[1539],"class_list":["post-32272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-emergent-digital-practices"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-8ow","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}