A Critical Political Economy of Surveillance-for-Profit
In the post below, Markus Kienscherf reflects on his article, “Surveillance Capital and Post-Fordist Accumulation: Towards a Critical Political Economy of Surveillance-for-Profit,” which appeared in a recent issue of Surveillance & Society.
In her statement before the US Congress last year, former Facebook product manager turned whistleblower Frances Haugen maintained that Facebook put profits before the safety of its users. This revelation was treated as shocking news by members of Congress and the media. Yet, the fact that a corporation focuses primarily, if not exclusively, on its bottom line shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, capitalism is all about profits for the sake of even greater profits in the future. And last I checked, Facebook and other digital advertising platforms still operated under the conditions of capitalism. But how does the business model of digital advertising platforms relate to the broader logic of capitalism?
Over the last two decades, several scholars have argued that digital technologies would usher in, or have already ushered in, radically new forms of profit-making and perhaps also a new type of capitalism. Hyphenated capitalisms, such as cognitive capitalism, data capitalism, platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism, have proliferated in the social science literature and the media. My article, however, shows that the business model of advertising platforms, such as Facebook and Google, does not so much mark a rupture with the general logic of capitalist profit-making as an intensification of earlier attempts to smooth out the messy and uneven processes of capitalist production and circulation.
Advertising platforms are in the business of selling predictions about their users’ behaviour to advertisers. Most of us use digital platforms to engage in all sorts of productive and recreational activities. In doing so, we either wittingly or unwittingly produce data that the platform owners and operators appropriate. Our interactions on and with digital platforms allow capitalists to obtain data about those parts of our lives which are not (yet) subject to the logic of capitalist profit-making. These data are, in turn, used to make us buy more stuff. Digital platforms are the infrastructure that subjects our social interactions to the control of capitalists. Surveillance is the instrument through which data about our personal lives are expropriated and turned into behavioural profiles to be sold to advertisers. Yet, what is genuinely new about all this is the “mere” breadth and depth of surveillance.
Capitalist profit-making was dependent on surveillance since the onset of industrialization: first to control workers during the production process; then, with the rise of advertising and market research, to establish at least some control over consumption. Digital advertising platforms “merely” extend the logic of capitalism into the most intimate personal lives of their users. Thus, rather than speaking of surveillance capitalism (or any other hyphenated capitalism), I argue that we should treat surveillance capital as a particular fraction of global capital and surveillance capitalists as a specific faction of the capitalist class. Surveillance capital — all the money and resources bound up in digital advertising platforms — performs an essential function for the producers and sellers of commodities (industrial and commercial capital) insofar as it helps manage, and perhaps also stimulate, consumption.
What is more, I locate surveillance capital’s extension of capitalist profit-making into people’s every day (virtual) lives within broader developments in global capitalism. The rise of more geographically dispersed processes of production and consumption, as well as the trend towards producing more customizable commodities at higher volumes, has increased the need for surveillance in general and targeted advertising in particular. These developments provided the historical conditions for the rise of surveillance capital. At the same time, these new patterns of global production and consumption have also entailed the automation, offshoring and outsourcing of many well-paying jobs in the global north, which may well affect surveillance capital’s future.
In the article’s conclusion, I thus suggest that the developments in global capitalism that gave rise to surveillance capital may also bring about its downfall. The stagnating wages and the increasing job insecurity of still comparatively privileged workers (and consumers) in the global north may end up undermining the surveillance capital’s business model. Surveillance capital can only remain profitable as long as its advertising clients think that targeted advertising helps them and their clients sell more commodities. That means that consumers have to go on buying these commodities, which for most of them still depends on the paycheck they receive for selling their labour power to capital. But where will that money come from when wages stagnate, and jobs disappear because of offshoring and automation. Consumer demand can be propped up for a while by cheap credit or even something like a universal basic income (UBI) [unsurprisingly, some surveillance capitalists have come out in support of UBI]. But, ultimately, and precisely because it remains subject to the general logic of capitalism, surveillance capital depends on the production and consumption of commodities. If workers no longer produce and consume commodities, both surveillance capital and capitalism in general will cease to exist. And this may not be such a bad thing after all.
