Tomorrows Versus Yesterdays E-Book

Andrew Keen

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 292

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The current crisis of democracy, the growing economic inequality between rich and poor, our narcissistic social media culture and the looming menace of AI all threaten us as never before. The challenges presented by technology have long been central in these issues, but how can we take advantage of the opportunities it provides to shape a better twenty-first century? The most important division of our age is between the 'tomorrows', those who believe that the future can be better than the past, and the 'yesterdays' who harbor a nostalgic desire to return to a rose-tinted past. This division is encapsulated by how we answer a simple question: can we trust the future? In Tomorrows Versus Yesterdays, Andrew Keen discusses the issue with some of the most influential thinkers of our time. The book is split into four sections. The first identifies the challenges of our digital age. The second focuses on the failure of the internet revolution to realize its ambitious goals. The third untangles the complex relationship between populism and digital media, before the final part presents possible solutions to the challenges of our age. The result is an insightful examination of the most important issues facing us today, and essential reading for anyone interested in the impact of the digital revolution.

Leseprobe

TOMORROWSvsYESTERDAYS

Also by Andrew Keen

How to Fix the Future

The Internet Is Not the Answer

Digital Vertigo

The Cult of the Amateur

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © DLD Media GmbH, 2020

The right of DLD Media GmbH to be identified as the proprietor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 112 2

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 113 9

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FOR THE TOMORROWS OF TODAY

Contents

Foreword by Steffi Czerny

Introduction

Part 1 THE CRISIS

Shoshana Zuboff

John Borthwick

Maria Ressa

Rana Foroohar

Part 2 WAKING UP FROM UTOPIA

David Kirkpatrick

Douglas Rushkoff

Eli Pariser

Kenneth Cukier

Peter Sunde

Part 3 DEMOCRACY AND ITS DIGITAL DISCONTENT

Peter Pomerantsev

Ece Temelkuran

Catherine Fieschi

Ian Bremmer

Martin Wolf

Part 4 FIXING THE FUTURE

Richard Stengel

Carl Benedikt Frey

Toomas Ilves

Scott Galloway

The Interviewees

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Digitalization is rapidly transforming our world. It is one of the major driving forces of change in the last two decades. It is so drastic and unsettling that it fosters fear, sarcasm, and pessimism, and a longing for the ‘good old days’ that felt more stable, less complex, and more humane. Of course, globalization, with its geopolitical conflicts, climate change, migration, and the shifting balance of economic power between West and East, is just as powerful a driver of change, but the boundless disruptive power of the digital revolution is behind it all.

When the internet was first made commonly available with the World Wide Web, we were all euphoric about its promise and the technologies that were developing alongside it. Everything was going to be easier and would allow us to reach higher, go faster, and further. On a societal level, the potential of a connected world, the proverbial global village, with shared knowledge and readily available information, was an exciting opportunity. The internet was thought to be the ultimate tool to ensure that democracy was finally going to spread across the globe like wildfire.

It was at this time that DLD was formed, to explore this new technology. In 2005, the year of the first DLD conference in Munich, there was no Twitter, no LinkedIn, and no Instagram. Facebook had just launched and Google was still a startup, but every new digital company was praised as a gamechanging business idea. We, as consumers, are still harvesting the positive outcomes of this wave of digitalization, which are being constantly reiterated in the shape of new products: realtime communication, from emailing and texting to video calls, custom search, online learning, video streaming, and online shopping and banking.

DLD connected the early digital adopters with the so-called ‘old economy’. Some industries had a hard time adapting and many went under, while others were able to reinvent themselves or diversify their business model; DLD’s parent company, Hubert Burda Media, was able to transform from a printing and publishing house into a digital media and technology company.

The rapid rise of social media in the first decade of the twentyfirst century was embraced with enthusiasm. Mark Zuckerberg presented his social network at a DLD conference in Munich in 2009 in a conversation with David Kirkpatrick, who is featured in this book and has since become one of Facebook’s most fervent critics.

When social media peaked, we were all posting, sharing, liking and commenting – which led to an entirely new way of communicating and sharing content. Once again, digital services were celebrated as new tools to further democratize the planet. The Arab Spring made Twitter the medium of the oppressed, as people were able to make themselves heard with poignant messages and live footage that escaped state-controlled media propaganda.

All the while, the companies running these ‘democratization tools’ gained unfathomable amounts of data about their users: their age, gender, and location, but also their likes, dislikes, habits, opinions, and beliefs – a treasure trove that they could convert directly into advertising revenue. Never before had it been possible to play messages to more or less the exact group of people who were supposed to hear them.

Most of us do not object to receiving special offers for products that we like, information about books that we might be interested in, or music that might match our taste. We do not object to being presented with news stories that are relevant to us on social media or to commentaries by people whose views we share. We do not object to our cell phone guiding us through cities. Most of us are willing to share our data if we get a useful and apparently free service in return.

But where do we draw the line? When does sharing our data with a company with whom we never signed a contract of service become an invasion of our privacy? When does reading news that reconfirms our beliefs and watching content that matches our taste become manipulation that traps us in a bubble and reduces our view of the world to a one-dimensional picture? And who is responsible for filtering what we see, read, and consume on digital platforms?

These are some of the questions that have in recent years dampened the euphoria about the digital age. Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, and the Christchurch mosque shootings have brought criticism of the digital age and its major players, and there is a massive reluctance to comply with the speed of change. Statements like ‘Privacy is over’, ‘Tech giants are taking over every market and stifle innovation’, ‘Millions of people will lose their jobs due to smart machines’, and ‘Elections are won with so-called alternative facts’ illustrate this development. This is much more than the eternal game of up and down, of yin and yang; with the digital age, we have opened Pandora’s box. Alongside the excitement of digitalization, we have neglected to set the rules.

If history can teach us anything, it is that big societal and technological changes never come with a rule book attached – be it the invention of the printing press, industrialization, or the French Revolution. Rules are formed by trial and error; they are discussed and fought over. And every big change in history has seen winners and losers; the question is whether the digital age can be one that brings opportunities for everyone. One thing is for sure: we will not find the answers to the questions that the digital revolution raises by looking to the past. The procedures of the pre-digital world no longer work when it comes to ensuring competition, fairness, and prosperity.

We are at the point in the digital revolution where we have to step up and rewrite the rules. If the internet and social media are tools for democratization, then we should use them as such. If new technologies, from artificial intelligence to blockchain and quantum computing, have the potential to make the world better, then let us embrace and learn about them. Let us not be sheep going along with the crowd, not asking, knowing, or daring.

We believe that digital technologies play an integral part in solving, or at least mitigating, current issues – locally as well as globally. Digital communication platforms can help secure freedom of speech and encourage citizen engagement rather than spreading hate and disinformation, but we have to set the rules.

In the face of accelerating automation, online education can provide urgently needed specialist training to people who are untrained or don’t have access to schools, but we have to provide stable internet access for everyone.

Digital technology can enhance public services, healthcare, farming, medicine, or mobility. It has the potential to save money and time and to make the world better, but we have to ensure it is secure, available to everyone, well regulated, and easy to use.

Machine learning, robotics, blockchain, and quantum computing all have huge innovation and business potential, but we have to ensure that we have the knowledge, the legal framework, and the investment power to make the most of it.

There is reason for optimism, and this goes to the core of what DLD is about. The digital age offers us boundless opportunities, but we need courage to seize them and to deal with the challenges along the way. Courage is the fuel that drives us to overcome boundaries – in our life, in business, and in our own mind. It gets us fired up to see the glass as half full rather than half empty, and to push for tomorrow rather than clinging to yesterday.

Steffi Czerny, Managing Director, DLD Media

TOMORROWSvsYESTERDAYS

INTRODUCTION

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5

A single conversation can sometimes trigger a series of further conversations each of which, in turn, can inspire many more. The original conversation that inspired this book was with Paul-Bernhard Kallen, the CEO of Burda Media, the German media conglomerate that runs the DLD series of conferences. I interviewed Paul for my last book, How to Fix the Future, and it was this conversation that flowered into the ones in this collection.

Over the last few years, whenever Paul and I have met – whether in Munich, New York City, Brussels, Palo Alto, or the other venues on the global DLD conference circuit – we’ve talked about the most pressing questions and challenges of our age. Our conversations have been about the threat and promise of Silicon Valley, the current crisis of liberal democracy, the growing economic inequality between rich and poor, our narcissistic social media culture, and the threat of AI. Whatever our specific subject, however, the overarching theme of our conversations has always been the same: how can we learn from the analog twentieth century to shape a better digital twentyfirst century? Technology, and particularly the opportunities and challenges of digital technology, has always been at the heart of our conversations. The digital revolution, we both believe, is what’s shaping the core problems and opportunities of our age.

While Paul and I share a concern about the current direction of the digital revolution, neither of us have fallen into the trap of idealizing an imaginary analog past. We aren’t, I hope, just another couple of middle-aged white guys who want to return to the imaginary idyll of our childhoods. So our conversations, which share the optimistic, forward-thinking spirit of Steffi Czerny’s DLD conferences, have never been nostalgic for a supposedly halcyon analog twentieth-century world that can’t, at the flick of a switch, be reinvented in the digital twenty-first century. We agree that we can learn from the past, but realize that you can’t turn back the clock; if history teaches us anything, we know, it’s that we should focus on tomorrow rather than yesterday.

I could have written a book in the style of Louis Malle’s 1981 movie My Dinner with Andre and called it My Conversations with Paul, but rather than transcribing our own conversations, Paul wanted to democratize the project. He suggested that I start a podcast in which I discussed the great questions and challenges of our age with leading technologists, writers, entrepreneurs, and investors around the world. And so, with the help of Paul’s business development lieutenant, Sophie Ahrens, and Steffi Czerny, Alexandra Schiel, and Heiko Schlott at DLD, I started a podcast series entitled ‘Keen on Democracy’ that has built upon the themes of my original conversations with Paul, and particularly on the idea that the way to fix the future isn’t to retreat into a romanticized past.

In the traditional narrative, the twenty-first-century podcast comes after the twentieth-century book, but the story of this book is the reverse. Having launched a weekly podcast series that has been downloaded by many thousands of listeners, we decided to transform it into a physical book; the conversations that you are about to read were all originally broadcast as part of the ‘Keen on Democracy’ podcast.

Unlike digital media, books are not infinite storage systems. Only so many pages can exist between a book’s covers, so not all the podcasts from the series could be included in this book. After a spirited debate, we selected the 18 interviews which we believed best captured the questions and challenges of our digital age. If you enjoy the conversations in this book, I urge you to listen to all the interviews in the podcast series by subscribing online.

One of the conversations from the podcast series that didn’t make it into this collection was with David Goodhart, the British author of the controversial 2017 book Road to Somewhere. Goodhart told me that in our globalized world, where twentieth-century political distinctions like ‘left’ and ‘right’ and ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ appear archaic, the key difference is between what he calls ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’. And there’s no doubt that, in today’s age of Trump, Putin, and Brexit, his distinction between a global cosmopolitan elite (the ‘anywheres’) and more fixed communities (the ‘somewheres’) helps to make sense of the shouting matches that define our times.

However, I think there’s an even better way to frame the divisions of today’s world. Rather than Goodhart’s ‘somewheres’ versus ‘anywheres’ split, the most important division of our age is, I believe, between what I dub the ‘tomorrows’ and the ‘yesterdays’. This division is encapsulated by how an individual answers a simple question: can we trust the future?

The ‘tomorrows’ – people such as Paul-Bernhard Kallen, Steffi Czerny, and the thinkers featured in this book – believe that the future, for all its problems, can and indeed must be better than the past. The ‘tomorrows’ trust the twenty-first century; the ‘yesterdays’, by contrast, have no trust in the future; rather, they are nostalgic for something they believe we’ve lost and want to return to this imaginary past.

This idea of yesterdays and tomorrows was triggered by my podcast conversation with Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time magazine. Stengel tells a memorable story about an encounter with Vladimir Putin:

‘When I was editor of Time, we made Vladimir Putin Person of the Year in 2007 and he agreed to an interview. We went to Moscow, and from there we drove out to his dacha outside Moscow for lunch, but he kept us waiting for six hours so it turned into dinner.

‘After the interview we had this great British photographer named Platon take his picture. Platon is this kind of elfin fellow and while he’s taking the picture, his schtick is that he talks about The Beatles and just before he takes the picture, he asks the person what their favorite Beatles song is?

‘Putin had not said a word of English during the whole interview and when Platon turned to him and asked, “What’s your favorite Beatles song?” Putin, without missing a beat, said, “Yesterday”.’

With his nostalgia for the twentieth-century Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin epitomizes the twenty-first-century ‘yesterday man’. He is, as Peter Pomerantsev reminds us, the pioneer of a nostalgic ideology that doesn’t trust the future – no wonder his favorite Beatles song is ‘Yesterday’.

In contrast with Vladimir Putin, the people featured in this book are united in wanting to trust the future, but that doesn’t mean that they agree on how to fix or shape it. For example, some of my interviewees trust the regulators to solve the most pressing issues of our digital age, while others believe that this can be better achieved through individuals or corporations. Some trust the United States as the pioneer of a better future, while others have more faith in the European model. Some want to split up the Silicon Valley leviathans, but others don’t. Some want more direct democracy, while others favor representative democracy. Some want more market capitalism, and some want less.

We’ve divided the interviews into four sections:

We begin with conversations featuring Shoshana Zuboff, Maria Ressa, John Borthwick, and Rana Foroohar that identify the core problems and challenges of our digital age.

The second section explores the ideas of David Kirkpatrick, Douglas Rushkoff, Peter Sunde, Eli Pariser, and Kenn Cukier, focusing on the failure of the internet revolution to realize its ambitious goals.

The third part presents interviews with Peter Pomerantsev, Catherine Fieschi, Ian Bremmer, Martin Wolf, and Ece Temelkuran that explore the current crisis of democracy and untangle the complex relationship between populism and digital media.

The final section includes conversations with Carl Benedikt Frey, Toomas Ilves, Richard Stengel, and Scott Galloway that focus on possible solutions to the challenges of our digital age.

I suggested earlier in this introduction that conversations can be viral. My single conversation with Paul-Bernhard Kallen triggered a series of podcasts which resulted in the eighteen conversations in this book, but that should be the beginning rather than the end of the conversation. This book, in the spirit of the DLD conferences, is part of an ongoing conversation about the future. Your job is to read these interviews and then start your own conversation – that’s the shortcut to a better tomorrow.

PART 1

THE CRISIS

SHOSHANA ZUBOFF

In 2018, before her brilliant book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power was published, Shoshana Zuboff sent me a review copy. Astonished by its fluency, elegance, and passion, I wrote a glowing pre-publication quote comparing the book to The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. Many other reviewers were equally impressed by her erudition and intelligence, with some even suggesting that it was the most important book yet published in the twenty-first century.

I admit that I was a little nervous when Shoshana agreed to be interviewed by me at my home in Berkeley, California, for the ‘Keen on Democracy’ podcast. I hadn’t met her before and was keen to talk to the woman behind this immense book; I was pleased to discover that Shoshana is as fluent, elegant, and passionate in person as is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She is a remarkable woman and thinker, and I hope this interview does justice to her brilliance.

Andrew Keen: The most acclaimed new book about technology in 2019 is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. The Irish Times called it ‘The most important book of the twenty-first century’; a number of other authors have compared it to Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty in terms of its critique of the digital revolution. Shoshana Zuboff, congratulations; have you been surprised with this huge acclaim for your book?

Shoshana Zuboff: The book has been a long project of intense study and concentration for many years, and seven years of writing. I think as an author, one always hopes but one never knows. A lot of things worked out in terms of the timing for this book, because I think we’re finally at a moment when many of us in the United States, Europe, and around the world are already beginning to have doubts about this whole digital milieu – who is running it, who is controlling it, how is it affecting our lives, is it just, is it unjust? A lot of people are trying to get their minds around this and are trying to understand it and put words to a general sense of malaise – something is not right, but we don’t know what to call it.

Andrew Keen: So you’ve called it ‘surveillance capitalism’. What does that mean?

Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism refers to the social relations that are required in order for this kind of economic logic to be successful, so I call it ‘the social relations of the oneway mirror’. In other words, if the methods and mechanisms of surveillance capitalists were out in the open, if they were known to us, we would be rebelling. We would be resisting. We would be saying no, and they would not be making any money.

Andrew Keen: So who are the surveillance capitalists? Is it Google? Is it Facebook? Is it Amazon? Is it Apple?

Shoshana Zuboff: Surveillance capitalism was discovered, invented, and elaborated at Google in 2000, 2001, during the dot-com bust. From there it migrated to Facebook with Sheryl Sandberg, and from there it became the default option in Silicon Valley and in the tech sector in general, but what’s most interesting is that it is no longer a function of a single corporation or a few big tech corporations or even of the tech sector. This is now an economic logic that has spread across the normal and has become the gold standard that people are chasing in virtually every economic sector: insurance, retail, health, finance, all the way to automobile manufacturing, where the great industrialists of the twentieth century got their start – because of course, Ford Motor was the crucible of twentieth-century mass production. And now it’s the CEO of Ford Motor who is publicly discussing that company’s move toward what I describe as surveillance capitalism.

Andrew Keen: I always imagined surveillance capitalism as being built around the business model of free, but are you suggesting that it can also involve people selling products and then building data and the disruption of privacy on the back of that?

Shoshana Zuboff: We blew by free a long time ago. First of all, we pay for the devices that participate in surveillance capitalism and represent the interface for these vast supply chains of behavioral data that are shunted to machine intelligence operations. We pay for the phone. We pay for the television set that listens to our conversation. We pay for the mattress that has the sensors in it that siphons data to the Nest thermostat that siphons data to the Nest security system that just a couple of weeks ago was revealed to have a microphone built into it.

Andrew Keen: And Nest, of course, is owned by Google.

Shoshana Zuboff: So that’s one way that we’re paying for it, but the insurance industry now is what they call ‘behavioral underwriting’, where they are trying to tap into data streams about our real-time behavior, as well as other sources of personal information, and use that for their evaluation of their premiums.

Andrew Keen: So in the old days, in the industrial age, everyone bought the same insurance and the insurance company didn’t know too much about you. These days, in the age of surveillance capitalism, they’ll know how many times we go to the gym, whether we smoke, what we eat, where we walk, if we walk at all. Is that what surveillance capitalism is?

Shoshana Zuboff: It’s the complete destruction of privacy, and I would stress that in order to have privacy, we have to have the right to make decisions about the boundaries of our own experience. And what surveillance capitalism does carefully and intentionally is engineer their methods and systems to bypass our awareness so we never know what, when, or how they are claiming our personal experience as raw material to translate into personal data, to ship to their machines, to create predictions about our future behavior.

And because we are intentionally engineered to be ignorant of this whole structure, we have lost the right to put boundaries on our own experience. We’ve lost the right to decide what is private and what is public. We’ve lost the right to exercise our own sense of self-determination and our own individual autonomy. This is intolerable because when we just zoom out a little bit, we understand that one can’t even think of the possibility of a democratic society without the assumption that we have citizens who have the ability to make autonomous moral judgments. And in a whole variety of ways, compelled by their own economic imperatives, surveillance capitalism is on a collision course with human freedom.

Andrew Keen: Join the dots between the shift toward authoritarianism – Brexit, Trump, Putin, China – and surveillance capitalism.

Shoshana Zuboff: Well, those are a lot of dots.

Andrew Keen: But is there a single path between those dots, or is it an interconnected series of dots?

Shoshana Zuboff: All of those dots, certainly China, Cambridge Analytica, and what we now understand to be the Russian intelligence interventions in these elections, derive from one central source, and that is the two decades of careful invention and elaboration of the methods and mechanisms of surveillance capitalism.

What Cambridge Analytica, China, and Russia represent is a way of commandeering these mechanisms and methods and pivoting them a couple of degrees toward commercial outcomes instead of political outcomes. But they all derive from the same source, and when you understand what Cambridge Analytica was up to, those methods that they used had begun to be developed by academic researchers as early as 2010, 2011, and were already being adapted by surveillance capitalists. And even after the Cambridge Analytica revelations in March 2018, we have a leaked document from Facebook in April 2018 that is a beautiful description of Facebook doing what Cambridge Analytica did, and doing it on steroids.

Beginning with Cambridge Analytica, what we see there is a day in the life, routine life, of a solid, self-respecting surveillance capitalist.

Andrew Keen: So what do we do about it? The subtitle of your book is The Fight for a Human Future, and your definition of a human future is one with human agency. How do we reestablish human agency in a world where it seems as if we’ve lost it? Where do we begin?

Shoshana Zuboff: We begin with democracy.

Andrew Keen: And democracy is the purest manifestation of human agency, the will of the people?

Shoshana Zuboff: Everything depends upon democracy. We’re living in a moment, in the United States and Europe and other parts of the world, where democracy appears to be under siege, in a way that many of us thought was unimaginable. Democratic institutions are being tested and some have fallen, even within Western Europe which we thought was inviolable to these kinds of threats.

Andrew Keen: Well, how is it going to work? How are we going to get democracy back? Are we grabbing it back? The human future is something we have to seize – it’s not going to be given to us.

Shoshana Zuboff: I talk to young people a lot and what I’ve come to understand is that a lot of young people have the idea that democracy is like a rock, it’s like a mountain. It’s there when you’re born and it stays there and it’s immovable. But that’s not what democracy is. My metaphor for it is more like the hoop game that kids played in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, where you’ve got a hoop and you roll it and you run after it and you try to keep it from teetering and falling over. Every generation faces the work of running after that hoop and preventing it from teetering and falling over, and that’s where we are now. And I believe that we’ve been in worse jams; look at the bloody story of the twentieth century. My grandparents and my great-grandparents have been in worse jams, and we found our way out of them.

Andrew Keen: Is this another war, Shoshana? Is this equivalent to war in some way, this fight against surveillance capitalism?

Shoshana Zuboff: Well, Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, to whom we owe a great debt, called it ‘information warfare’. And the thing about this information warfare is that it’s not states facing off against one another, soldier to soldier, military to military. When we talk about surveillance capitalism, it’s actually private surveillance capital facing off against all of us.

Andrew Keen: So is it an equivalent, if we want to think of things in historical terms, of the nineteenth century and the fight against what Marx called bourgeois capitalism or industrial capitalism?

Shoshana Zuboff: Let me give you an analogy. Earlier in the nineteenth century in Britain you had the term ‘aristocracy’ and you had the term ‘wealthy class’ and then for everyone else you had one term: the ‘lower classes’. And in the lower classes you had bankers and merchants and shopkeepers and laborers and paupers and everything in between. And it took decades for the idea of the laborer to emerge as an identity. They identified with one another as a collective identity because they understood their shared economic interests.

Andrew Keen: And is that what we need to do today? We have to think of ourselves as data laborers?

Shoshana Zuboff: No, let me amend that. Today we are called ‘users’.

Andrew Keen: Or consumers?

Shoshana Zuboff: Yes, and we didn’t start off by calling ourselves users. They call us users.

Andrew Keen: It’s interesting that people also describe drug addicts as users.

Shoshana Zuboff: Exactly, and I don’t think that’s an accident. So we thought that we were using these services that are free; we thought we were using social media. We thought we were using search; in fact, they are using us. So here we are, the great unwashed users, just like the lower classes.

Andrew Keen: What’s a better word? How should we be rethinking ourselves?

Shoshana Zuboff: Where we are now is understanding not just our economic interests, as was the case a century ago, when we understood our interests as laborers, as employees, and also as consumers. And we came together in those identities to address the challenges of twentieth-century industrial capitalism. And that was the institutions of collective bargaining, of trade unions, the right to strike. We used our identities to pressure our elected officials and draw on the resources of our democratic institutions for new legislation and new regulatory regimes. We outlawed child labor. We outlawed unsafe working conditions. We created legislation that governed the working week and wages, and we righted the incredible asymmetry of power that existed at that time. We made it something tolerable that approached an equilibrium that we could call market democracy.

Now we are way out of that equilibrium again. We’ve entered the twenty-first century already disfigured institutionally. We talked about the threat to democracy from below, which is the threat to human autonomy and free will because of the way in which surveillance capitalists intervene in our behavior to help manage us toward its guaranteed outcomes, which is one of its critical imperatives. But I also want to point out that we have the threats from above because in the first two decades of the twenty-first century these institutions of private capital have created asymmetries of knowledge that are beyond anything we’ve ever seen in human history.

So this is not only economic justice that is challenged here, as we saw a century ago; this is justice about who gets to know things, who decides who gets to know things, who decides who decides who gets to know things, and now that we live in an information civilization, if we aren’t able to know things, we aren’t able to earn a living or function effectively.

Andrew Keen: So what you’re saying is that the old tools of taming capitalism, of anti-trust, of breaking up large companies, and of more regulation are probably not sufficient in the age of surveillance capitalism? It requires new strategies and new ways of thinking, organizing, and conceiving of ourselves?

Shoshana Zuboff: We have not adequately implemented the anti-trust laws that exist, and those laws are important because surveillance capitalists can also be ruthless capitalists. And there are monopoly issues and there are anti-competitive issues and we should implement those laws. We have not implemented our privacy laws – in 2011 the Federal Trade Commission made a consent decree with Facebook that has not been enforced. So all these laws should be enforced and they are necessary, but once we understand the specific economic logic of surveillance capitalism – its mechanisms, the way it works, and the fact that it unilaterally takes private human experience for translation into behavioral data – no matter how much we implement anti-trust, we’re not going to stop those mechanisms.

So we also need to build on what has gone before and to invent the kinds of laws and regulatory regimes that are going to interrupt and even outlaw the mechanisms of surveillance capitalism. For example, people talk about data ownership. Well, once we get comfortable with the idea that we’re producing labor and we should own and be paid for it, we have omitted a very important first step: by saying we should own the data, we’ve essentially legitimated the fact that those data should exist in the first place, when those data exist illegitimately.

When you’re walking down the street, there are cameras that are doing facial recognition, and those cameras are funneled into these private supply chains for surveillance capitalism.

Andrew Keen: I don’t like to use inevitable but given the nature of Moore’s Law and given the devices that we all use, isn’t the personal data you’re talking about inevitable? Isn’t the question how does it get used? You can’t get rid of data, can you?

Shoshana Zuboff: No one wants to get rid of data – the whole point of the digital was that we would have a tremendous amount of data that would help us to improve our lives. But we’re talking about millions and millions of data points, personal information that is processed by Facebook, Google, and others on a daily basis, not to fix healthcare, to address the climate crisis, or to invent something that will fundamentally make hunger impossible, but to improve its ability to predict our behavior and to sell those predictions into its new behavioral futures markets to business customers who want to lay bets on what we’re going to do now, soon, and later.

Andrew Keen: Should that just be illegal then?

Shoshana Zuboff: Yes it should. Here we have this hugely lucrative form of capitalism that does not require us as customers, that has massive knowledge about us, that is not used for us, that knows everything about us while we know almost nothing about it, all of this for the benefit of business customers and not for us.