The question is, what kind of regulation? Are existing approaches to privacy and antitrust law the answer? Both are critical but neither is adequate. The next great regulatory vision is likely to be framed by warriors for a democracy under threat: lawmakers, citizens and specialists, allied in the knowledge that only democracy can impose the people’s interests through law and regulation. Bringing big tech to heel: how do we take back control of the internet? We have every reason to believe that we can be successful again. More good news: our societies successfully confronted destructive forms of capitalism in the past, asserting new laws that tethered capitalism to the real needs of people. We have not failed to rein in this rogue capitalism we’ve not yet tried. Surveillance capitalism thrives in the absence of law. Their knowledge is used for others’ interests, not our own. Surveillance capitalists know everything about us, but we know little about them. The big picture reveals extreme concentrations of knowledge and power. At the grassroots, systems are designed to evade individual awareness, undermining human agency, eliminating decision rights, diminishing autonomy and depriving us of the right to combat. These economic imperatives erode democracy from below and from above.
As one data scientist explained to me: “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way … We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.” It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us the goal now is to automate us. The idea is not only to know our behaviour but also to shape it in ways that can turn predictions into guarantees. Data scientists describe this as a shift from monitoring to actuation. Ultimately, it has become clear that the most predictive data comes from intervening in our lives to tune and herd our behaviour towards the most profitable outcomes. This competition to sell certainty produces the economic imperatives that drive business practices. Markets in human futures compete on the quality of predictions. Each of these was an expression of a larger breakthrough: the invention of what I call surveillance capitalism. It’s easier to see that what we thought of as mistakes actually were the innovations – Google Glass, Facebook giving private information to developers, and more.
Facebook and Google were regarded as innovative companies that sometimes made dreadful mistakes at the expense of our privacy. The tech companies’ innovation rhetoric effectively blinded users and lawmakers for many years. Surveillance capitalism is an economic logic that has hijacked the digital for its own purposes As the historian David Nasaw put it, the millionaires preached that “democracy had its limits, beyond which voters and their elected representatives dared not trespass lest economic calamity befall the nation”. This rhetoric is a hand-me-down from another era when “Gilded Age” barons in the late-19th century United States insisted that there was no need for law when one had the “law of evolution”, the “laws of capital” and the “laws of industrial society”. In 2011, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that government overreach would foolishly constrain innovation, “We’ll move much faster than any government.”Then, in 2013, Google co-founder Larry Page complained that “old institutions like the law” impede the company’s freedom to “build really great things”. “I can predict that … we will have tech domination from a country with wholly different sets of values.”īoth Facebook and Google have long relied on this misguided formula to shield them from law. Clegg then showcased Silicon Valley’s standard defence against the rule of law – warning that any restrictions resulting from “tech-lash” risked making it “almost impossible for tech to innovate properly”, and summoning the spectre of Chinese ascendance. A few weeks earlier Facebook’s chiefs, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, snubbed a subpoena from the Canadian parliament to appear for questioning.