{"id":7620,"date":"2017-01-23T09:57:31","date_gmt":"2017-01-23T14:57:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7620"},"modified":"2017-06-23T18:18:52","modified_gmt":"2017-06-23T22:18:52","slug":"anxiety-and-surveillance-pillars-of-the-new-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7620","title":{"rendered":"Anxiety as the fuel for surveillance capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The terms addiction<\/em> and compulsion<\/em> tend to be used loosely and often interchangeably. But in an article in\u00a0the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>, science writer Sharon\u00a0Begley draws<\/a> a simple but illuminating\u00a0distinction between the two psychological disorders: addiction is born of\u00a0pleasure, while compulsion is anxiety’s child.<\/p>\n

Behavioral addictions begin in pleasure. But compulsions, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, are born in anxiety and remain strangers to joy. They are repetitive behaviors that we engage in repeatedly to alleviate the angst brought on by the possibility of harmful consequences.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The drunk seeks to regain the sense of well-being that the last shot of bourbon\u00a0provided. The compulsive hoarder seeks to alleviate\u00a0the dread that something valuable has been lost. Compulsion is both “balm and curse,” writes Begley. A compulsive act\u00a0briefly mitigates\u00a0feelings of anxiety, but the very experience of relief\u00a0reinforces\u00a0the anxiety. The anxiety\u00a0ends up feeling more real, more pressing \u2014 and even more in need of relief. Anxiety and compulsion become a self-reinforcing cycle.<\/p>\n

Compulsions can be so severe as\u00a0to be debilitating. But they also, and much more routinely, take milder forms. They alter\u00a0our thoughts and behavior, sometimes in deep ways, without making us dysfunctional in society. In fact, by tempering our anxiety, they may serve as a kind of therapy\u00a0that protects\u00a0our social functionality. Since ours is, as Auden suggested, an age of anxiety, it’s no surprise that it is also an age of compulsion.<\/p>\n

The near-universal compulsion of the present day is, as we all know and as behavioral studies prove, the incessant checking of the smartphone. As Begley notes, with a little poetic\u00a0hyperbole, we all “feel compelled to check our phones before we get out of bed in the morning and constantly throughout the day, because FOMO \u2014 the fear of missing out \u2014 fills us with so much anxiety that it feels like fire ants swarming every neuron in our brain.” With its perpetually updating, tightly personalized\u00a0messaging, networking, searching, and shopping apps, the smartphone creates the anxiety that it salves. It’s a machine almost perfectly designed to turn its owner into a compulsive.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, a portable, pocket-sized product that spurs and sustains compulsive use can be a very lucrative product for any company able to\u00a0tap into its hypnotic power. The smartphone is the perfect consumer good for the age of anxiety. It’s hardly\u00a0an exaggeration to say that, from a commercial standpoint, the smartphone is to compulsion what the cigarette pack was to addiction.<\/p>\n

In a recent post<\/a>, I highlighted the business scholar Shoshana Zuboff’s idea that, with the arrival of the internet, capitalism has begun to take on a new form.\u00a0Traditional product-based competition (sell an attractive good at a fair price) is being displaced by data-based competition (collect the richest store of information about the identity and behavior of individual consumers). In this new industrial system, which Zuboff\u00a0calls<\/a>\u00a0surveillance capitalism<\/em>, “profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior.”<\/p>\n

While surveillance capitalism taps the invasive powers of the Internet as the source of capital formation and wealth creation, it is now, as I have suggested, poised to transform commercial practice across the real world too.\u00a0 An analogy is the rapid spread of mass production and administration throughout the industrialized world in the early twentieth century, but with one major caveat. Mass production was interdependent with its populations who were its consumers and employees. In contrast, surveillance capitalism preys on dependent populations who are neither its consumers nor its employees and are largely ignorant of its procedures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The concept of surveillance capitalism helps explain the dynamics of a growing part of the economy. But it doesn’t explain everything. It focuses on the supply side (what motivates companies) while largely ignoring the demand side (what motivates consumers). I’d suggest that the secret to understanding the demand side may lie in the\u00a0anxiety-compulsion cycle. What motivates consumers is anxiety \u2014 not just the fear of missing out, but also the dread of becoming invisible or losing status, the worry that others might know something that you\u00a0don’t know, the nervousness that a message might have been misconstrued, and so on \u2014\u00a0and this anxiety spurs the compulsive behavior that generates ever more personal data for surveillance capitalists to harvest. We divulge our secrets because we can’t help ourselves.<\/p>\n

This powerful, compulsion-fueled business model may have emerged by accident\u00a0\u2014 I’m pretty sure that Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t found Google with the intent\u00a0of spreading social anxiety and then capitalizing on it through surveillance systems \u2014\u00a0but it is now sustained by design. Facebook doesn’t hire cognitive psychologists and maintain a behavioral research lab for nothing. Rewards now flow to the competitor that is best able to maximize consumer anxiety\u00a0in a way that spurs more compulsive behavior that in turn\u00a0generates\u00a0more valuable consumer data that can, to complete the cycle, be deployed to further manipulate consumer psychology.<\/p>\n

That’s a dark way of putting it, to be sure \u2014 it ignores the real benefits that consumers gain from many online services \u2014 but it does seem to explain the governing\u00a0logic\u00a0of what we\u00a0once happily termed “the new economy.”<\/p>\n

Photo: University of Alaska Anchorage<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The terms addiction and compulsion tend to be used loosely and often interchangeably. But in an article in\u00a0the\u00a0Wall Street Journal, science writer Sharon\u00a0Begley draws a simple but illuminating\u00a0distinction between the two psychological disorders: addiction is born of\u00a0pleasure, while compulsion is anxiety’s child. Behavioral addictions begin in pleasure. But compulsions, according to a growing body of […]<\/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":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_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-7620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7620","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=7620"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7930,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7620\/revisions\/7930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}