Social technologies in and out of psychology

Abstract

Data on human behavior have become a highly valuable commodity under contemporary capitalism. Psychology’s stronghold on knowledge about individuals is thus threatened by new enterprises that lack formal commitments to public wellbeing: social media platforms. For Shoshana Zuboff, this represents a new form of capitalism—surveillance capitalism—where information technologies not only generate data from user activity, but effectively repurpose this data to shape behavior for corporate gains. We argue that Zuboff’s analysis, while a useful starting point, frames problems related to social media at a macrosociological level in ways that obscure the possibility for effective collective action. We then demonstrate how insights from Karl Marx and Gilbert Simondon can help psychologists understand the profound shifts in subjectivity elicited by hyper-networked digital media landscapes. Their shared process-relational ontology foreshadows a collective form of subjectivity in response to contemporary capitalism, something which Zuboff alludes to but fails to fully explain.