Book Too Smart

How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our

Lives, and Taking Over the World
Jathan Sadowski
MIT Press, 2020
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Jathan Sadowski’s searing, alarming exposé reveals how smart technology will soon
achieve domination of human life. Technocratic organizations use smart devices to
extract data from people’s bodies, homes and interactions with police and
government agencies. Everything you do becomes a source of value they aggregate,
analyze and sell to insurance companies, retailers and surveillance
enterprises. Governments and corporations use data to control you using covert and
 overt behavior-modification methods. Sadowski issues an urgent call to action to
collectivize data and resist corporate encroachment.

Take-Aways
• “Smart tech” is a pervasive and powerful presence in human lives.
• Data are a form of capital; those with the most data possess the most power.
• Digital capitalism reduces people to “data streams.”
• Social credit systems and micromanaging workers via smart tech are behavior-
modification tools.
• The smart city is an “urban war machine” in which mass surveillance criminalizes daily
life.
• To serve the public good, data should be transparent and accountable.

Summary
“Smart tech” is a pervasive and powerful presence in human lives.

Smart tech is any device with the capacity for “data collection, network connectivity,
and enhanced control.” Soon, smart tech won’t be optional when you buy, for
example, an electric toothbrush; it will be a standard feature. You won’t be able to
opt out of someone tracking your movements, behavior and preferences.

For every person who benefits from technology, others suffer. Technology
is naturally political, in that certain people will have the power to make decisions
about how other people live and work. The technocrats that hold power are part of an
oligarchy. When citizens don’t participate in the decisions that govern their lives,
they effectively become subject to a de facto authoritarian state.

“The imperative of control is about creating systems that monitor, manage, and
manipulate the world and people.”
In this coming era of “digital capitalism,” technopolitics will present itself in three
ways:

1. “Interests” – Smart tech expands and advances corporate interests,

prioritizing them over “human autonomy, social goods, and democratic rights.”
2. “Imperatives” – Digital capitalism seeks to both extract data from and exert
control over everything and every person.
3. “Impacts” – In exchange for convenience and connection, people must endure
changes to their lives and privacy they cannot predict.

There is no conspiracy to cause harm to society or its constituents. Instead, the

system favors privileged interests. To navigate capitalism’s principles of “exclusion,
extraction and exploitation,” society must critically assess digital capitalism’s
dangers and threats.
 Data are a form of capital; those with the most data possess the most
power.

Amazon transformed retail, disrupting other giants such as Walmart and recently
purchasing Whole Foods. Amazon Web Services is a true control center in the cloud,
and will expand Amazon’s reach into daily life. Corporations and governments use it
for computation and to store data. Whole Foods, for example, will track how people
purchase items in its stores, turning brick-and-mortar edifices into “physical
websites.” In exchange for constant surveillance and forfeiting your privacy, Amazon
will make shopping more convenient with autobilling. This is an example of smart
tech “terraforming,” or shaping, society to serve digital capitalism’s aims.

“Like other political projects, building the smart society is a battle for our
imagination.”
Data are a form of capital – no different than money or goods – with wide
applications. Data can be used to:

• “Profile and target people” – Companies gain profits from knowing more about
you, for example, via personalized ads.
• “Optimize systems” – To make savings, data are used to increase efficiency and
reduce waste.
• “Manage things” – Knowledge from data, such as statistics on a health app to
monitor a person’s weight, or traffic flow in cities, is used to enhance systems.
• “Model probabilities” – Data can help make predictions, for example,
determining criminal “hot spots” in a neighborhood.
• “Build stuff” – AI and machine learning aid the creation of platforms dependent
upon data. Without data, the taxi firm Uber wouldn’t exist.
• “Grow the value of assets” – Smart data can slow the decline of assets such as
machines or cars.

Technocrats want to build a world of data, and convert anyone, anywhere – and any
process – into profit. But data aren’t just “there” to be found. “Data mining” is a
misleading term, as is the assertion that data are “the new oil.” Both wrongly imply
that data exist to be extracted. They don’t reflect the fact that technocratic entities
manufacture data for certain aims, and by not compensating people for that data,
they exploit and steal from them.

Digital capitalism reduces people to “data streams.”

In society, there are three types of power: “sovereign, disciplinary and control.” For
centuries, sovereign power used force to extract compliance. Later, institutions such
as schools or the workplace instilled disciplinary power through norms and beliefs.
Digital capitalism, via smart tech on apps, phones or over Wi-Fi, is a control regime
that sets parameters and monitors behavior constantly, in real time.

“Smart tech enhances the ability to take one attribute, action, or category, and
make it representative of the whole person.”
Digital capitalism exerts power by turning an individual into what French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) calls a “dividual.” Rather than interact with
an entire person, the system interacts with his or her discrete parts. When sensors
collect your temperature or count your steps and send that data for aggregation, that
creates a profile based on your behaviors or actions. Data brokers sell that
information to companies and governments. These data better target consumers and
aid police departments, employers and government agencies in assessing, for
example, who is likely to commit a crime or who is at risk for defaulting on a loan.

These data streams have a large and growing impact on insurance. In the United
States, health insurance ties to employment, and in promoting “wellness,” employers
increasingly track employee health with wearable tech, which sends data for analysis
and impacts employee benefits. Other home health tech covertly extracts data to
monitor and punish users who use it improperly.

“At last, insurers can replace the old proverb ‘trust but verify’ with ‘comply or else’.”
Car insurance companies track driving habits and adjust your premiums
accordingly. Insurance may replace advertising as a bankroller for smart tech as its
reach and influence expands. By assigning premiums to people’s daily activities,
insurers engage in behavior modification. Such power outstrips government control
over people’s lives; profits drive it all.

Social credit systems and micromanaging workers via smart tech are
behavior-modification tools.

China is an example of a country that deploys data streams for total control. Zhima
Credit (Sesame Credit) partnered with Alibaba, China’s largest social media platform,
to turn its massive data stream into an integrated Social Credit System. A person’s
three-digit score reflects their worth, reputation and status. Zhima uses data
collected from various professional and personal sources. High scores bring
benefits; low scores relegate people to the “digital underclass.” China intends to roll
out its integrated Social Credit System in 2020, with its guiding message: “If trust is
broken in one place, restrictions are imposed everywhere.”

“It is the strangely conspiratorial truth of the surveillance society we inhabit that
there are unknown entities gathering our data for unknown purposes.”
Among the lower-paid, unskilled labor force in the United States, invasive tracking
increases. Amazon, for example, monitors its workers’ every move in its fulfillment
centers. Examples in other companies include software to track keystrokes by remote
workers, and putting chips inside employees that open doors and operate vending
machines for them. Capitalism has long monetized labor at the expense of worker
wellbeing. Now, it exploits people in new, invasive ways.

People allow smart tech into their lives and homes because of an ideology born in
Silicon Valley: that every problem has a technological solution. This technocratic
“solutionism” overlooks human values in favour of technical ones.

The smart city is an “urban war machine” in which mass surveillance

criminalizes daily life.
Some think the “smart city” will be a “technoutopia,” where people can live
frictionless lives surrounded by state-of-the-art amenities as data collection agencies
track their movements and habits to improve services. However, experimental
smart cities in South Korea and the United Arab Emirates have attracted few
residents. The reality of smart cities is not in those places but all around us, in our
smart homes, smart TVs, fridges and vacuum cleaners. It is subtle and
unnoticeable. Smart tech seizes the collective imagination and sells a future full of
innovation and disruption. But with the promise of more convenience comes
the imposition of parameters and boundaries on behavior.

“Silicon Valley has until now tried to control the world in various ways; the point is
to liberate it.”
Smart city solutions include using tech to predict and punish crime with society’s
most vulnerable as test subjects. For example, Silicon Valley-based Palantir provides
surveillance tools to the police. Its tech is proprietary; the services it provides to
cities lack transparency or accountability to the citizens it tracks. Other smart tech
tracks cellphone use, and assigns threat intensity to certain neighborhoods,
predicting where and when crime will happen.

Unlike the smart cities in marketing leaflets, the real version is invisible and
pervasive, an “urban war machine” that secretly monitors people’s actions. Police
collect data on people who haven’t yet committed crimes and combine it with data
from private and public institutions to create searchable databases called “fusion
centers,” with IBM and Microsoft’s aid. All data are now police data.

People sacrifice civil liberties for security. Police will target neighborhoods with high
crime, leading to more arrests, and marginalizing the neighborhood further as
prediction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This infringes on citizen privacy,
violates civil rights and can lead to wrongful prosecution, systemic bias and other
human rights violations. The result is a serious erosion of trust.

To serve the public good, data should be transparent and accountable.

Smart tech developed to extract data from people to control them, but alternatives
exist. Collective action to change digital capitalism and make a better society can
happen in three transformative ways:

1. “Unmake” systems that exploit and control – Workers should stage

“microresistances,” such as gaming the systems and the tech that defines their
days. They can thus assert agency and undermine capitalist control mechanisms.
2. Democratize innovation – Power and control mustn’t belong to the
“meritocracy” – wealthy, white men. Treating smart tech users as citizens, not
consumers, and getting their feedback and input, can effect change. People
should demand transparency and accountability from those who create
intelligent systems.
3. Make smart tech a public good – Insist governments fund “socially useful
production” and choose public stakeholders over private shareholders.

“When faced with the decision between adapting to a smarter society or un/making
a dumber world, choose the latter.”
Data animate digital capitalism, leading tech giants to hoard it and hold society
captive, toxifying democracy. A progressive strategy to change data
governance involves two steps: “demanding oversight”and “demanding ownership.”
Oversight requires reforms in regulations. Anti-trust laws would challenge techno-
oligarchs.

Giving people ownership over their data forestalls tech giants from profiting from it
and would contribute to a better society. Collectivizing data as a shared resource
would help identify the vulnerable and improve social welfare systems. Data would
no longer be a currency traded on the market among the super-rich, but a public
utility, like electricity. A “data repository” would protect the public and reward
companies that request access to it for society’s betterment. Data’s benefits should be
equally distributed to unlock their full potential.

About the Author

Jathan Sadowski is a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab
at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He writes on the politics of
technology for publications including The Guardian, OneZero, and Real Life.