Re: <nettime> James Bridle: Review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Guardian)

[David Garcia <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

Felix wrote:

> Mozorov puts lots of emphasis on her lack of engagement with other
> theories of contemporary capitalism and her unwillingness to considers
> options beyond the market. And, really, not even Wikipedia is ever
> mentioned (expect as a source once) and Free Software only in relation
> to Android and Google's strategy to dominate it. Thus, she never asks
> why such alternatives exist and what could be done to support them. So,
> the only alternative we get is Apple, the company, as Richard Stallman
> famously put it, that "made prison look cool”.

I am also reading this large tome in bits and moments.. But so far I actually do feel 
there is more engagement other theories of 'contemporary capitalism’ than she is being 
given credit for by Mozorov. She goes into some detail on the relevance of Hannah Arendt’s 
complication of Marx’s concept of 'primitive accumulation’ (page 99) with regard to Google’s 
discovery of the potential for exploitation of the vast quantities of our ‘behavioural surplus’ 
which they simply seized as the new ‘virgin rain forest’ in the permissionless culture 
of Sylicon valley. 

Zuboff points out that Arendt complicates both Polanyi and Marx’s 
notion by pointing out that ‘primitive accumulation’ wasnt just "a one time primal explosion 
that gave rise to capitalism but a recuring phase in a repeating cycle as more aspects of
the social and natural world are subordinated to the market dynamic. 

Zuboff then proceeds to show how David Harvey builds on Arendt’s writing with his notion
of the “accumulation of dispossession”.. In this case of course we are being dispossed of our
own most intimate life spaces..

Coincidentally I was reading an interview with Harvey this morning where he asserts 
that “extraction and appropriation of value (often through dispossession) at the point 
of realisation is a political focus of struggle as are the qualities of daily life”
hewire.in/economy/david-harvey-marxist-scholar-neo-liberalism

So Zuboff provides useful explanetory and rhetorical tools to more aggressively contest
these new sites of accumulation.  

Of course I am quite early and I am sure that many of the flaws spotted are accurate 
but lack of engagement with other theories of capitalism doesnt seem to be quite correct.

She is certainly able to draw multiple familier threads together with some lucidity and anger which is
an achievement. As well as the ‘guts’ and intellectual confidence to pick fights with powerful contemporary 
players whom she identifies as complicit with surveilance capitalism (which differentiates her from other
highly placed scholars of the digital e.g. Manuel Castells). 

Although the extreme praise (the new Adam Smith or Marx etc) are probably ludicrous 
(so far and I am just a few chapters in) I think there is plenty of value to be found in the
nearly 700 hundred pages.

   


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