{"id":7539,"date":"2017-01-01T14:17:18","date_gmt":"2017-01-01T19:17:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7539"},"modified":"2017-01-01T16:23:49","modified_gmt":"2017-01-01T21:23:49","slug":"from-fordism-to-googlism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7539","title":{"rendered":"From Fordism to Googlism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/harvardmagazine.com\/2017\/01\/the-watchers\">The Watchers<\/a>,&#8221; an article by Jonathan Shaw in the new issue of <em>Harvard Magazine<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[Shoshana] Zuboff says that corporate use of personal data has set society on a path to a new form of capitalism that departs from earlier norms of market democracy.\u00a0She draws an analogy from the perfection of the assembly line: Ford engineers\u2019 discovery a century ago, after years of trial and error, that they had created \u201ca logic of high-volume, low-unit cost, which really had never existed before with all the pieces aligned.\u201d Today, many corporations follow a similar trajectory by packaging personal data and behavioral information and selling it to advertisers: what she calls \u201csurveillance capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cGoogle was ground zero,\u201d Zuboff begins. At first, information was used to benefit end users, to improve searches, just as Apple and Amazon use their customers\u2019 data largely to customize those individuals\u2019 online experiences. Google\u2019s founders once said they weren\u2019t interested in advertising. But Google \u201cdidn\u2019t have a product to sell,\u201d she explains, and as the 2001 dot.com bubble fell into crisis, the company was under pressure to transform investment into earnings. \u201cThey didn\u2019t start by saying, \u2018Well, we can make a lot of money assaulting privacy,\u2019\u201d she continues. Instead, \u201ctrial and error and experimentation and adapting their capabilities in new directions\u201d led them to sell ads based on personal information about users. Like the tinkerers at Ford, Google engineers discovered \u201ca way of using their capabilities in the context of search to do something utterly different from anything they had imagined when they started out.\u201d Instead of using the personal data to benefit the\u00a0<em>sources<\/em>\u00a0of that information, they commodified it, using what they knew about people to match them with paying advertisers. As the advertising money flowed into Google, it became a \u201cpowerful feedback loop of almost instantaneous success in these new markets.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThose feedback loops become drivers themselves,\u201d Zuboff explains. \u201cThis is how the logic of accumulation develops \u2026 and ultimately flourishes and becomes institutionalized. That it has costs, and that the costs fall on society, on individuals, on the values and principles of the liberal order for which human beings have struggled and sacrificed much over millennia\u2014<em>that<\/em>,\u201d she says pointedly, \u201cis off the balance sheet.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Privacy values in this context become externalities, like pollution or climate change, \u201cfor which surveillance capitalists are not accountable.\u201d In fact, Zuboff believes, \u201cPrinciples of individual self-determination are\u00a0<em>impediments<\/em>\u00a0to this economic juggernaut; they have to be vanquished. They are friction.\u201d The resulting battles will be political. They will be fought in legislatures and in the courts, she says. Meanwhile, surveillance capitalists have learned to use all necessary means to defend their claims, she says: \u201cthrough rhetoric, persuasion, threat, seduction, deceit, fraud, and outright theft. They will fight in whatever way they must for this economic machine to keep growing. &#8230;\u00a0This is an economic logic that\u00a0<em>must<\/em>\u00a0delete privacy in order to be successful.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From &#8220;The Watchers,&#8221; an article by Jonathan Shaw in the new issue of Harvard Magazine: [Shoshana] Zuboff says that corporate use of personal data has set society on a path to a new form of capitalism that departs from earlier norms of market democracy.\u00a0She draws an analogy from the perfection of the assembly line: Ford [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7539"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7543,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7539\/revisions\/7543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}