Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization
Surveillance capitalism is what happened when US democracy stood down. Two decades later, it fails any reasonable test of responsible global stewardship of digital information and communications. The abdication of the world’s information spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis o...
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| Published in: | Organization Theory 2022-07, Vol.3 (3), p.263178772211292 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Surveillance capitalism is what happened when US democracy stood down. Two decades later, it fails any reasonable test of responsible global stewardship of digital information and communications. The abdication of the world’s information spaces to surveillance capitalism has become the meta-crisis of every republic because it obstructs solutions to all other crises. The surveillance capitalist giants–Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and their ecosystems–now constitute a sweeping political-economic institutional order that exerts oligopolistic control over most digital information and communication spaces, systems, and processes.
The commodification of human behavior operationalized in the secret massive-scale extraction of human-generated data is the foundation of surveillance capitalism’s two-decade arc of institutional development. However, when revenue derives from commodification of the human, the classic economic equation is scrambled. Imperative economic operations entail accretions of governance functions and impose substantial social harms. Concentration of economic power produces collateral concentrations of governance and social powers. Oligopoly in the economic realm shades into oligarchy in the societal realm. Society’s ability to respond to these developments is thwarted by category errors. Governance incursions and social harms such as control over AI or rampant disinformation are too frequently seen as distinct crises and siloed, each with its own specialists and prescriptions, rather than understood as organic effects of causal economic operations.
In contrast, this paper explores surveillance capitalism as a unified field of institutional development. Its four already visible stages of development are examined through a two-decade lens on expanding economic operations and their societal effects, including extraction and the wholesale destruction of privacy, the consequences of blindness-by-design in human-to-human communications, the rise of AI dominance and epistemic inequality, novel achievements in remote behavioral actuation such as the Trump 2016 campaign, and Apple-Google’s leverage of digital infrastructure control to subjugate democratic governments desperate to fight a pandemic. Structurally, each stage creates the conditions and constructs the scaffolding for the next, and each builds on what went before. Substantively, each stage is characterized by three vectors of accomplishment: novel economic operations, governanc |
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| ISSN: | 2631-7877 2631-7877 |