The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

As Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian is a major force throughout The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, given Zuboff’s argument that Google was the pioneer of surveillance capitalist operations. Varian was a leader in the push for personalized technology. He insisted that Google needed to create machines that could predict what users needed to know and provide answers before users even initiated a query. Varian was confident in the personal digital assistant as a successful route to introducing personalized machine intelligence to the masses. In observing neoliberal class tensions, he hypothesized that personal assistants were the current envy of the middle and working classes, which led him to push for Google’s invention of a digital assistant service. Other tech firms then followed suit. Varian also authored the concept of the “uncontract,” an image of the future championed by surveillance capitalism that wishes to erase uncertainty and replace human contractual agreements, regulations, and relationships with automated processes, thus creating a utopia of certainty. 

Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder and CEO of Facebook. Along with Hal Varian, he is one of the most prominent surveillance capitalists working today and a recurring figure in Zuboff’s book. Zuckerberg is a significant force in building surveillance capitalism’s “utopia of certainty.” He wants Facebook to be the leading firm in a new global community that will create a unified, streamlined utopia. Facebook has also conducted several experiments on its unwitting user base to establish how social relations influence posting behaviors and site engagement. These experiments serve as a touchstone in many other experiments studying peoples’ digital interactions. For instance, in Chapter 16, Zuboff details how Zuckerberg designed his website to encourage social media addiction, leading to dire psychological effects in younger generations such as depression, self-objectification, and the inability to establish a firm sense of self. Mark Zuckerberg’s work has thus played a major role in cementing the power that surveillance capitalism holds over society.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a psychologist and behavioralist who established the theory of radical behaviorism. As a professor of psychology at Harvard University, he was a member of the faculty while Zuboff was a graduate student; in Chapter 12, she recalls how she would often debate him in the halls of the Harvard Psychology Department. Infamous for his methods of studying animal behavior, his conditioning experiments served as a roadmap for how the surveillance capitalists of the 21st century sought to build their predictive products and modify peoples’ behaviors. His philosophy of radical behaviorism interpreted human freedom as a thing of ignorance that stood in the way of a true, objective understanding of mankind. He sought to create a utopia of the “Other-One,” where humans were stripped of free will and rendered as agreeable, placated beings through behavioral engineering. In 1948, Skinner published a novel titled Walden Two, which elaborated upon radical behaviorism and illustrated his utopian vision for a society that would cure the 20th century evils of totalitarianism.