The psychototalitarian ambitions of surveillance capitalism

The previous text in this series dealt with the expropriation and the use of the voice of the users of the new products devised by the surveillance capitalists https://link.medium.com/py1YaIbNP6. In item II, chapter 9, second part of the book, Shoshana Zuboff addresses a really explosive issue: the psychological and political exploitation of the behavioral surplus expropriated by surveillance capitalism.

Before going directly to the subject, I will take a small detour to give the reader the opportunity to understand the true dimension of the problem raised by the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

At the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud discovered a new continent. Studying the neuroses, fixations and other emotional pathologies of his patients, he developed a series of scientific hypotheses about the functioning of the human psyche and created a method to discover the most profound and ignored causes of the problems that affected their lives.

“The emergence of transference in a frankly sexual form - be it affection or hostility - in the treatment of neurosis, despite not being desired or induced by the doctor or the patient, has always seemed to me the most irrefutable proof that the origin of forces driving neurosis is in sexual life. This argument has never been given the degree of attention it deserves, because if it had happened, research in this field would not have left any other conclusions open. As far as I am concerned, this argument remains decisive, even more decisive than any of the more specific findings of analytical work. ” (Os Pensadores, Sigmund Freud, A história do movimento psicanalítico, Abril Cultural, São Paulo, 1978, p. 43)

In addition to proving the sexual origin of psychological problems, the transfer would be unquestionable evidence of the patient's impossibility of healing. Throughout his career, Freud cautiously argued that self-knowledge acquired during the psychoanalysis process could only help people to live better with their problems.

Freud's disciple, Carl G. Jung distanced himself from the master by defending the opposite thesis:

“... It is the ego that illuminates the entire system, allowing it to gain awareness and, therefore, to become realized. If, for example, I have an artistic gift that my ego is not aware of, this talent does not develop and it is as if it were non-existent. I can only bring it to reality if my ego notices it. The innate but hidden totality of the psyche is not the same as a fully realized and lived totality. ” (O homem e seus símbolos, Concepção e organização de Carl G. Jung, O processo de individuação, Nova Fronteira, Rio de Janeiro, 2008 p. 213)

Freud intended to help his patients to know and live with their problems. Jung defended the thesis that it would be possible to cure patients by bringing them to the reality of their egos, talents that they ignored. One saw man as a flawed being who could minimize his flaws. The other believed that man could overcome his limitations by improving himself. Both believed that under the surface of observable human behavior there was an immense continent. Freud wanted to explore it scientifically to improve his method, Jung believed that it could be conquered by anyone.”

Focusing exclusively on what could be observed, Burrhus Frederic Skinner thought differently:

“… An adequate behavioral science must consider the events that occur under the body's skin, not as physiological mediators of behavior, but as part of the behavior itself. You can handle these events without assuming that they are of a special nature or that they should be known in any special way. The skin is not as important as a boundary. Private and public events have the same type of physical dimensions. ” (Os Pensadores, Pavlov/Skinner, Crítica das explicações alternativas do comportamento, Abril Cultural, São Paulo, 1984, p. 345/3460

A little further, Skinner clarifies that:

“The problem of privacy can be approached in a new direction by getting started with behavior rather than starting from immediate experience. The strategy will certainly not be more circular or arbitrary than previous practices, and it has surprising results. Rather than concluding that man can only know his subjective experiences - that he is being tied forever to his private world and that his external world is just a construct - a behavioral theory of knowledge suggests that it is the private world that, if not it is entirely unknowable, at least it has little chance of being well known. ” (Os Pensadores, Pavlov/Skinner, Crítica das explicações alternativas do comportamento, Abril Cultural, São Paulo, 1984, p. 346)

Behaviorism rejects Freud and Jung's theses and argues that people's behaviors are the only things that can be observed and studied. They are acquired through learning, modeled by rules and become permanent due to reinforcement conditions. Changing the conditions for reinforcing and teaching new behaviors would therefore make it possible to reprogram people's subjective experiences.

In one of his books, Skinner designed a perfect society in which the best stimuli, reinforcements and rules would produce productive, happy, satisfied and aware of their obligations. Walden II was very successful. The biggest one was certainly to provoke a literary reaction that became one of the greatest classics of English language literature. I am obviously referring to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Let us now look at the facts narrated by Shoshana Zuboff. She tells how the internet started to be explored in a rudimentary way by a company interested in analyzing the behavior of employees. People subjected to this type of treatment did not like the result very much. After all, they began to suffer unwanted consequences from the public use of information that could or should be private.

“A paper published in 2015 broke fresh ground again by announcing that the accuracy of the team’s computer predictions had equaled or outpaced that of human judges, both in the use of Facebook ‘likes’ to assess personality traits based on the five-factor model and to predict ‘life outcomes’ such as ‘life satisfaction’, ‘substance use’, ou ‘depression’. The study made clear that the real breakthrough of the Facebook prediction research was the achiefement of economies in the exploitation of these most-intimate behavioral dephs with ‘automatede, accurate, and cheap personality assesstement tools’ that effectively target a new class of ‘objetcs’ once known as your ‘personality’. That these economies can be achieved outside the awareness of unrestrained animals makes them evem more appealing; as once research team emphasizes, ‘The traditional method for personality evaluation is extremely costly in terms of time and labour, and it cannot acquire customer personality information without their aweranes...’

Personality analyss for commercial advantage is built on behavioral surplus – the so-caled meta-data or mid-level metrics – honed and tested by ressearches and destinet to foil anyone who thinks that she is in the control of the ‘amount’ of personal infermation thar she reveal in social media.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019,p. 275)

According to a Facebook document leaked in 2018, these resources were used by Facebook.

“… ‘to predict future behavior’ targeting individuals on the basis of how they will behave, purchase, and think: now, soon, and later. The document links prediction, intervention, and modification. For exemple, a Facebook service called ‘loyalty prediction’ is touted for its ability to analyze behavioral surplus in order to predict individuals who are ‘at risk’ of shifting their brand allegiance. The idea is that these predictions can trigger advertisers to intervene promptly , targeting aggressive messages to stabilize loyalty and thus achieve guaranteed outcomes by altering the course of the future.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019,p. 279)

The political possibilities of this tool were widely used to guarantee the victory of Brexit in England, the election of Donald Turmp in the USA and, without a doubt, to overthrow Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. This was absolutely clear during the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

“ ‘We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of peoples profiles’, Wylie admitted, ‘and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target ttheir inner demons’. His summary of Cambridge Analytca’s accomplishments is a précis of the surveillance capitalist projetc and a rationale for its determination to render from the depths. These are the very capabilities that have gathered force over the nearly two decades of surveillance capitalim’s incubation in lawless space. These practices produced outrage around the world, when in fact they are routine elements in the daily elaboration of surveillance capitalim’s methods and goals, both at Facebook and within other surveillance capitalist companies. Cambridge Analytica merely reoriented the surveillance capitalist machinery from commercial markets in behavioral futures toward guaranteed outcomes in the political sphere.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019,p. 280/281)

At the end of this chapter 9 item, Shoshana Zuvoff states that:

“Billionaires such as Zuckergerg and Mercer have discovered that they can mucle their way to dominance of the dividion of learning in society by setting their sights on these rendition operations and the fortunes they tell. They aim to be unchallenged in their power to know, to decide who knows, and to decide who decides. The rendition of ‘personality’ wan an important milestone in this quest; a frontier, yes, but not the final frontier.” (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, PublicAffairs, New York, 2019,p. 282)

This is a really important topic. That is why I made a point of making a slight digression on the works of Freud, Jung and Skinner at the beginning precisely to resume the question of the lucrative and political exploitation of the human psyche by surveillance capitalism.

Psychoanalysis was created by Freud to help people to know themselves and live with their problems. It gained a new dimension with Jung's work to make available to everyone the possibility of conquering the depths of his own personality to bring out abilities that are dormant and unknown to the ego. Skinner rejected both theses and focused on the study of human behavior and the conditions that reinforce it to enable people to improve themselves by reprogramming their customs.

With greater or lesser care, all three psychoanalysts mentioned were concerned with only one thing: the well-being of their patients. People's well-being is not the object of any concern in the calculations of those who use techniques to analyze the expropriated behavioral surplus of internet and mobile phone users to guarantee economic and political results. This change in focus seems to me to be very relevant.

Patients are not and cannot be treated as means for the purposes of psychoanalysts. The duty of not doing any harm that obliges the doctor, prevents him from making analyzes without the knowledge of the people analyzed. It also forbids him to commercialize the analyzes he made for the purpose of guaranteeing the profits or political victory of anyone.

The automation of unauthorized mass psychoanalysis for the purpose of inducing people to consume or stop consuming a product, to support or reject a political proposal, to think one way and not another, to be happy or sad for cause of something that is placed on their Timeline is an evident perversion of medicine and should be treated as such. The result of this perversion is being harvested in England, the USA and Brazil.

If voters had not been manipulated, the outcome of the elections in these three countries would have been different. Would the COVID-19 pandemic kill the same number of English, Americans and Brazilians if they hadn't been used as mice in the political experiment lab that was built and profitably exploited by billionaires like Zuckergerg and Mercer?