The Role of Self-Determination — some thoughts after reading “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”
What this book fascinated me the most was knowing the importance of our desire for self-determination and its evolving relationship with economic paradigms throughout history. By understanding this history, I believe we could better expect what our future can be.
The Brief.
This book is fruitful for people who want to have a holistic view on the unprecedented form of power called “Surveillance Capitalism” and its challenge to humanity.
Surveillance Capitalism, started from Silicon Valley and now spread into loads of economic sectors, is marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. It claims human experience is a free source, uses advanced computational abilities to interpret human experience into behavioral data, and sells the data in a new marketplace that trades exclusively the predictions about human behavior. Since the higher certainty for prediction means higher profit, production of goods and services is subordinated to a new means of behavioral modification. The behavior modification threatens it may bring to humans in the twenty-first century may be just as industrial capitalism threatened the natural world in the twentieth.
This review, based on western perspectives, will be focusing on the interaction between human needs for self-determination and the capitalism paradigm across historical periods. Inspired by the sociologist Emile Durkheim, I believe the economic paradigm evolves in response to the needs of people in a time and place. By looking through this lens, I might better imagine the possible future Surveillance Capitalism could bring and what our next steps might be.
So the story starts here…
Two hundred years ago, when entering the early stage of industrialization, a number of people became more individualized as they are no longer handed down from one generation to the next according to the traditions of villages and clans. Traditional norms and meanings are no longer to be experienced as the only possible story. People who choose to separate themselves from the traditional norm to live in the newly industrialized world would need to make things up on their own. However, they would do this within the hierarchical social structure and rules the new world has to offer. This structure is a collective solution for people at that time, while it also suppressed the growth and expression of self.
As more wealth was produced by industrialization and the practice of mass production capitalism at its core and the development of democratic politics, distributional policies, access to education and health care, individuals were enabled to build more solid self-consciousness and imaginative capabilities, which stimulate them to fortify their own values against predefined roles or prior social norms.
Later, WW2, the Vietnam War, and the corruption exposed by the Watergate scandal had triggered public insistence on political reform. Since then, the fiscal and social policies began to shift from government-regulation to a way that allows the market to operate freely without much regulation from external authority. The value of a firm became to be decided by its share price in the free market. Since then, the logic of capitalism had shifted from the profitable production of goods and services to increasingly exotic forms of financial speculation. This is when “shareholder value maximization” started to be widely accepted as the objective goal of the firm.
According to Thomas Piketty, a market with less regulation contains powerful forces of divergence. Society began to be transformed in a way that led to expanding gaps between the haves and have-nots. For individuals who have a growing desire to exercise control over their own lives, it seems less possible for them to do this in an era with such an unbreakable social structure.
However, the internet technology provided a silver lining for those individuals, because the internet unlocked much information and individuals are able to make their voice loud there. Ironically, this was also when Surveillance Capitalism came to the stage. To survive in a world that celebrates “shareholder value maximization”, companies such as Facebook need to find a way to make a profit. They started to notice the economic value of behavioral data. The more data they collect, the more precise predictions about human behavior they can sell to their business customers. With an aim of collecting more data, the platforms are designed in a way to exploit the human inclination towards empathy, belonging, and acceptance. The system tunes the pitch of our behavior with the rewards and punishments of social pressure. And now these platforms became our reality.
How do these environments affect humans? Based on studies, environments that keep attracting your attention with social pressure might harm individuals to establish a stable sense of identity and develop abilities to differentiate themselves from others. Without these abilities, we tend to weigh our own worth and existence by other’s affirmation, fail to find the boundaries between ourselves and others, and fail to develop an inward sense of valid truth and moral authority, which is the reference point from which we can carve out our own perspectives and make the decision for ourselves.
To sum up
Traveling through history, we can see there’s always back and forth interaction between human needs for self-determination and economic paradigm. After industrialization, there are more resources for humans to grow a sense of self-determination. During the wartime and the Watergate scandal, people started to ask the government to step back from the fiscal and social policies, which had led to the rise of the free-market that created growing economic inequality which deteriorated the spirit of self-determination. Nevertheless, people found their place to exercise self-determination in the digital world. However, Surveillance Capitalism came to the stage by exploiting humans’ needs and behavior, which again dropped shadow on self-determination.
What is our next step? I’m afraid there’s no answer yet. However, I think the power of self-determination might still play a powerful role, just like the role it played in the past. And this might be the goal of this book: raise awareness towards the danger of this new economic paradigm, remind us of the power of self-determination, and ignite the spirit within us.
