It isn’t often I give up on a book, still less one that has arrive garlanded with praise, and which I’m predisposed to agree with. However, I can’t manage another word of Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

From what I’d gathered from early reviews, her argument is that Google and Facebook have become too big, deploy great power unaccountably, pose grave threats to democracy and accumulate for profit masses of data about all the individuals using their services. It’s rather hard to disagree with this, and indeed legislators and regulators around the world are gearing up to respond, albeit more slowly than would have been ideal. Only this month Germany’s Bundeskartellamt banned Facebook from connecting data about individuals from different sources, and India forbade Amazon to sell its own products on its platform. Those with powers to fine and to put people in prison are coming for the digital usurpers.

Having read a few chapters, this is still what I take the argument to be. You just wouldn’t know it from the extraordinarily impenetrable language. For example:

“Surveillance capitalism rules by instrumentarian power through its materialization in Big Other, which, like the ancient tyrant, exists out of mankind while paradoxically assuming human shape.”

Or:

“As for the Spanish Data Protection Agency and the European Court of Justice, the passage of time is likely to reveal their achievements [with regard to the right to be forgotten] as stirring an early chapter in the longer story of our fight for a third modern that is first and foremost a human future, rooted in an inclusive democracy and committed to an individual’s right to effective life. Their message is carefully inscribed for our children to ponder: technological inevitability is as light as democracy is heavy, as temporary as the scent of rose petals and the taste of honey are enduring.” [italics hers]

There are over 500 pages of this, and it was too much when I found myself having to read everything several times to work out the meaning. What’s more, there are some analytical lacunae – no Bentham, no Foucault in a book about surveillance? And Zuboff clearly believes what the digital titans claim about the effectiveness of their data gathering in selling us; yet we’ve all had the experience of being followed by ads for the thing we just bought or being creeped out by evidence of such joining up in a way that will make us never shop at a certain outlet again. They have become conduits for alarming shifts in people’s beliefs and behaviour, for sure, but in an accidental way. I don’t know if it would be more or less scary if they were actually in control of the social trends they’ve unleashed.

Mine is a minority view, as all the reviews of the book I’ve seen have been almost adulatory. No doubt you should believe those who had more patience than me and read the whole damn thing.

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