The real New Economy?

“The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying,” writes Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff in an incisive, disquieting essay in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. We’re seeing the rise, she argues, of “a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism.”

Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary mechanisms associated with its historical success and corrupts the unity of supply and demand that has for centuries, however imperfectly, tethered capitalism to the genuine needs of its populations and societies, thus enabling the fruitful expansion of market democracy.

The product, which once formed the foundation and the boundary of the customer-company relation, becomes an excuse for the surreptitious collection of behavioral data. The product becomes the loss leader for surveillance. The money’s in the data.

Zuboff limns what she sees as the path of modern capitalism:  “once profits from products and services, then profits from [financial] speculation, and now profits from surveillance.”

This latest mutation may help explain why the explosion of the digital has failed, so far, to decisively impact economic growth, as so many of its capabilities are diverted into a fundamentally parasitic form of profit.

Zuboff’s is an ominous vision of a drift toward “a disfigured capitalism” that, facilitated by the public’s “ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, [and] habituation,” ends in “an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.” Is she overstating the case? Maybe. Maybe not. At the very least, she tells us a truth we seem eager to avoid: the most valuable things in the internet of things are the things formerly known as people.