Meanwhile, down in the town, the Happyfolk slept restlessly

Their dreams invaded by shadowy figures digging away at their souls

Every day, people would wake and stare at the mountain

Why was it bringing darkness into their lives?

Gorillaz feat. Dennis Hopper, Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head

In our time, the division of labor we inherited from the industrial era has been transformed by the digital economy into a division of learning, a new principle of social ordering in which access to information and education has created the so-called “knowledge economies.” In these economies the production of products and services is based on intellectual activities that have been defined as “cognitive labor” (“Bifo” Berardi) or “immaterial labor” (Lazzarato, Hardt and Negri) and require a high level of specialization. Those who are fortunate enough to be able to pay for an education or to be trained at their jobs have the possibility to update their skills to the new digital contexts. Those who do not, become labor for the less immaterial tasks. While some of us live between the third and fourth industrial revolution, most still work in the second.

The digital knowledge applied to the surveillance economic model creates what Zuboff calls the problem of the two texts. The first of these is a pubic text that takes place in the internet and “is composed of what we inscribe on its pages: our posts, blogs, videos, photos, conversations, music, stories, observations, “likes,” tweets, and all the great massing hubbub of our daily lives captured and communicated.”¹ However, alongside this text there is another, which is the shadow of the first one and is hidden to all users. This shadow text provides information to the first one and is “a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its analyses, and it says more about us than we can know ourselves. Worse still, it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text. It automatically feeds on our experience as we engage in the normal an necessary routines of social participation.”² It is from this hidden text that the walls of virtual paradeisos are built.

The fact that the second text is hidden has important implications for our argument. If data extraction is secret, conducted in the shadows, the operations that monetize surveillance capitalism are faceless and therefore unaccountable. Just as a corporation has no face and no personality and for that reason could not have a voice and a right to expression, the shadow text presents us with an ungraspable and invisible enemy. This circumstance resembles what Mark Fisher called the “the shadowy, centerless impersonality proper to a corporate conspiracy.” As an anonymous layer, the shadow text of surveillance capitalism casts us into an opaque world in which the only concern of the participants in the conspiracy, says Fredric Jameson,

is not personal but corporate, for the vitality of the network or the institution, a disembodied distraction or inattentiveness engaging the absent space of the collective organization itself…³

Just like the corporatism of the the 20th century, in which “the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible,”⁴ surveillance capitalism inherits and deepens the problem, for how could the algorithms in charge of data mining and analysis be held accountable? Since its hidden operations are nameless and faceless, surveillance capitalism is a socially destructive force. It does not feel bound to society by ties of respect and responsibility, its main concern is for the vitality of the networks, digital or otherwise, that constitute the operational substrate of its profits.

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1. Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 186 ↩︎
2. Ibíd. ↩︎
3. Frederic Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, 66. Quoted by Fisher in Capitalist Realism, 74. ↩︎
4. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 108. ↩︎