Destaques

Rui Alexandre Grácio [2024]

“Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.
1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.”

“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.”

“Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”

“We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.”

“Surveillance capitalism operates through unprecedented asymmetries in knowledge and the power that accrues to knowledge.”

“Just as industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity. ”

“A first challenge to comprehension is the confusion between surveillance capitalism and the technologies it employs. Surveillance capitalism is not technology; it is a logic that imbues technology and commands it into action.”

“We cannot evaluate the current trajectory of information civilization without a clear appreciation that technology is not and never can be a thing in itself, isolated from economics and society. This means that technological inevitability does not exist. (…) Despite this, each generation stumbles into the quicksand of forgetting that technology is an expression of other interests.”

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has four parts. Each presents four to five chapters as well as a final chapter intended as a coda that reflects on and conceptualizes the meaning of what has gone before. ”

“On the strength of its unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power, surveillance capitalism achieves dominance over the division of learning in society—the axial principle of social order in an information civilization.”

“Any consideration of the division of learning must resolve these dilemmas expressed in three essential questions. The first question is “Who knows?” This is a question about the distribution of knowledge and whether one is included or excluded from the opportunity to learn. The second question is “Who decides?” This is a question about authority: which people, institutions, or processes determine who is included in learning, what they are able to learn, and how they are able to act on their knowledge. What is the legitimate basis of that authority? The third question is “Who decides who decides?” This is a question about power. What is the source of power that undergirds the authority to share or withhold knowledge?”

“Our freedom flourishes only as we steadily will ourselves to close the gap between making promises and keeping them. Implicit in this action is an assertion that through my will I can influence the future. It does not imply total authority over the future, of course, only over my piece of it. In this way, the assertion of freedom of will also asserts the right to the future tense as a condition of a fully human life.”

“In the dystopia of the uncontract, surveillance capitalism’s drive toward certainty fills the space once occupied by all the human work of building and replenishing social trust, which is now reinterpreted as unnecessary friction in the march toward guaranteed outcomes. The deletion of uncertainty is celebrated as a victory over human nature: our cunning and our opportunism.”

“So let us establish our bearings. Uncertainty is not chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense. We choose the fallibility of shared promises and problem solving over the certain tyranny imposed by a dominant power or plan because this is the price we pay for the freedom to will, which founds our right to the future tense. In the absence of this freedom, the future collapses into an infinite present of mere behavior, in which there can be no subjects and no projects: only objects.”

“Similarly, the meaning of Polanyi’s prophecy for us now can be grasped only through the lens of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives as they frame its claim to human experience. If we are to rediscover our sense of astonishment, then let it be here: if industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism will thrive at the expense of human nature and threatens to cost us our humanity.”

“Under the regime of instrumentarian power, the mental agency and self-possession of the right to the future tense are gradually submerged beneath a new kind of automaticity: a lived experience of stimulus-response-reinforcement aggregated as the comings and goings of mere organisms. Our conformity is irrelevant to instrumentarianism’s success. There is no need for mass submission to social norms, no loss of self to the collective induced by terror and compulsion, no offers of acceptance and belonging as a reward for bending to the group. All of that is superseded by a digital order that thrives within things and bodies, transforming volition into reinforcement and action into conditioned response.”