Surveillance capitalism

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Monitoring capitalism ( English Surveillance capitalism ) is in 2014 by the American US economist Shoshana Zuboff term coined under which it is a market economy , capitalist understands system that skimmed by technical means of people personal data to collect used to provide information on behaviors to analyze these and to prepare them for market-economic decision-making in order to be able to generate behavioral predictions from them and to generate profits through their use.

While " monitoring " ( Surveillance ) usually by government agencies and the intelligence agencies run out, have the Internet and beyond established dominant companies, which on Internet use, use of social media (social media), telephones , televisions , wireless LANs , Smart homes , motor vehicles and the Internet of Things, as well as a variety of sensors, collect user data and analyze and process it using big data (mass data processing) and process and use it for yourself and other market participants. The user data recorded in this way goes beyond what state authorities usually have, and since the data is recorded in a targeted and systematic manner, this is equivalent to monitoring the market capitalization of the user data while at the same time incapacitating its actual owners.

The basis

Zuboff sees the basis of the development towards surveillance capitalism in the revolutionary changes that shook the music industry at the beginning of the 21st century and were shaped by Napster and above all by Apple . Until then, the capitalist market economy was characterized by advertising and offers dictating to customers what they had to buy, Apple used the new technical possibilities with its iPods , iTunes and later iPhones to give customers the opportunity to create pieces of music according to their own wishes to purchase and consume, anytime, anywhere and according to your own taste . With its concept, Apple increased the number of music downloads from five million in the first month to two billion downloads four and a half years later in early 2007 and to over 25 billion downloaded pieces of music in 2013. This led to the behavior of consumers “what-when-where- and-however-I-want " .

According to Zuboff, there are two opposing historical forces that collide with each other: one, shaped by the social reorientation process, away from the masses towards the individual, and the other, determined by

“… The decades-long implementation of the neoliberal paradigm, its political economy and its revolutionary impact on society; this applies in particular to his goal of reversing, inhibiting, and even stifling the individual's urge for psychological self-determination and moral action ... "

- Shoshana Zuboff : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . 2018, p. 49 .

With the initial development of the Internet , search engines and the information and goods offered on the Internet , it initially looked as if the users of the Internet could benefit from their use in a self-determined manner. But at the latest with the market entry of Google , Facebook , WhatsApp and Co., this perspective became an illusion. At first unnoticed, but then it became increasingly clear to the public that the apparently free offers contained a price: the abandonment of privacy .

To theory

According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism is a new form of market , which on the one hand follows the well-known logic of the accumulation of capital , but on the other hand is based on the commercial monetization of knowledge about the current behavior of consumers and includes the possibility of influencing the behavior of consumers in the future to be able to develop sources of income in the future. By bypassing the individual consciousness and without corresponding authorization (under “self-authorization”), an influence is exerted on the behavior of others, which serves to increase one's own profit and power. In her opinion, the term big data leaves society in the dark about its true background and is used euphemistically to hide the systematic skimming and processing of personal data without the consent of the individual. It has a deal with rivals Google and Microsoft in the year 2016 out where they decided to mutual cartel processes to avoid to an impending regulation of the market to escape. With this they confirmed, according to Zuboff, that a seemingly democratic but unregulated market would benefit their interests in relation to the skimming off of personal data.

Zuboff's criticism

Zuboff criticizes that this new form of information capitalism aims to predict and modify human behavior in order to produce revenue and market dominance. In her publications she makes it clear that the lack of regulation of the market gives Internet companies the opportunity to freely decide which data they generate from their users, how they can generate it and how they can use the data. In this way, companies would declare the future according to their ideas and create facts. She criticizes the fact that users are turned into unpaid workers by providing their data and allowing them to be expropriated. In this context, Zuboff used two other terms to make it clear what it was all about. It denotes the skimmed data as " monitoring goods " ( surveillance assets ) and thus earned capital " monitoring capital " ( surveillance capital ) and developed the concept of " monitoring capitalism " ( Surveillance capitalism ) for the capitalist system. She also notes that surveillance capitalism creates new forms of social inequality through an unprecedented asymmetry of knowledge, in which a few “ surveillance capitalists ” have a lot of power , which, however, is not transparent and not recognizable for many.

Zuboff also notes that data will collect on the behavior of users of a software or a technical device no longer practiced by the major players of the Internet, but already an integral part of online - startups and their applications is.

Zuboff's conclusions

This article or section is not worded in a generally understandable manner. The shortcomings are described under Discussion: Surveillance Capitalism. If you remove this module, please explain this on the article discussion page and add the automatically created project page section Wikipedia: Incomprehensible Articles # Surveillance Capitalism{{ Done | 1 = ~~~~}}.


The following should be improved: The confused second sentence of the first paragraph (for or against what is Zuboff or is not or what? Huh?) Is not to be expected of a reader.

Zuboff sees surveillance capitalism as part of information capitalism, which she does not fundamentally reject. Nor is it opposed to countering the declaration of the digital future created by the Internet companies with a so-called counter-declaration in which everything that exists is rejected, but does not consider this alone to be sufficient. She also advocates the creation of a synthetic declaration in which another, new kind of information capitalism can arise. In their opinion, this should be part of the social order, be based on democratic principles and value people.

However, she also states that there can be no comprehensive protection against the instrumental abuse of power within a democratic society and that laws do not take effect unless public opinion has previously changed. On the last pages of her work “ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism ” she calls on civil society to be “sand in the gears” and to oppose the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism. Their belief in the effectiveness of resistance from civil society is based on the fact that the citizens of the GDR also opposed the system at the time and thus made the fall of the Berlin Wall possible.

literature

  • Shoshana Zuboff : Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization . In: Journal of Information Technology . Volume 30 , 2015, p. 75-89 , doi : 10.1057 / jit.2015.5 .
    • Translation: Shoshana Zuboff : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2018, ISBN 978-3-593-50930-3 (English: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . New York. Translated by Bernhard Schmid, the English version published in January 2019).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Zuboff : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . 2018, p.  22nd f .
  2. ↑ What is Surveillance Capitalism? In: Digital Society Blog. Institute for Internet and Society at the Alexander von Humboldt University, October 2, 2018, accessed on July 14, 2019 .
  3. ↑ a b c d Shoshana Zuboff : Our future with "Big Data" - do not be dispossessed! In: Frankfurter Allgemeine. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, September 14, 2014, accessed on July 14, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Zuboff : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . 2018, p.  47 f .
  5. ↑ Zuboff : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . 2018, p.  48 .
  6. ↑ Zuboff : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . 2018, p.  67 .
  7. ^ John Naughton: 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism. In: The Guardian. January 20, 2019, accessed on August 11, 2019 (English): "These processes are meticulously designed to produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus eliminate any possibility of self-determination. [...] This power to shape behavior for others' profit or power is entirely self-authorizing. "
  8. ^ Julia Powles : Google and Microsoft have made a pact to protect surveillance capitalism . In: The Guardian . May 2, 2016, accessed July 14, 2019 .
  9. ^ Zuboff : Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization . In: Journal of Information Technology . 2015, p.  75 .
  10. ↑ a b Shoshana Zuboff : A Digital Declaration . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, September 15, 2014, accessed on July 14, 2019 (English).
  11. ↑ Shoshana Zuboff : In the Age of Surveillance Capitalism. In: netzpolitik.org. June 12, 2019, accessed July 14, 2019 .
  12. ^ Zuboff : Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization . In: Journal of Information Technology . 2015, p.  77 .
  13. ↑ Zuboff : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . 2018, p.  590 .
  14. ↑ Zuboff : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . 2018, p.  594 .
  15. ↑ Zuboff : The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . 2018, p.  599 .