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You Are Literally Working for Silicon Valley and Don’t Know It
The digital economy has been called ‘surveillance capitalism,’ but that doesn’t capture how insidious it really is
During the last decade, thanks to the proliferation of sensors and data-rich devices, a new economic order sprung up around us. Some refer to it as “surveillance capitalism,” a form of accumulation built on the collection and parsing of massive amounts of data. In this arrangement, those who collect the most data can make the most profit (often by selling that data or using it to target ads), which is why companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are among the most valuable in the world.
Surveillance capitalism depends on what the scholar Shoshana Zuboff, whose work has helped popularize the concept, calls “behavioral surplus” — a kind of digital exhaust that is constantly produced and collected. More than just contributing the user-generated content — profiles, photos, posts, likes — that social networks rely on, we now produce useful data all the time, which tech giants collect almost by default, as part of a massive informational dragnet operating according to the logic that any bit of information is potentially useful. (The U.S. intelligence community abides by a similar philosophy, known as “collect it all.”) The result for internet users is total surveillance in exchange for free services.
But surveillance capitalism, while a useful concept, doesn’t capture the entire picture. Digital feudalism, which casts us as indentured workers on the platforms’ giant estates, is one compelling model. But a more apt description can be found in the idea of the “social factory.”
Drawing on Italian Marxist theory developed in the sixties, the social factory posits that “labouring processes have moved outside the factory walls to invest the entire society,” as the philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri wrote. As social networks, sensors, and digital systems became mobile and spread throughout society — bringing their logics of surveillance, bulk data collection, and targeted advertising with them — the work of data production began to permeate practically everyone and everything. We all became, however unknowingly, workers in a factory whose profits are…
