This symposium brings together leading scholars bridging our field with economics, sociology and social psychology to provide an interactive, engaging conversation about what is unique about the emerging power of Big Tech firms, given the growth of AI and digital technologies, and what we could or should do to respond to it, at multiple levels: Advice to companies and individuals, advice to society and regulators, and advice to academics wishing to contribute to one of the important, open debates of our times. Drawing on multiple fields and seeking not only commonalities but also unique insights (and, what history can teach us and offer by way of solace and by way of warning) we aim to push the boundaries of the current discussion in our field, and engage with the audience in Q&A.

Surveillance capitalism is what happened when US democracy stood down. Two decades later, it fails any reasonable test of responsible global stewardship of digital information and communications. The abdication of the world’s information spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic because it obstructs solutions to all other crises. The surveillance capitalist giants–Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and their ecosystems–now constitute a sweeping political-economic institutional order that exerts oligopolistic control over most digital information and communication spaces, systems, and processes. The commodification of human behavior operationalized in the secret massive-scale extraction of human-generated data is the foundation of surveillance capitalism’s two-decade arc of institutional development. However, when revenue derives from commodification of the human, the classic economic equation is scrambled. Imperative economic operations entail accretions of governance functions and impose substantial social harms. Concentration of economic power produces collateral concentrations of governance and social powers. Oligopoly in the economic realm shades into oligarchy in the societal realm. Society’s ability to respond to these developments is thwarted by category errors. Governance incursions and social harms such as control over AI or rampant disinformation are too frequently seen as distinct crises and siloed, each with its own specialists and prescriptions, rather than understood as organic effects of causal economic operations. In contrast, this paper explores surveillance capitalism as a unified field of institutional development. Its four already visible stages of development are examined through a two-decade lens on expanding economic operations and their societal effects, including extraction and the wholesale destruction of privacy, the consequences of blindness-by-design in human-to-human communications, the rise of AI dominance and epistemic inequality, novel achievements in remote behavioral actuation such as the Trump 2016 campaign, and Apple-Google’s leverage of digital infrastructure control to subjugate democratic governments desperate to fight a pandemic. Structurally, each stage creates the conditions and constructs the scaffolding for the next, and each builds on what went before. Substantively, each stage is characterized by three vectors of accomplishment: novel economic operations, governance carve-outs, and fresh social harms. These three dimensions weave together across time in a unified architecture of institutional development. Later-stage harms are revealed as effects of the foundational-stage economic operations required for commodification of the human. Surveillance capitalism’s development is understood in the context of a larger contest with the democratic order—the only competing institutional order that poses an existential threat. The democratic order retains the legitimate authority to contradict, interrupt, and abolish surveillance capitalism’s foundational operations. Its unique advantages include the ability to inspire action and the necessary power to make, impose, and enforce the rule of law. While the liberal democracies have begun to engage with the challenges of regulating today’s privately owned information spaces, I argue that regulation of institutionalized processes that are innately catastrophic for democratic societies cannot produce desired outcomes. The unified field perspective suggests that effective democratic contradiction aimed at eliminating later-stage harms, such as “disinformation,” depends upon the abolition and reinvention of the early-stage economic operations that operationalize the commodification of the human, the source from which such harms originate. The clash of institutional orders is a death match over the politics of knowledge in the digital century. Surveillance capitalism’s antidemocratic economic imperatives produce a zero-sum dynamic in which the deepening order of surveillance capitalism propagates democratic disorder and deinstitutionalization. Without new public institutions, charters of rights, and legal frameworks purpose-built for a democratic digital century, citizens march naked, easy prey for all who steal and hunt with human data. Only one of these contesting orders will emerge with the authority and power to rule, while the other will drift into deinstitutionalization, its functions absorbed by the victor. Will these contradictions ultimately defeat surveillance capitalism, or will democracy suffer the greater injury? It is possible to have surveillance capitalism, and it is possible to have a democracy. It is not possible to have both.

À l’âge de l’information, doit-on tout accepter au nom du libre accès à Internet ? Derrière des déclarations d’intention relatives à la liberté et leur mission d’utilité publique, les géants de l’économie numérique pratiquent une forme inédite de capitalisme à travers la collecte massive de données personnelles. La sociologue et professeure émérite de la Harvard Business School, Shoshana Zuboff, a théorisé sur ce nouveau visage de l’exploitation qu’elle nomme « capitalisme de surveillance ».

Epistemic rights are the cause of which privacy is the effect. The wholesale destruction of privacy during the first two decades of the digital century is the consequence of the unilateral nullification of elemental epistemic rights, as the leading surveillance capitalist corporations established unrivaled dominance over the totality of the world’s information now rendered in digital format. This political and human rights contest has been obfuscated to the point of invisibility, despite the fact that its outcome will define the moral and political milieu of our information civilization. The distribution of epistemic rights determines the degree of epistemic inequality, defined as unequal access to learning imposed by hidden mechanisms of information capture, production, analysis, and control. It is best exemplified in the fast-growing abyss between what people can know and what can be known about them. This new axis of social inequality does not reflect what we can earn but rather what we can learn. It represents a focal shift in social ordering from ownership of “the means of production” to ownership of “the production of meaning,” from the division of labor to the division of learning. Asymmetries of knowledge feed the progress of instrumentarian power as exclusive knowledge is translated through the networked layer of digital instrumentation to produce new capabilities of behavioral actuation at scale – influencing, tuning, herding, and modifying human behavior toward others’ commercial -- and political-- ends. The division of learning is both the ascendant principle of social order in the twenty-first century and already hostage to surveillance capital’s privileged position, empowered by its self-authorized ownership of human-generated data and its exclusive command of analysis and prediction capabilities. The result: Caveat usor. These conditions are best understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society. Just as Durkheim warned of the subversion of the division of labor by the powerful forces of industrial capital a century ago, today’s successful prosecution of information warfare by surveillance capital against citizen-users exerts private power over the definitive principle of social order in our time. Epistemic inequality is the signature deformation of this epoch, as the pathologies of the division of learning infect society and undermine democracy. How do surveillance capitalists defend their dominance? What responses are required? Finally, the citizens’ paradox: Democracy is the ultimate target of this epistemic poison and its only antidote.

Alors que la division du travail etait le principe organisateur de la societe industrielle, c’est la division du savoir qui organise la societe numerique. Mais elle est prise en otage par le capitalisme de la surveillance qui traduit l’experience humaine en donnees informatiques a son profit. Un tel mouvement historique exige une reponse democratique.

La industria digital prospera gracias a un principio casi infantil: extraer los datos personales y vender predicciones sobre los comportamientos de los usuarios a los anunciantes. Pero, para que aumenten los beneficios, el pronostico debe transformarse en certeza. Para ello, ya no basta con prever: ahora se trata de modificar las conductas humanas a gran escala.

A 2002 review of “wireless telemedicine” stressed the value of home health monitoring for the elderly and the expansion of health services in remote areas. A diagram of the proposed digital architecture for such services featured only three parties: a closed loop that exclusively linked a person at home, her hospital’s servers, and her physician (Pattichis et al. 2002, 143– 153). Digitalized information about one’s body was imagined as deeply “mine”: an inalienable extension of self with which one could choose to enrich already close relationships, such as those between a patient and a trusted doctor or elderly parents and their adult children. In just a few years, however, those 2002 schematics faded like an old daguerreotype. Many studies of health monitoring continue to emphasize its utility for the elderly and other forms of remote care, but the conversation has decisively moved on from its earlier state of grace. Researchers anticipate the fusion of “smart cities” and what’s now called “m-health” to produce “smart health,” defined as “the provision of health services by using the contextaware network and sensing infrastructure of smart cities” (Solanas et al. 2014, 74– 81). Toward that end, there are now reliable sensors for rendering an increasing range of physiological processes as behavioral data, including body temperature, heart rate, brain activity, muscle motion, blood pressure, sweat rate, energy expenditure, and body and limb motion (Intille et al. 2012, 24– 31; Mukhopadhyay 2015, 1321– 1330). There are sensors that can render audio, visual, and physiological data during postsurgical patient recovery and rehabilitation (Castillejo et al. 2013, 38– 49). A flexible, sensored textile patch has been developed that can render breathing,

This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization, ’ and continuous experiments. ’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: Big Other. ’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsShoshana ZuboffAbout the authorShoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School (retired). She is the author of In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism.

People throughout the legal community are begin- ning to realize that clients are demanding creative and pro-active lawyering, driven by new ways of thinking about legal solutions, while focusing on reducing rising legal costs. Lawyers will need to put aside the presup- positions of the old competitive world and compete according to totally new rules of engagement in order to survive in the increasingly turbulent business environ- ment of the future. Good examples of new market competition and chal- lenges come from many state courts. For instance, look at the Utah State Court, whose mission is "to provide the people an open, fair, efficient, and independent sys- tem for the advancement of justice under the law." The Utah State Court's Web site includes an area designed to help the public: Complete Divorce Papers Online, File Landlord-Tenant Disputes, and File Small Claims. The court's mission says nothing about preserving the lawyer's role in any of these transactions.