Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization
Journal of Information Technology (2015) 30, 75–89. doi:10.1057/jit.2015.5
15 Pages Posted: 17 Apr 2015
Date Written: April 4, 2015
Abstract
This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ Google is to surveillance capitalism what General Motors was to managerial capitalism. Therefore the institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries long evolution of market capitalism.
Keywords: surveillance capitalism, big data, Google, information society, privacy, internet of everything
JEL Classification: L2, O3, P1, Z, M, K, A13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Register to save articles to
your library
Recommended Papers
-
By Solon Barocas and Andrew D. Selbst
-
By Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford
-
'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy
-
By Neil M. Richards and Jonathan King
-
Big Data and Due Process: Toward a Framework to Redress Predictive Privacy Harms
By Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz
-
By Neil M. Richards and Jonathan King
-
Big Data for All: Privacy and User Control in the Age of Analytics
By Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky
-
Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use
By Jon Penney