Surveillance Capitalism: a Marx-inspired account

Abstract

Some of the world's most powerful corporations practise what Shoshana Zuboff (2015; 2019) calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. The core of their business is harvesting, analysing and selling data about the people who use their products. In Zuboff's view, the first corporation to engage in surveillance capitalism was Google, followed by Facebook; recently, firms such as Microsoft and Amazon have pivoted towards such a model. In this paper, I suggest that Karl Marx's analysis of the relations between industrial capitalists and workers is closely analogous to the relations between surveillance capitalists and users. Furthermore, three problematic aspects of industrial capitalism that Marx describes – alienation, exploitation and accumulation – are also aspects, in new forms, of surveillance capitalism. I draw heavily on Zuboff's work to make these parallels. However, my Marx-inspired account of surveillance capitalism differs from hers over the nature of the exchange between users and surveillance capitalists. For Zuboff, this is akin either to robbery or the gathering of raw materials; on the Marx-inspired account it is a voluntary sale. This difference has important implications for the question of how to resist surveillance capitalism.

El neoliberalismo educacional chileno y sus posibilidades de derrumbe en una nueva constitución

“…Beyond cognitive capitalism, with digital media companies capturing, monitoring, and processing private personal data for marketing and profitability, and knowing more about people than the persons themselves could, there is the "superindustry of the imaginary" (Bucci, 2021). Thus, Marx's concept of commodity fetishism must be updated to account for the symbolic dimension of the economic and politico-ideological instances of society, resulting in what has been called "surveillance capitalism" (Venkatesh, 2021). In this all-encompassing digital planetary coverage, immediately followed by the worldwide integration of financial systems, a gigantic, new kind of epistemodiversity emerges, with social networks operated by robots open for immediate dissemination of strange narratives, fake news, or pseudo-true stories (Darnton, 2017).…”

“…Recent transformations in the world economic system have turned the prevailing mode of production into what has been called hyper-capitalism (Graham, 2002), cognitive capitalism (Boutang, 2011), digital capitalism (Fuchs & Mosco 2016), or surveillance capitalism (Venkatesh, 2021). These constructs have been justified by societal trends that theoretically support the notion of a society of knowledge (Stehr & Adolf, 2017).…”

Does surveillance capitalism trigger the financial performance of information technology firms? A reflection from FAANG business models

“…Surveillance companies collect and scrutinise people's online behaviours on their platforms through likes, dislikes, shares, searches, social networks, and purchases to produce data that can be further used for commercial purposes. These social interactions are necessary to access material subsistence in the contemporary world, and if we need subsistence, we need these interactions (Venkatesh, 2021). In support of this, Hal Varian (2014) describes the core of the Surveillance business as 'data extraction and analyses through econometric modelling.…”