[Doctorow-L] New book out today! "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism"

[Cory Doctorow]

You've probably heard Zuboff's excellent coinage "Surveillance
Capitalism" and perhaps you've read the paper it was introduced in, or
the book that it led to.

Today, I've published a response to that book, "How to Destroy
Surveillance Capitalism."

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

I wrote "How to Destroy..." after reading Zuboff's book and realizing
that while I shared her alarm about how Big Tech was exercising undue
influence over us, I completely disagreed with her thesis about the
source of that influence and what should be done about it.

Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism a "rogue capitalism," a system that
has used machine learning to effectively control our minds and shape our
behavior so that we can no longer serve as market actors whose purchase
decisions promote good firms and products over bad ones.

Because of that, Big Tech has a permanent advantage, one that can't be
addressed through traditional means like breakups or consent decrees,
nor can it be analyzed through traditional privacy lenses.

But I think that's wrong. It's giving Big Tech far too much credit. I
just don't buy the thesis that Big Tech used Big Data to create a
mind-control ray to sell us fidget spinners, and that Cambridge
Analytica hijacked it to make us all racists.

So I wrote "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism," a short book that
delivers a different thesis: Big Tech is a monopoly problem. In fact,
it's just a part of a wider monopoly problem that afflicts every sector
of our global economy.

Accidentally and deliberately, monopolies create all kinds of malignant
outcomes. If the company that has a monopoly on search starts serving
wrong answers, people will believe them - not because of mind control,
but because of dominance.

But monopolies have an even graver failure-mode: when a large,
profitable industry collapses down to 4 or 5 companies, it's easy for
those companies to agree on what they think policy should be.

And being monopolists, they have lots of spare cash to convert that
agreement to actual policy. What's more, once an industry is
monopolized, everyone qualified to understand and regulate it probably
came from one of the dominant companies.

Think of how the "good" Obama FCC chairman was a former Comcast exec and
the "bad" Trump FCC chair is a former Verizon lawyer.

There's a name for regulatory outcomes driven by collusion among
monopolists whose regulators come from their own ranks.

We call them: "Conspiracies."

When social scientists investigate conspiracists, they find people whose
beliefs are the result of real trauma (like losing a loved one to
opiods) and real conspiracies (the Sackler family and other Big Pharma
barons suborning their regulators).

The combination of real trauma and real conspiracies gives ALL
conspiracies explanatory power. This is brilliantly documented in Anna
Merlan's "Republic of Lies," one of the most important books on the rise
of conspiratorial thinking I've read.

https://boingboing.net/2019/09/21/from-opioids-to-antivax.html

Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem, but not
because it accidentally led to a working mind-control ray and then
turned it over to Nazis.

It's a problem because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead
to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual
dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize
opposition to the status quo.

And Big Tech *does* exert control over us, but not with mind-control
rays. Lock-in (and laws that support it) allows Big Tech to decide how
we can use our devices, who can fix them, and when they must be thrown away.

Lock-in is an invitation to totalitarianism: the Chinese government
observed the fact that Apple alone could decide which apps can run on
Iphones, then ordered Apple to remove apps that allowed Chinese people
privacy from the state.

I'm sure that the Uyghurs in concentration camps and the Falun Gong
members having their organs harvested are relieved that Apple abetted
their surveillance for reasons other than mere marketing.

This is the core of my critique, the reason I wrote this book: we should
be suspicious of all corporate control over our lives, and should insist
on nothing less than absolute technological self-determination.

The idea that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the
product," suggests the simplistic solution of just charging for
everything. But the reality is that in a monopoly, you're the product
irrespective of whether you're paying.

We deserve to be more than products.

I am so grateful to Onezero for the incredible look-and-feel of my new
book. It's a free read on their site, with a really fantastic new nav
system that will help you pick up where you left off.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the spectacular artwork that Shira
Inbar did for the book, and the tireless efforts of my editor, Brian
Merchant, who championed it internally and is ultimately responsible for
the brilliant package you see before you.

I'm also excited to note that this will be shortly coming out as a print
book, doubtless just as beautiful as this digital edition.

I know it's a longread, but I hope you'll give it a try.

Big Tech *needs* a corrective, and that corrective - antimonopoly
enforcement - is part of a global movement that addresses deep, systemic
problems in every sector. This is a moment for us to seize, but we have
to understand where the problem really lies.


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