Matt Katz:

Welcome back to The Takeaway. I'm Matt Katz. The coronavirus pandemic and the protests for racial equality are forcing many of us to reassess the role technology and surveillance play in our lives. We've been talking about all of this on the show, from contact tracing to Facebook ad boycotts, to facial recognition technology. And now, we're going to go a little deeper into one perspective on how social media in particular marks our lives and how it got this way. The 2016 election and its aftermath put a spotlight on the ability of social media to not only affect civil discourse, but to affect an election and impact democracy as we know it. That is a lot of power.

Shoshana Zuboff:

What's happened is that the systems have taken over every domain of life. This stuff is ubiquitous, and it has increasingly put us in a situation of no escape.

Matt Katz:

That's Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power and a professor emerita at Harvard Business School. She thinks a lot about how technology affects us.

Shoshana Zuboff:

What happens to human beings in that kind of situation is you get resigned, you feel helpless, and you start to create these defense mechanisms to prevent you from feeling the full weight of how intolerable this is. And those defense mechanisms look like habituation. You just kind of stop really noticing and reacting.

Matt Katz:

She says that many of the privacy issues that today plague the internet can be traced back to the aftermath of 9/11.

Shoshana Zuboff:

Even on September 10th, if you were hanging around Capitol Hill and people were talking about the internet, the debates were about having comprehensive privacy legislation, because the folks from the FTC and within Congress already understood that these fledgling companies, these genius startups in Silicon Valley, they were already developing these secret monitoring and surveillance tools of users, things that now we consider pretty benign, web bugs, cookies. And they understood that this fledgling industry was not going to be able to self regulate. There were going to need to be laws.

Shoshana Zuboff:

Now, September 11th, everything changed. The focus shift from privacy on the internet to total information awareness, and the political shift there is that suddenly these fledgling companies that were threats to privacy and everything that privacy represents to us, human autonomy, human agency, and so forth, suddenly these companies were reimagined. Now they were going to be the heroes who are going to march us into the 21st century. And they were going to provide the government, its intelligence agencies, the defense department, they were going to provide the government with the data flows that it needed to achieve total information awareness.

Shoshana Zuboff:

Outside of the constitution and without any new laws coming on stream to really impede them, they were encouraged to develop these new systems that take our private experience as free raw material that's repurposed as behavioral data, which they then claim as proprietary, that then they say they own it. And with their owning these behavioral data streams, they turn them into computations, they sell them, and that's how they have become information empires.

Matt Katz:

It's that system that's allowed privacy breaches and the misuse of data that companies like Cambridge Analytica have used to detrimental effect. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has continued to apologize for his company's mistakes and misuse of data. Here he is during a congressional testimony in 2018.

Mark Zuckerberg:

Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our existence, we focused on all of the good that connecting people can do. And as Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool for staying connected to the people they love, for making their voices heard, and for building communities and businesses. But it's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. And that goes for fake news, for foreign interference in elections and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy. We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility and that was a big mistake. And it was my mistake, and I'm sorry.

Shoshana Zuboff:

For the last 20 years, we have operated on this assumption that we were going to let these companies self-regulate. We thought that these were good, innovative companies who occasionally made mistakes that violated our privacy, when the actual truth is, and we've slowly come to understand this, that those mistakes that violate our privacy are the innovations. They're not mistakes. That's the thing that they do, that's the thing they excel at, and they have driven that to a frontier that was unimaginable 20 years ago.

Matt Katz:

Zuboff told us she's positive about the future though. She sees the recent Facebook ad boycotts and zoom privacy scandals as signs that people are ready to push for new internet laws and regulations that would prevent invasions of privacy and hate speech.

Shoshana Zuboff:

The good news is that because of this intensification and amplification, because of the way this is now taking over all of our lives, and as we lose the social and the physical dimensions of our lives, we are all becoming alert to this in a new and fresh and sharp and painful way. So we're breaking through that fog of habituation and normalization, and those defense mechanisms and the resignation that we got used to the sense of helplessness and inevitability. And now, there is a sense of the intolerable nature of these circumstances. We're talking about it. We're talking about it right here on this show, but people are talking about it everywhere.

Matt Katz:

Shoshana Zuboff is a professor emerita at Harvard Business School and the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. We'll be right back with more on The Takeaway.

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