Poll results about consumer expectations back Fink up. Millennials and Generation Z customers are especially prone to seeing their consumer expenditures as part of creating a socially conscious personal brand identity. For many companies, then, signaling progressive virtues to consumers is a smart business move in the same way that signaling all-American patriotism would have been to corporations in the 1950s.
But what counts as a “positive contribution to society”? Corporations like to brand themselves as being in favor of a predictable constellation of causes, all of them guiding stars of the progressive cosmos. Woke capitalist branding harnesses the unmatched propaganda resources of the advertising industry to send the message, both explicitly and implicitly: the beliefs of social conservatives and religious traditionalists are obstacles to the social good.
The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism
The politicization of life in corporations along social justice lines has occurred at the same time that Big Business has embraced amassing personal data as a key sales and marketing strategy.
In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith must live with a telescreen in his apartment. The two-way device delivers propaganda but also monitors residents, allowing the totalitarian state to invade the privacy of people’s homes.
Given that generations of American students have read Orwell’s novel, you would think they would be inoculated against accepting this kind of invasive technology.
You would be wrong. In the twenty-first century, Big Brother has found a much more insidious way into our homes. In fact, he has been invited. Nearly 70 million Americans have one or more wireless “smart speakers”—usually manufactured by Amazon or Google—in their residences.4 Smart speakers are voice-recognition devices connected to the internet. They serve as digital assistants, recording vocal commands, and in response, executing actions—obtaining information, ordering retail goods, controlling lights and music, and so forth. For over 25 percent of the population, convenience has overcome privacy concerns.
Consumerism is how we are learning to love Big Brother. What’s more, Big Brother is not exactly who we expected him to be—a political dictator, though one day he may become that. At the present moment, Big Brother’s primary occupation is capitalist. He’s a salesman, he’s a broker, he’s a gatherer of raw materials, and a manufacturer of desires. He is monitoring virtually every move you make to determine how to sell you more things, and in so doing, learning how to direct your behavior. In this way, Big Brother is laying the foundation for soft totalitarianism, both in terms of creating and implementing the technology for political and social control and by grooming the population to accept it as normal.
This is the world of “surveillance capitalism,” a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff, a former Harvard Business School professor. In her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff describes and analyzes a new form of capitalism created by Google and perfected by Amazon and Facebook. Surveillance capitalism hoovers up detailed personal data about individuals and analyzes it with sophisticated algorithms to predict people’s behavior.
The aim, obviously, is to pitch goods and services tailored to individual preferences. No surprise there—that’s merely advertising. The deeper realities of surveillance capitalism, however, are far more sinister. The masters of data aren’t simply trying to figure out what you like; they are now at work making you like what they want you to like, without their manipulation being detected.
And they’re doing this without the knowledge or informed permission of the people whose lives they have colonized—and who are at present without means to escape the surveillance capitalists’ web. You may have given up Facebook over privacy concerns, and may have vowed never to have a smart device under your roof, but unless you are a hermit living off the grid, you are still thoroughly bounded and penetrated by the surveillance capitalist system.
“This power to shape behavior for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorizing,” Zuboff told The Guardian. “It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society. The message here is simple: Once I was mine. Now I am theirs [italics added].”5
The story of surveillance capitalism begins in 2003, when Google, by far the world’s largest internet search engine, patented a process to allow it to use the vast amount of data it gathered from individual searches in a new way. The company’s data scientists had figured out how to utilize “data exhaust”—surplus information obtained from searches—to predict the kind of advertising that would most appeal to individual users.
Before long, “data extraction” became the basis for a new tech-based economy. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others discovered how to make fortunes by gathering, packaging, and selling personal data about individuals. By now, it is not a matter of vending your name, address, and email address to third parties. It is vastly more thorough. Web-connected sensors are reporting facts and data about you constantly.
Consider this scenario: The alarm on your smartphone by your bedside buzzes you out of bed in the morning. While you were asleep, the apps on the phone uploaded the previous day’s information about your activities on it to the app owner. You crawl out of bed, brush your teeth, put on your shorts and sneakers, and take a twenty-minute run around your neighborhood. The Fitbit on your wrist records your workout information and uploads it.
Back home, you shower, go into the kitchen to pour yourself a bowl of cereal, and sit down at the kitchen table to check you Gmail account, Facebook, and your favorite news and information sites. Everything you write on Gmail is processed by Google, which scans the text for key words to direct advertising to you. Everything you post, Like, or forward on Facebook is recorded by the company and used in its advertising. The company’s algorithms
