Silent Letter #1

Shoshana Zuboff, author of Surveillance Capitalism

Dear Prof. Zuboff

Surveillance Capitalism was a joy to read slowly, a few pages at a time. Your prose is musical. I felt my mind dancing with your flow. I don’t know how else to say it: your writing is true, it’s good, and it’s beautiful.

This history and analysis of search engines and social media as creatures of the intelligence community is singularly important. Anyone who did not read your book, and gets their history of Google from say Wikipedia, receives no sense of the relationship and objectives involved. Wikipedia obscures the history with a passive mention that “a computer science research team … received funding.” Big Other, as you call the watchers, strikes again.

While there are a few vehement reviews on GoodReads (1%) they generally fall into one of two categories. Some don’t like your style and think you belabour your points. Others fall one way or another into the cognitive bias known as the just world hypothesis, and cannot see how “progress” in this direction is a march to the totalitarian horror shows that Hannah Arendt and George Orwell warn us about (not to mention the accelerating ecocide.) For the former, style and weighting is a matter of personal preference. For the latter, also a matter of personal preference, there are people who think Edward Bernays was a great man who made the world safe for managerial technocracy (and many more who have no idea.) No critical work will please everyone. I think it’s great.

For my part, a unique perspective precludes me being objective. I’ll touch on three personal impressions: The story of Google’s rise describes the shape of an encounter I had beginning in 1995; your efforts helping shut down Google’s pilot “smart city” project is indirectly tied to the ending of my consulting job in 2020; and finally I’ll say a few words about what I love most about this book.

For the first, it is difficult, if not impossible, to be explicit. I can only point and allude and hope a reader can fill in the blanks. I dubbed my 1995 encounter with a Big Other pilot project as MK Ultra Consumer Division (MKU ConDiv). I hope that conveys something because it was mostly shadows and fog that left no visible marks (and fortunately I wasn’t dosed with elephantine quantities of LSD.)

Why me, one might ask with a reasonable skepticism. My encounter with a Big Other was triggered by an artistic scribble I posted discreetly on the wall of my cubicle in a pressurized corporate environment. The piece was multi-faceted, but most obviously it was an assertion that extreme wealth disparity is the primary cause of societal instability. Also I referenced my unusual name, associated with long memory, which modernity cannot process and seeks to erase. Soon after, trying to fathom the nature of a darkness I felt stalking me, I reasoned that my profile would show ten times more exposure to advertizing, television, computers and news media than average, making me the ideal subject for an MKU ConDiv operation. I was a generation ahead of today’s ‘World of Tomorrow:’ atomized people in narrow focus staring at text and video all day.

After 16 months of feeling stalked I wrote a handful of Letters to The Editor. Then after 6 weeks of pleasant enough back and forth, but no more clarity than I had before, I put down the pen and walked away. MKU ConDiv soon showed itself. It was an alloyed brew of sacred and profane. There are ancient rituals irreducible to words; esoteric initiations involving alphabets, social energies and enduring love echoing through time. But the openness and vulnerability in such an experience, which cannot be described, can be weaponized. I feel I was invited to believe I was undergoing transformation, while behind a veil little green men were instrumentalizing me into an object of surveillance capitalism.

In the beginning I felt myself in a room with dear, sweet grandma’s who’d lost their whole families. I blubbered and cried and felt their anguish pour through me. I pledged my life, glad to have a purpose. But then the vibe shifted. Gone were the grieving grandma’s and in their place were fugly gangsters, all of whom could very well have been H. Weinstein. They sat silently, impressing on me that I made their momma cry and now they owned me, and all of history, so therefore I would provide them with monetizable content. I could become anything I wanted, as long as it was tightly controlled and beneficial to the dominant culture.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut describes an ordinary guy, carrying shell shock from the war, who finds himself under a transparent dome with a beautiful woman. I think I understand this image from the 1960’s, but for me it was a machine, inviting me to dream of love as I stared into the unblinking glare of surveillance capitalism. My scripted and routinized hero’s journey, to a place I didn’t want to be, left me cold.

I refused to provide further content, hoping the Machine would move on but it didn’t. Then I did something drastic and fed the Machine the most repulsive image and sappy writing I could think up. I thought it would be too much and the Machine would spit me out. I had read Roszak’s Counter Culture by then and recognized, though underestimated, the dominant culture’s capacity to metabolize and profit from any form of resistance. (It is the ultimate energy vampire.) Eventually it was over, and though I’ll never know exactly what I turned my back on, I’m glad I took my shot to lob a wrench at the machinery. Be the Friction. Love that phrase.

~~~

I read Surveillance Capitalism around 2020, then later learned of your efforts to stop a pilot “smart city” project in Toronto. At the time I worked for a consulting firm designing the infrastructure. While you were being the friction, we clueless employees were getting slick and anemic “smart city” PR presentations. Startech (not its real name) maintains a headquarters in Canada, to remain eligible for government contracts, but it created a smart city department run from New York so it could attach itself like a remora to the great white shark of surveillance information domination. They didn’t mention Google/Sidewalk but employees received a directive forbidding talking to media. Looking back at that time, it’s clear a sizeable chunk of this bland, banal, faceless engineering company had pivoted to capture geysers of globalized, corporatized, police state cash. I wasn’t involved, but it’s gross to know I was blindly helping grow this monster just by showing up to work every day.

Smart City presentations repeated narratives around safety and sustainability. The latter had me hoodwinked for a time. After one presentation I asked if the ubiquitous tracking badges would provide personally identifiable information, since that would be entirely unnecessary to avoid accidents, manage smart switching, and eliminate “frictions” like pushing buttons and turning keys. I didn’t get an answer but during covid I was purged, ostensibly for unrelated reasons. I’ll never be certain if it knew I was reading your book at the time, but no regrets either way. You’ve given us clarity. Be the Friction.

~~~

The closing of Surveillance Capitalism lives in my heart. Your walkthrough of the home that you and yours built with a lifetime of love moved my spirit. Despite my uncanny and persistent recognition of MKU ConDiv, this is what I’ll remember most. For me your message involves the idea that no matter how tyrannical and totalitarian the VC-funded, Big-Intel-directed future could become, it can never capture, quantify or replicate intimacy, interiority and implicit meaning. As a former engineer with some basic knowledge of the inner workings of computers and machines, I wholeheartedly concur.

~~~

Not long after Surveillance Capitalism I encountered the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist, who made a discovery about how the structure of our brains has played a role in modernity’s descent into abstraction and reductionism. I sense you are retiring, and I’m sure it’s well earned, but it would be stellar to hear a conversation between the two of you. For one thing, I’m sure you could talk just on Heidegger and Arendt for hours. Dr. McGilchrist likes to remind us that while friction is what stops Newtonian motion, it’s also what makes motion possible; without it we couldn’t take a step. I’m certain many fine people would find great joy in hearing you two talk. I know it’s a long shot but would you be interested?

Thank you again for the beautifully crafted sword you put in our hands. Be the Friction.

Yours

Jeff V