Replacing society with machine action
The future of interpersonal relations under surveillance capitalism
The world as a global data lab
In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism professor Shoshana Zuboff (Harvard Business School) examines the ways in which science and technology are used as weapons against human beings who are unaware of their behaviour as being engineered by the combo of AI, machine learning and big data.
She examines the dissonance between the euphemistic marketing slogans of surveillance capitalism and the realpolitik of its rapacious ambitions. In order to fulfil these ambitions, as she shows, the currency of human relationship has to be liquidated for the sake of total predictability.
The currency of surveillance capitalism is certainty, so wherever life proves uncertain, it is the enemy of the technocratic top-down control:
...surveillance capitalism’s new instruments will render the entire world’s actions and conditions as behavioural flows. Each rendered bit is liberated from its life in the social, no longer inconveniently encumbered by moral reasoning, politics, social norms, rights, values, relationships, feelings, contexts, and situations. In the flatness of this flow, data are data, and behavior is behavior. The body is simple a set of coordinates in time and space where sensation and action are translated as data. All the things animate and inanimate share the same existential status in this blended confection, each reborn as an objective and measurable, indexable, browsable, searchable “it.”
For example, in the insurance industry a degree of certainty in predicting human bahaviour is critical to stay in business–the greater the certainty, the better the business. Zuboff quotes from McKinsey report on the topic: “Uncertainty will be strongly reduced (...) This leads to demutualisation and a focus on predicting and managing individual risks rather than communities.”
Demutualisation of social relations
Risk reduction is of primary importance so much so, that spontaneous qualities of human character become an inconvenience to the machine-controlled protocols designed to condition human behaviour:
Behavioural underwriting promises to reduce risk through machine processes designed to modify behavior in the direction of maximum profitability. Behavioral surplus is used to trigger punishments, such as real-time rate hikes, financial penalties, curfews, and engine lockdowns, or rewards, such as rate discounts, coupons, and gold stars to redeem for future benefits.
Insurance companies are therefore advised to define relevant behavioural parameters and translate them into algorithms that can monitor, track and enforce compliance to ensure safety. Behavioural knowledge is in thus translated into power of machine over the human being with no recourse to appeal against it.
From incentive to coercion
The guidelines released by Deloitte with regards to how to encourage those customers who might be reluctant to accepting the above nightmare scenario as reality suggest three points of leverage to influence customer behaviour:
Incentive: offer “significant enough” cost savings so that people are willing to accept the privacy trade-offs despite the “lingering concerns.”
Deception: perception control; present behavioural monitoring as “fun,” “interactive,” “competitive,” and “gratifying” as a part of the “gamification” process optimised for maximal enjoyment.
Induce learned helplessness: present the deal as if it’s already here, and its implementation inevitable which is supposed to make the customer feel like all they can do is submit.
This last point about the rhetoric of inevitability goes hand in hand with the abolishment of the idea of contract. For centuries formal agreements between individuals and commercial entities legitimised the relationship between them, but under surveillance capitalism contract becomes redundant as the living, and thereofre non-linear nature of human relationship poses a threat to the dead automatism of machine power.
The enemy of the machine
Thus, in the world of total automation any form of sociality is a potential enemy of the process optimised for profit for the Moloch of the corporate state. Therefore, any basis for trust, loyalty or interpersonal reciprocity which could have the capacity to challenge the neofeudal techno-fascism must be ruled out.
Every doctrine of inevitability carries a weaponised virus of moral nihilism programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility. Inevitability rhetoric is a cunning fraud designed to render us helpless and passive in the face of implacable forces that are and must always be indiffent to the merely human. This is the world of the robotized interface, where technologies work their will, resolutely protecting power from challenge.
How will life react to such an assault on its inherent qualities of spontaneity, unpredictability and creativity?
We will discover this soon enough…