Pod Insights The Vergecast The Age of Surveillance Capitalism with Shoshana Zuboff About this episode The age of surveillance capitalism author Shoshana Zuboff considers whether "data is the new oil" and explains how data collection has fundamentally changed the economy and how big companies interact with consumers. Shoshana Zuboff breaks down how to define, understand and fight surveillance capitalism.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:14 Nilay Patel? Hey everybody, it's Sam from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we have Shoshana Zuboff, who just wrote The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It is a super interesting book about how data collection has fundamentally changed the entire economy. I'm not just talking Facebook and Google, but big oil companies, car companies, literally everything around us has been turned upside down. The way we buy and sell things has been turned upside down by data collection, which is pervasive. It is a super long book. It's 800 pages. She goes super deep into how surveillance capitalism works, how you define it, how you understand it. I have to say, after reading it, I see it everywhere now. It is completely eye-opening and it changes the way I think about a lot of things. So it was really exciting to get Shoshana on the show, have her explain it to me, challenge her on some parts of it,
1:59 Nilay Patel? and see how she came back at me, and talk about what we can do next. Check it out, Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
2:08 Nilay Patel? I'm here with Shoshana Zuboff, who just wrote The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Or I'd actually say, just published. You've been writing it for like, seven years.
2:15 Speaker 03 True that.
2:16 Nilay Patel? And you have absolutely hit, I think, the window of people waking up to realize, all this data tracking is not necessarily a good thing. And here you are with a 700-page book about exactly how this economy works. What is it like to just sort of be like, I hit the moment?
2:32 Speaker 03 Well, I feel very lucky that I hit the moment. One never knows as an author, if you're going to get that kind of luck or not. I think that, you know, we're coming on the one-year anniversary of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblowing, blowing the lid off those practices. And of course, the work I did provides the framework for understanding what Cambridge Analytica actually was. Because in fact, what they did was they employed all of the stock and trade mechanisms and methodologies of surveillance capitalism, pivoting them just slightly from commercial outcomes to political outcomes,
3:17 Speaker 03 from commercial behavior to political behavior. And in doing that, they showed that they could, you know, essentially do open-heart surgery on our society. And more and more of us are ready to name, you know, what is this thing that has taken root around us that seems to be menacing, that seems not to have our interests at heart, seems to be invading my life in more and more ways, and yet, I don't know what to call it, I don't know what it is, and I don't know how it works.
3:45 Nilay Patel? And so that was the thing you just said to me. Surveillance capitalism is a framework for understanding the sort of technology-dominated, modern economy that we live in.
3:56 Speaker 03 Yes.
3:56 Nilay Patel? But be more specific. What do you mean? When you say surveillance capitalism, what do you mean?
4:00 Speaker 03 One of the lies that has been perpetrated is that...
4:06 Speaker 03 The mechanisms and methods of surveillance capitalism are somehow just an inevitable consequence of digital technology. That this is how the digital works, folks. Take it or leave it. You know, you can't get out there in front of technological progress. Technological progress lifts all boats and so forth. That's a big lie. The fact is that we can easily imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism. We cannot, however, imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital. This is an economic logic that has infected and hijacked the digital for its own commercial gain. So that's number one. Number two, there are many ways in which surveillance capitalism diverges from the history of market capitalism.
4:51 Speaker 03 But there is one way in which it emulates and continues that history. So let me describe that. It's well-known that capitalism evolves by taking things that live outside the market, bringing them into the market dynamic, and turning them into things that can be sold and purchased. That's what we call commodities. So famously, industrial capitalism did that with nature. Nature lives in its own time and space, brought into the market dynamic, reborn as real estate, as land that could be sold and purchased. Or work, activities that people did in their homes, in their gardens, in their meadows,
5:33 Speaker 03 brought into the market dynamic, reborn as labor to be sold and purchased. Now, fast forward a century. Surveillance capitalism takes something that lives outside the market dynamic, but now with a dark twist. Surveillance capitalism claims private human experience as a free source of raw material for translation into behavioral data.
5:59 Speaker 03 Those data are then combined with its advanced computational capabilities. And what comes out of that mix are predictions of human behavior, predictions of what we will do now, soon and later. And those predictions are sold into a new kind of marketplace that trades in these behavioral futures. So this began in the world of online advertising. And we thought, oh, that's online advertising. All right, well, we can figure out a way to live with that. But what we didn't realize was that this economic logic is no more confined to that original context than mass production was confined to the original context
6:43 Speaker 03 of the production of the Model T. Right? That this is an economic logic began at Google, spread to Facebook, became the default option for Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general. But ultimately now is spreading across the normal economy. So we see it in the insurance sector, in the health sector, in the retail sector, and oddly enough, coming full circle, in the automotive sector, where now we hear the Ford CEO announcing that in order to make the kind of profits that Google and Facebook makes, Ford is going to start looking at its vehicles as surveillance opportunities
7:28 Speaker 03 and grab data from the 100 million people driving around in its cars.
7:32 Nilay Patel? So let me, let me see if I just understand it right so I can state it simply. So industrial capitalism, which I'm like a fan of, accomplished some things in this world. You know, Ford buys steel on the market. They turn the steel into a car. They sell the car, right? We're like, we're taking one thing. We're applying some labor. We're selling it in a market. There's competition. You're saying surveillance capitalism upends that relationship, which I think people kind of intuitively understand now. And you buy something that's cheap or free, and you're paying into it with your behavior, which then gets turned into behavioral data that is bought and sold on a market that you cannot see and participate in so that other things are recommended to you or your decisions are somehow influenced.
8:16 Speaker 03 That's correct. So we thought that we were using free services, but they think that we are free, right? We thought we were using surveillance capitalism's free services. In fact, surveillance capitalism looks at us as free, as free sources of raw material for its production processes. They call us users, but in fact, they are using us as raw material for their production processes.
8:45 Nilay Patel? Because what they produce is recommendations.
8:48 Speaker 03 Because what they produce are predictions. I call them prediction products. So what they're selling into these futures markets are predictions of our future behavior. What is a click-through rate? I mean, just zoom out a little bit. A click-through rate is nothing but a prediction of a piece of future human behavior. So now we have predictions about, not just click-through rates, but what we will purchase in the real world or whether or not we will drive insurance premiums up or down, be a positive or negative effect on the insurance company's bottom line. We have predictions of health behavior we will engage in,
9:31 Speaker 03 predictions of what kind of driving behavior we will engage in, predictions of what kind of purchasing behavior we'll engage in, predictions of where we will go, what we will do when we get there, who we will meet, what they will do when they get wherever they're going, and so on and so forth. So all this activity, which started with grabbing our online private experience, turning it into behavioral data for prediction, this has now swept out of the online world.
10:05 Speaker 03 Into the real world so that it follows us with our phones. It follows us through other devices that increasingly saturate our environment, whether we're in our car or walking through our cities or in our homes. And this increasingly saturated environment is collating, creating data. There are complex ecosystems of players now. Some players that do nothing but capture niches of behavioral data and then shump them into these supply chains, these pipelines, you know, that are sending them to the aggregators, that are sending them into the machine learning specialists and so forth.
10:50 Speaker 03 So these are complex ecosystems now with complex supply chains. You know, The Wall Street Journal, to some fanfare, published a report just a few days ago about their investigation of a whole range of apps, mobile apps that people use, to which they're feeding very intimate data. Some are health apps, some are fitness apps, some are apps about your menstrual cycle, on and on and on. These apps, The Wall Street Journal discovered, are taking those data and most of them are shunting that data right into Facebook's supply chains. Lo and behold. This is something that I write about in detail, of course,
11:31 Speaker 03 and has been well-known to, you know, folks who research this closely for quite a while. We are living in the center of this ecosystem. And once you begin to wrap your mind around this, Nele, so you understand that we're not the users, we're being used. So you understand that it's not free, we are free. Once you make that mental switch, I promise you that your perception changes in a fundamental way. Yesterday, I got off the plane and I'm walking through LaGuardia. And there's a space where everybody's sitting at counters, you know, on these little stools. Everyone's on their laptop, you know, waiting for their plane and so forth.
12:16 Speaker 03 I'm looking at this and thinking, we just don't realize that we're just on our laptops feeding these supply chains. And all of the wealth that is amassed here, all of the surveillance capital that is accumulated, much of it goes into a design effort to make sure that these mechanisms and methods are hidden from us, to make sure that we are kept in ignorance.
12:43 Nilay Patel? How do you mean?
12:44 Speaker 03 That they're hidden.
12:45 Nilay Patel? But give me an example of bypassing awareness.
12:48 Speaker 03 OK, an example is the Facebook contagion experiments, which made a lot of headlines long before Cambridge Analytica hit the streets.
12:57 Nilay Patel? This is Facebook said, we can make people feel bad if they look at.
13:01 Speaker 03 Well, first they said, can we make people vote?
13:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
13:04 Speaker 03 So that was published in 2012. And the idea was subliminal cues in your newsfeed, on your Facebook pages, using social influence and other kinds of subliminal cues to see if they could actually produce more people casting real votes in the real world during the 2012 midterm elections. The conclusion was, yes, they could. And when they wrote it up in a very reputable scholarly journal, the Facebook data scientists celebrated, together with their academic colleagues who were part of this research, they celebrated two facts. One was, we now know that we can spread a contagion in the online world that affects real world behavior.
13:47 Speaker 03 And number two, they celebrated the fact that this can be done while bypassing the user's awareness. It's all subliminal. We don't know what's happening to us. While the world was mobilized in outrage at the thought that Facebook unilaterally toyed with us this way in what they call a massive scale experiment.
14:12 Speaker 03 While we were in outrage, they were already putting the finishing touches on a second massive scale experiment. And this one was to see if they could manipulate our emotional state with the same kind of methodologies, bypassing awareness, subliminal cues and so forth. And of course, they discovered that they could. They could use subliminal cues in the online environment to make us feel either more happy or more sad.
14:38 Nilay Patel? Right, I just want to unpack subliminal real quick.
14:41 Speaker 03 Yes.
14:42 Nilay Patel? Because the classic subliminal advertising is you watch the Coke ad and it like blips for one second and it shows you like a flower and you said, but that is like disproven. By subliminal here, I think you mean something different, which is they adjust the news feed, they adjust the user interface in ways that are not obvious to you, but provoke some other effect.
15:01 Speaker 03 Yes.
15:02 Nilay Patel? Not that they're hiding like daisies all over Facebook to make you feel good.
15:05 Speaker 03 I'm not sure why you say this subliminal has been disproven because there's, there's quite a bit of work on how powerful the subliminal actually is.
15:14 Nilay Patel? I just, I mean, the very classic subliminal, like the one second flash, right? Like, that is disproven, I think. I, I want to make sure we're clear on the definition.
15:22 Speaker 03 All right, so, so for example, in the emotional contagion experiment, the kind of thing that they did was to manipulate the content of your news feed and manipulate the actual language and vocabulary that was used on the pages that you saw and in your news feed so that there were more words, more messages with a quote sadder valence and other, in other cases, more words with a happier valence, right? In the voting experiment, among other things, what they did was feature a picture of somebody in your network who says, "I voted."
16:09 Speaker 03 And the reason that that is a big deal is that what we have learned through all of the research in the social media milieu is that the principal social dynamic in this milieu is a dynamic that psychologists call social comparison. We know that social comparison is a natural human dynamic. We meet each other, it's natural that we have a few moments of immediate social comparison. You know, am I similar or different from this person? This is a natural, literally autonomic kind of thing that we do when we engage with others.
16:51 Speaker 03 But what we've learned about social media is that social comparison is more intense, a more dominant, dense, intensified social dynamic than anything that we have ever experienced in social life. It becomes the prime mover in the network. That's why we have come to adopt this language of people who are influencers, for example. And that's become kind of second nature to us. Who's an influencer? We have little children who are influencers, you know, dressing up in brands and so forth. Their families getting paid for their influential presence. This is the salience of social comparison in the network.
17:34 Speaker 03 And the thing about this is, most of this happens outside of our awareness. And so we have data scientists who are already, you know, very clearly talking about how you manipulate these subliminal social comparison processes in the network in order to tune and herd human behavior toward specific outcomes. Under surveillance capitalism, these are specific commercial outcomes. But as we talked a moment ago, what Cambridge Analytica did was use these, precisely these same dynamics and methodologies to just shift the dial a little bit toward political
18:17 Speaker 03 behavioral outcomes rather than commercial behavioral outcomes, you know, with tremendous result.
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19:39 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back with Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
19:44 Nilay Patel? So one of, I was talking to somebody else, it was off the record, so I can't say their name, but you and I had actually spoken before on C-SPAN. And you had said something to me that I found very powerful, which is eventually you shift from making recommendations to guiding outcomes.
20:00 Speaker 03 Yes.
20:01 Nilay Patel? Right? Netflix says, hey, you watch this show, you might like these four shows.
20:04 Speaker 03 Yes.
20:05 Nilay Patel? And eventually the dial turns all the way to Netflix is just telling you what to watch.
20:09 Speaker 03 Yes.
20:09 Nilay Patel? And so I brought this up with somebody who's smart, and he said, in this specific area, not just like a generalized smart person, and he said, well, here's the problem. Everyone recognizes that this is an issue, but there's no mathematical difference between a very good recommendation and that sort of malicious persuasion. I can't tell you when to stop. So if you make the recommendation algorithm good enough, eventually it will recommend to you. A thing that you want and that is indistinguishable from me telling you what to do. You can't put a number on it at what point it crossed the line. Do you see that as a problem in terms of how we might regulate this, how we might stop it, how we might limit that surveillance capitalism mechanism?
20:50 Speaker 03 Well, what you're describing there is the outcome of a process. What I describe is the process itself. For example, the question to ask is, how do we get to a recommendation that is that good, that it is for all intents and purposes, the equivalent of an observation?
21:07 Nilay Patel? Mm-hmm.
21:08 Speaker 03 Right? That's what we're talking about. How do we get to a prediction that is so good, it's almost as good as an observation? So my argument is, or my observation is, that in order to get to that quality of prediction, surveillance capitalism has gone through several competitive phases. Because what surveillance capitalists are competing on are the quality of their predictions.
21:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:34 Speaker 03 Because that's what they're selling to their business customers. It began with economies of scale. We need a lot of data. We need to feed the machines a lot of data in order to get really good predictions. Okay, so we're getting a lot of data. We're pulling all the data that we can find in the online, in the online world. Then it becomes, wait, wait a minute. Volume is essential, but we need more than volume. We also need variety. We need scale and we need scope. And to get that scope, to get that variety, the diversity of data, we need to get out of the online world. We need to also embrace the offline world. We need a mobile situation. Here's your phone, put it in your pocket, right?
22:18 Speaker 03 Now, off you, off you go, into the city, into the park, into your home, into your car, wherever you are. Those become new sources of, of supply chains for us. Okay, now, we're competing in the mobile world. And the discovery occurs, hold on a second. You know, data scientists talk about the shift from monitoring and capturing data.
22:44 Speaker 03 To actuating, actually affecting the device or the person in a way that actuates behavior. And through actuating behavior, you set that behavior on a specific course that gives you even better basis for prediction.
23:04 Nilay Patel? Right.
23:04 Speaker 03 So, so you see, this is the input. This is what's happening behind the veil before you get to that killer recommendation, wherever it is. So behind the veil, what's happening is we're looking for ways to actually nudge, tune, herd, human behavior through these subliminal cues that operate in the online and increasingly in the real world so that we can channel behavior toward a certain direction. And once we know you're, you're moving in that direction, then the predictions that we can make are going to be even more powerful. One of the tests of this that became perhaps most interesting
23:48 Speaker 03 and will be familiar to our listeners is the augmented reality game Pokemon Go, which I consider to be another superscale, population scale, experimental laboratory in how you do what I've just described, but now not in the online world, in the real world, in the world we call real.
24:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
24:12 Speaker 03 Because what Pokemon Go was actually doing was monetizing based on its own behavioral futures markets.
24:22 Nilay Patel? Of where people would go.
24:23 Speaker 03 Exactly. So there were, you know, pizza joints, restaurants, McDonald's franchises, all kinds of service establishments, retail places that were paying Niantic Labs, which was the Google spinoff.
24:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
24:39 Speaker 03 That produced and incubated Pokemon Go while still inside Google, led, of course, by John Hanke, who was behind Street View and behind that, before that, Google Earth. So they're paying Niantic Labs for footfall, footfall in the real world. Is the precise analogy to click through in the online world.
25:01 Nilay Patel? Footfall, which means literally foot traffic in a store.
25:03 Speaker 03 Footfall is your body is in my store and your foot is falling on my floor.
25:09 Nilay Patel? Wait, so I just have to, we're talking, we started with surveillance capitalism and it's evil and there's data exhaust and you're the product and we're at Pokemon, right? And I, I just want to, what is the, I hear tech executives on this show in the world and we go talk to them, they describe exactly the things that you are saying, but they're describing a utopia, right? I mean, every big company CEO will happily tell, data is the new oil.
25:35 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
25:35 Nilay Patel? Which is what you are saying, right? Data is a natural resource that we can mine, extract, process, refine, sell for higher and higher prices. And they're enthusiastic about it. You have talked to a lot of people, I mean, this book is a phenomenon. When you bring up Pokemon Go, are people like, oh, that was evil? Or are you getting the response that I'm having, which is, it was just a video game? Like, how do you, how do you square sort of that popular consumer response, that enthusiastic industry activity with, hey, if we look at this a little bit closer, it's actually not so great. Like, how do you, how do you bring those levels together?
26:13 Speaker 03 This is such a great question, Neil. I'm so glad that you asked me this question. So let's look at this a little bit. What we're describing is a utopia, if you're a surveillance capitalist.
26:25 Nilay Patel? Mm-hmm.
26:26 Speaker 03 Right? Because they have managed in the past 20 years to create this economic engine in which we do not benefit as customers, nor do we benefit as employees. They have entered the 21st century with the most extreme asymmetries of knowledge and the power that accrues to that knowledge, which is the power to influence and shape human behavior at scale. Asymmetries of power and knowledge, literally unlike anything the world has ever seen. They know just about everything about us. We know almost nothing about them. All of their knowledge about us.
27:08 Speaker 03 Is used for others' gain, not actually to solve our problems. So these are immense asymmetries, and they've institutionalized this as kind of the framework of our 21st century society right now. So it's a utopia if you're a surveillance capitalist, but it's not a utopia if you're someone who believes in democracy. It's not a utopia if you're someone who believes in individual autonomy and individual sovereignty. These things have been allowed to root and flourish, literally in the absence of societal understanding and in the absence of law. So that's number one. Let's talk about data is the new oil, because I love that one.
27:50 Nilay Patel? It's a great phrase.
27:51 Speaker 03 Data is the new oil, folks. A hundred years ago, we thought oil was a great thing. Right now, every major banking institution in the world is writing down its fossil fuel stocks because it understands that the oil, that's that, you know, the fossil fuel supplies that are still in the ground and counted on these companies' balance sheets, those supplies have to stay in the ground.
28:20 Nilay Patel? Mm-hmm.
28:21 Speaker 03 And increasingly, there will be regulations that require those fossil fuel supplies to stay in the ground.
28:30 Nilay Patel? So by extension, do you think there's regulation coming that would require our data to stay in our homes?
28:35 Speaker 03 So the way in which we're marking down, now, it's taken us a while to get here, Neelai.
28:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
28:42 Speaker 03 It's taken us a while to understand that oil used to be a great thing, but now oil is a thing that is destroying our planet. Oil is a thing that is destroying nature. So, yeah, data is the new oil, because data, as long as it is owned and operated by surveillance capitalism, is also the thing that's going to get marked down. As we come into a world where, as you, you know, we started off by saying, wow, this book is coming out at a time when people are really interested in this.
29:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:14 Speaker 03 Because people feel the pressure bearing down on them, but they don't know what it is and they don't know how to name it. As public consciousness changes, that's going to translate into pressure on our democratic institutions, and it will translate into law, and it will translate into new regulatory regimes.
29:31 Nilay Patel? Is that the answer? Is that how we stop it? We pass a bunch of regulations and break up the companies? Or do you, is there something more fundamental that needs to change? I mean, I think most people really like the service that Google provides. Most people are very happy that they can tell Alexa to turn off their lights. Like, those are, those are good outcomes. I mean, our audience is built on that as being exciting and, and providing some utility. How do you disconnect those outcomes from the machinery that produce them?
29:56 Speaker 03 Great question. One of the big lies here is that surveillance capitalism is the same as the digital. I, so, we all ran to the internet with open arms because we were looking there for the kind of help that we need with our lives that we're not finding in the real world. Because our public institutions have been so scraped of resources, because our commercial institutions became so indifferent to our well-being and to our lives. You know, whether we're talking about healthcare and, you know, you get seven minutes to talk to your doctor, or, you know, we're talking about these big industries where, you know,
30:38 Speaker 03 basically they're run by robotic systems and you no longer have a say and you can't talk to anybody and everything is so alienated. So we ran to the internet looking for the personal support that would make our lives easier. And that's why we like the Alexa and the digital assistants and these various services and so forth. But what's happened now is that surveillance capitalism has invaded and infected and hijacked this digital milieu. So now, just to get those utilities that we're looking for, just to get the very basics of what now constitutes effective social participation.
31:20 Speaker 03 We are forced to march through the same channels that are surveillance capitalism supply chains. And my answer to that is that this is an illegitimate choice that 21st century citizens should not have to make. So, yes, we want the digital. Yes, we want these conveniences. Yes, we want these things that are going to help us live our lives more effectively because you know what? We're living in a time when we all have to work. Moms and dads have to work. And we've got to take care of our kids. And our kids live in a very competitive world. And just taking care of our kids now requires so much time and effort.
32:00 Speaker 03 So, we're all pressured, we're all stressed, and not by our choice. And we deserve to have the digital that answers our needs. We also deserve to have institutions that don't stress us this much.
32:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
32:17 Speaker 03 But that's another conversation. So, we are now facing an illegitimate choice. And my argument is yes to the smart home, yes to the smart vehicle, yes to the smart city, yes to the digital, but not under the terms and conditions of surveillance capitalism, which is a direct assault on human autonomy and a direct assault on democracy. Because we cannot have democratic societies that are marked by these new axes of social inequality, these asymmetries of knowledge and power that operate under the auspices of private capital. This is inherently antagonistic to a democratic society.
33:02 Speaker 03 We cannot have a democratic society where individual autonomy and individual sovereignty, decision rights over my own life, over my own privacy, over my own human agency, and freedom to choose what my future is. We cannot have a democratic society without these kinds of deep autonomous moral action capabilities from individuals.
33:32 Nilay Patel? Shouldn't the other market, the sort of like regular capitalism market?
33:38 Nilay Patel? Counteract this? Like, if all of us feel stressed that we're being surveilled, shouldn't there be other products that don't surveil us? Like, Apple exists, it's one of those valuable companies in the world, and Tim Cook is like, "We're never gonna do this." Is that, is that just a one-off? Is that the exception that proves the rule? Where is the sort of supply for the latent demand that you were talking about?
33:59 Speaker 03 All right. So, we talked a moment ago about law and regulation. So, let's put this in a context. When we ask the question, you know, "What is to be done?", I think there are three big answers here, and they're all interrelated. So, that's something we've gotta get our heads around. One is, public opinion, a change in our awareness, in our consciousness, in our demands, in our sense of what is tolerable and what is intolerable. We withdraw social sanction from surveillance capitalism, and we put pressure on our democratic institutions to interrupt and outlaw, that allow behavioral futures markets, sorry, to thrive. So, that's one thing. The second thing is, the competitive solution.
34:43 Speaker 03 And that's what you're asking me about right now, the competitive solution. We know, going back to the early 2000s, every time you actually disclose to folks what some of these hidden methods and mechanisms are, they feel disgusted and revolted and outraged, and they do not want to be enmeshed in these, you know, in these magnetic forces.
35:12 Nilay Patel? I mean, this is the Facebook moment right now.
35:13 Speaker 03 That's right. The Facebook moment that's been going on for a while. We've had many Google moments, you know, we've had Google scandals over Street View and over Gmail and over Buzz and so many different Facebook scandals over the past decade or so. So, we know that folks don't want this, but we also know that folks keep engaging in it, largely because, A, they don't know what's going on, and B, There's no choice. Increasingly, the alternatives have been foreclosed. So that I want to get my kids' grades from the school, I'm marching through these supply chains. I want to get my health data from the physician's healthcare system, I'm marching through these supply chains.
35:58 Speaker 03 So these things have been foreclosed. We need substantial alternatives. Tim Cook has raised his hand and he said, "We're an alternative." But right now, Apple is one company, tremendous legitimacy. Apple is a great choice to anchor an alternative ecosystem. To do that, Apple has to do quite a few things to get its act together in order to qualify as a leader that actually wants to create scrupulously, create the kind of institutional systems, policies, mechanisms, methodologies,
36:39 Speaker 03 all of it, that truly realign the digital with the people it's meant to serve. You can't have the outages, like, "We don't service the software for the old device." Yeah, yeah. You can't have the outages, like, "We don't pay tax." There are contradictions in Apple that everybody knows about that leave many people feeling cynical about its ability to lead. I happen to believe that Tim Cook and Apple are perfectly positioned to be leaders. But to do that, there is some work that they have to do to do the kind of scrupulous institution building that the economist Joseph Schumpeter once described, you know, as really being able to move the dial of economic history. So that's one thing.
37:24 Speaker 03 Were Apple to do that and create an alliance with other companies that want to be part of this alternative ecosystem? And alternative supply chains where, yeah, we've got the digital and yeah, we've got data, but all of that data is under your control. All of your data is determined by your decision rights and all of that data is yours to use to improve your life, the products and services that serve you. And there is the transparency and the oversight to ensure that that is the case. And by the way, all of this operates under the larger framework of democracy, of the
38:07 Speaker 03 laws and regulatory frameworks in place to make sure that none of this slips into the surveillance capitalist territory.
38:15 Nilay Patel? Mm-hmm.
38:16 Speaker 03 Which is the one-way mirror, the secrecy, the social relations of hierarchy and ignorance and these hidden mechanisms. So this is how the democracy on the one hand and the competitive solution on the other hand, you know, are parts of the same conversation. Finally, the third piece of the solution, new forms of collective action. I've said that we are not users, we're being used. And as populations who are being used, we need to discover our shared, not only economic, social, political, psychological interests and invent the new forms of collective action
39:01 Speaker 03 that make us powerful in this new era, in the same way as a hundred years ago, you know, we developed trade unions and collective bargaining and the right to strike. And through those mechanisms, we helped drive our democracies
39:20 Nilay Patel? But this is what tech workers should do.
39:21 Speaker 03 To the new solutions.
39:22 Nilay Patel? This is what the workers of the tech companies should do. The way that consumers speak collectively is usually by buying things.
39:28 Speaker 03 But here's the thing, when we talk about industrial capitalism and generally when we talk about capitalism, we're talking about capitalism bearing down on us in the economic domain. Bearing down on us in our economic roles as customers and as employees. But now, we're having a different conversation, Neelai. When we're talking about surveillance capitalism, we're seeing capital bear down on us, not solely in our economic roles. That's why I'm using the term users. It's bearing down on us in this other kind of role where we are users, not as customers,
40:08 Speaker 03 not as employees, but simply as citizens, as members of society, who must use the digital in order to live an effective life. And that digital is now owned and operated by surveillance capitalism. So it's bearing down on us in our social roles. And that's where I argue that it has overspilled the walls of the, you know, the factory, the office, the economic domain, which was our model in the 20th century. And it's flowing everywhere in our society. It's the sensor in my mattress. It's the microphone that we've now discovered in the Nest security system.
40:53 Speaker 03 It's the diet app in my phone that's now feeding all my personal data to Facebook. It's everywhere in our lives, not strictly in our roles as economic actors.
41:06 Nilay Patel? Well, we could go forever on this. I could talk to you about this forever. Sadly, I've used up all of our time. Tell them where they can buy the book. I think everyone should read this book. It's massively interesting. Where can I get the book?
41:17 Speaker 03 Well, you can get the book wherever you want to. You can get it online through many different vehicles. Online, going right to my US publisher, Public Affairs, or my European publisher, Profile Books. You can go to Amazon. You can go to Barnes and Noble. You can go to your independent bookseller. You can go to Goodreads. And most fun, get out of the house, walk down the street, go to one of those great independent booksellers.
41:53 Nilay Patel? No phone in your pockets.
41:54 Speaker 03 And buy the book and have a great conversation in the shop with the folks who love the book and are selling many copies of it.
42:03 Nilay Patel? What a setup. You nailed it. Hit it out of the park. All right. Thank you so much, Shoshana. It was lovely to have you. I want to have you back very soon.
42:09 Speaker 03 Thank you so much, Neelai. Always a great pleasure.
42:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah. All right, that was Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. We'll be back later this week on Friday, talking all about Apple's new streaming services, their TV service, their credit card, the game service, the news service. So much went down. We're going to get deep into that. We got to pull that all apart. Tuesday after that, back with the interview episode, and then we'll just keep right on going with the Vergecast. I want to hear from you. I'm at reckless. Tweet me. Let me know what you think.
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