The Shoshana Zuboff interview on next steps for big tech regulation: 10 takeaways
A few weeks after Facebook punted its decision on Donald Trump’s account, I got a chance to speak with Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ and Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School. Below are 10 highlights from our hour long conversation. A 40 minute companion podcast is also embedded here, if you prefer listen-only mode. These extracts serve to expand the conversation around complex and urgent questions on the subject of tech regulation, algorithmic mediation, behavioral targeting and ethics in the digital public square.
1. “We don’t yet have the bodies of laws that are purpose built for the harms that we face, beginning with the entire supply system of surveillance capitalism — the unilateral secret extraction of behavioral data from our lives.”
“This is the first century in which we’ve experienced digital. So we’re just figuring out what its capabilities are and what those capabilities can be turned into and how antidemocratic those capabilities can be. It’s untethered to society and to the real needs of the public, the public interest, the real needs of individuals and to our laws and rights. So, unprecedented harms means that we need new kinds of solutions. We come into this era with established laws for regulating industry for regulating business. Some of those laws are still relevant. But we don’t yet have the bodies of laws that are purpose built for the harms that we face, beginning with the entire supply system of surveillance capitalism, which is what we’ve just been talking about — the unilateral secret extraction of behavioral data from our lives. This is something that began in secret, grew in secret, we never agreed to it, there is almost no law to contain it…If you fundamentally described this process to any child you say hey, somebody took from me without asking. Now they’re selling it and they’re using it to make money for themselves. What should I do, and that child will say they stole something from you. You should call the police.”
2. “We need to have laws that make this kind of secret extraction illegal. Simply criminalize it.”
“The fundamental act of unilateral extraction from our lives is deeply illegitimate. And of course without that, the whole rest of the edifice crumbles. When we talk about objectives in the larger chessboard, we need to be able to confront extraction head on. And we need to have laws that make this kind of secret extraction illegal. Simply criminalize it.”
3. “Google invented the first globally successful predictive product and that was the click through rate.”
“The very first markets that traded human futures are targeted online advertising. Google invented the first globally successful predictive product and that was the click through rate. And that was the basis for online targeted advertising which is based on advertisers bidding on 10s of what ads will click on and the likelihood will click through to their websites and buy their wares or services. So, we can also go to the demand side, And we can say look, in the demand side, we are simply going to outlaw markets that commodify human behavior and trade in our behavior, because we can see that those markets lead to predictably, dangerous, and anti democratic consequences.”
4. “Digital technology is the Trojan horse that has been invaded by a very specific economic logic with very specific consequences.”
“People think it’s inevitable. The companies have preached to us for the last 20 years that we shouldn’t complain because all of these effects that I’m describing are simply consequences of digital technology, digital technologies, you know so great it’s going to teach us so much and it’s going to improve our, lives in our world. And we just have to, we just have to swallow this pill because all of these things are somehow an outgrowth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Digital technology can be applied in many ways that preserve privacy, preserve individual sovereignty and tethered to the public interest. But that’s not how we have evolved in the 21st century, because we have surveillance capitalism, which turned out to be — back in the year 2001 as Google discovered — the fastest route to monetize, so that it could escape the bankruptcy threat that came during the dot com meltdown in the early 2000s, so that it could find a quick way to make money, that would keep its investors on board. And that then became really the default model in its sector and then moved through the normal economy. Digital technology is the Trojan horse that has been invaded by a very specific economic logic with very specific consequences. So, none of these things are inevitable, and we see this now in the shifting orientation of lawmakers around the world.”
5. “Every conversation about data is already a conversation that has lost the war…and fighting a downstream battle.”
“GDPR, you know, has kind of fallen into the classic trap, focusing on the downstream issues of data and how data is managed, how is it protected and accessible, is it portable and so forth. But when we’re talking about legitimate extraction, every conversation about data is already a conversation that has lost the war and is fighting a downstream battle. It’s already lost the war because once you’re arguing about legal contracts over data, then you have lost the war about the legitimacy of self, because a lot of the data that we’re arguing about shouldn’t exist in the first place. Unless, individuals have decided that it should exist or unless democracy has.”
6. “Identify the goal state first…”
“I’m starting out by identifying the goal state. And then what I, what I do in my own thinking is kind of work backwards from there and say, what. It’s very different to approach the legislative challenge. If you’re, if you’re just sort of going opportunistically. Moving from crisis to crisis. Then, if you have a sense of, you know, the larger chessboard, and where it is that you want to end up.”
7. “Liberal democracies have so far failed to construct a coherent vision of what digital and democratic society would look like, what a digital and democratic future would look like.”
“The so-called Oversight Board has very little power, a very narrow range of decision making and absolutely no enforcement capability. So outside the very narrow range of decision making, they can make policy recommendations that are so bogus that it’s better for you to ignore. So the whole thing is a kind of theatrical performance, as if the social upheaval that is produced when corrupt information overwhelms the global information bloodstream. That whole solution set is in the hole of the donut*, and that’s where democracy is, that’s where the rule of law is, that’s where public law is. That’s where the only durable solutions are going to come from — the politics of lawmakers moving together.”
*Donut: A reference to Dr. Zuboff’s remarks (in another recent conversation), where she likens what has been lost (in the digital age) — to the hole in a donut.
8. “We’re going to need a lot of legislative creativity”
“We’re going to need a lot of legislative creativity, we’re going to need a lot of general creativity. Because what we’re going to have to do, and we can you know we can draw lessons from the last century and and how we move through the challenges of industrialization. We began with identifying rights, those rights were embedded in large legislative frameworks.”
9. The idea is not to give all the authority and power to the business owners or the politician who sits at the top of the hierarchy.
“Take the example of the Federal Reserve…it must operate according to certain standards that are transparent to the public that are contestable and are repairable, when they violate those rules. And the way the Federal Reserve operates is distinct from whoever is inhabiting the White House at any given moment, or what political party has the majority in Congress. So, these are public actions defined by democratic governance, defined by the rule of law, defined by transparency and public accountability. The idea is not to give all the authority and power to the employers and to the capital itself to the business owners and their interests, but neither do we just give all of that authority and power to the current politician who sits at the top of the hierarchy. We preserve this stored this authority and power within a set of institutionalized rules and practices that define the power.”
10. “I picture the huge Titanic pointed toward an iceberg. The first thing we have to do is shift the trajectory of this big boat.”
“So, we see this first of all in Europe. The EU Parliament right now has, in front of it two major pieces of legislation that were developed by the European Commission over the past couple of years.One of these is called the Digital Services Act One of these is called the Digital Markets Act. And both of these, especially taken together…these two regulatory proposals shift the direction of the big boat so we’re no longer heading toward the anti democratic iceberg of surveillance capitalism.”
