Surveillance Capitalism, Marx, and the Human Commodity

Introduction: The Practical and Ideological Framework of Surveillance Capitalism

In Part II of her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff (2019) lays out how the advance of surveillance capitalism has unfolded and where it is headed. In chapters 7 and 8, she makes two very important points — one practical and the other ideological — that necessarily serve as the framework for the advance of surveillance capitalism.

The practical point is this: the world has become so immersed in the Internet that it will seem as though the Internet has disappeared, to paraphrase the words of Eric Schmidt at Davos. Of course, it is only disappearing in the same sense that water disappears to fish who swim in it. The reality is that everyone will have so thoroughly immersed themselves in the Internet of Things (IoT) that they will no longer realize just how dependent upon the Internet — and by extension, surveillance capitalism — they truly are. It will be just like breathing air to them: organic, natural, unforced, as though this was simply the way things are and have always been — integrated, connected, everything seen and controlled by an invisible force that links and unites one and all.

The ideological point is this: it requires what Zuboff (2019) terms the "sur-render" of the people to the idea that their behavioral data is itself a commodity that they must willingly give up in exchange for the services that the IoT provides. One common modern maxim is, "If you don't know what the product is, you're the product." In the age of surveillance capitalism, that is inherently true.

Marx contends that a commodity is a thing that is external to us. But in the age of surveillance capitalism, we ourselves become the commodity, and it is our behavioral data — as Zuboff (2019) explains — that is for sale. Yet, because we become the commodity, we also become the thing of value, just as a slave was a thing of value to the owner while the slave's humanity was utterly dismissed. The slave was merely an object; the chains of slavery made the person a captive. Today, it is the chains of IoT that make the modern consumer captive to the surveillance capitalists. Marx also states that commodities cannot go to market and exchange themselves — yet that is exactly what people do in the age of surveillance capitalism. Since they themselves are the commodities, they exchange themselves for IoT services, and they do so willingly. In short, IoT in the age of surveillance capitalism has stood Marx's view of capitalism on its head.

Surrender of the Will

Marx contends that commodities are things that have no power of their own to resist those who would control them. Ironically, this thought aligns with what Zuboff (2019) states regarding the surrender of the individual consumer to surveillance capitalism. In the surrender of the consumer to IoT providers, the behavioral data of the person is exchanged and the Internet disappears, as Schmidt states: the person is given over completely to the Internet. It is everywhere — in one's pocket, in one's home, in one's workplace — all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipresent, and all-capable — a technological divinity that sustains and keeps one in existence. One surrenders to it. The only difference between what Marx says about the exchange and what Zuboff says about the exchange is that Marx believes the commodity has no will or power of its own. Zuboff observes that the consumer does have a will and power of his own, but that he gives up both by entering into the exchange with IoT providers.

Who, then, are the owners in the exchange? In one dystopian sense, the machine-driven learning algorithms are the owners of the behavioral data that the consumer surrenders. Zuboff makes that point in her TED Talk, and it is also present in her book: the machines that provide connectivity become owners in the sense that they learn to predict the behaviors of the consumer and thus anticipate his needs and desires. That ability to anticipate plays into the hands of digital marketers, and to the degree that cultivation theory applies in this age of digital mass media, the outcome is that the purveyors of the IoT not only predict but also program the behavior of the consumer. It is like luring a fish with a baited hook: the initial service is the bait, the IoT is the hook, and once hooked the fish is no longer free — its power and will have been exchanged for the morsel of bait. Once a freely swimming fish in a pool of water that it did not see (just as today's IoT user does not truly "see" the Internet), the fish is now the commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. The consumer of today is no different. When Marx was making his assertions about commodities and exchange, he was referring to things and did not anticipate that people would become the things themselves. Zuboff shows that they are the things today.

Marx's short-sightedness was perhaps due to his focus on the labor embodied in commodities — that is, the cost of a commodity stemming from the amount of labor placed into its development for the market. But as Zuboff shows, such short-sightedness was not unique to Marx. Even the Aware Home project envisioned the consumer as one who knows and decides — an end in himself rather than a means to an end. Surveillance capitalism has inverted that: the consumer is now the means to an end, a commodity once he has surrendered himself to the Internet, the very water in which the purveyors of IoT fish with baited hooks.

Consumer as Commodity

Marx notes that a commodity appears as a slight, trivial thing that is easily understood. This is indeed the case as the consumer becomes a commodity, thanks to the advances made by machine learning. Algorithms can now detect patterns in behavior quickly and efficiently to such an extent that the routines and habits of human behavior are known and understood more perfectly by the machines recording and interpreting behavioral data than by the person himself. A person acts often without thinking about how he is acting. The machines never stop "thinking," so to speak, and are thus always conscious, always aware, always monitoring, recording, and interpreting the behavioral data of the individual. Once the consumer becomes the commodity, he becomes the slight, trivial thing that is easily understood, as Marx described.

At the same time, Marx discusses the mystical character of commodities that stems from the human labor tied to them. The human being, Marx seems to imply, is himself of some mystical character, and once he puts himself — via his labor — into the harvesting or development of a commodity, there is a piece of himself in the thing that is bought and sold on the market. In this regard, all commodities have a personal value that is perhaps greater than the price placed upon them by the market. Nonetheless, the market neutralizes that mystical character by fetishizing commodities, and this same thing occurs when the consumer becomes the commodity in the age of surveillance capitalism. The human being enters the exchange as a person with will, power, and value uniquely tied to his inherent worth. But by entering into the exchange, he is divested of that character and becomes just another fish on a hook — another commodity whose behavioral data (his life force according to the market, and therefore his inherent value) is rendered by the purveyors of the IoT.

Marx views the dehumanization of labor as an effect of exchange on the market, where the human value of labor disappears in the bartering process. Zuboff views the dehumanization of the consumer as an effect of exchange in the IoT. The commoditization of human behavior in the age of surveillance capitalism is, in this sense, perfectly analogous to what Marx describes in his chapter on commodities. The only difference is that whereas Marx sees commodities as things, Zuboff sees people as commodities. Indeed, the IoT would not function if this were not the case.

Conclusion

Zuboff and Marx align in their examinations of commodities and exchange; the reality of the 21st century is, however, that the human being is now the commodity. The individual hands over will and power to Big Tech because the promises of IoT are all too appealing for him to recognize this as an exchange in which he loses anything of value or significance. To him, there is not much difference between slavery and freedom.