Imperatives
A digital multimedia series inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
Extraction
Zuboff’s “extraction imperative,” in which technology companies must endlessly extract data from their users for commodification purposes:
“…we are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for Google’s prediction factories. Predictions about our behavior are Google’s products, and they are sold to its actual customers but not to us. We are the means to others’ ends” (Zuboff, 2019).
Faustian bargain
Privacy policies are often overlooked upon purchasing or signing up for new personalized products, apps and services. Many are intentionally difficult to understand, which often ensures maximum access to users’ private lives.
In the case of Google, access includes location tracking, voice and audio information, online browser and purchase history, and records of “the people who matter most to you.”
“Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.”
- Larry Page, Google co-founder quoted in 2001
Shareholder value
maximization
Neoliberalism in the digital century; the righteous pursuit and mechanization of profit at any earthly cost.
“Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities, and surveillance capitalism lays its claims to the stuff of human nature for a new commodity invention. Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project” (Zuboff, 2019).