New economic models new forms of state: The rise of the US "surveillance state" (original) (raw)
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International Affairs
Infrastructural power in the United States, which is the capacity to extract and deploy social resources and initiate and harness technological innovation, is increasingly generated by private internet capital and exercised by digital platforms. In this article we argue that while these private actors do not possess legitimacy, this is a form of ‘virtual sovereignty’ which complicates the capacity of the US state to exercise infrastructural power. Though internet software was designed largely by US corporations, commercial users operate increasingly in deterritorialized global spaces, where citizen consent and the interests of the US state are not business priorities. Moreover, much of the internet's hardware is financed by private internet capital within global wealth chains and digital spaces populated by US and non-US corporations. We argue that digital platforms acquire infrastructural power through the accumulation and commercialization of big data, from which they curate i...
Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization
This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, 'surveillance capitalism,' and considers its implications for 'information civilization.' 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.
protection and a free and open Internet – has been criticized as being inconsistent at best and hypocritical at worst. Placing US copyright and Internet policy in an historical context and using Susan Strange’s concepts of structural power and knowledge structures, we argue that seeming inconsistencies can be rationalized by examining economic foundations of each policy that promote US business interests. All knowledge regulation policies involve balancing access and restriction, with the specific balance the outcome of path-dependent political and economic forces and subject to political contestation. Our analysis suggests that the current US policy of Internet freedom and strong copyright protection represents a particular, historically situated strategy designed to exert structural power in the global information economy: free flow of information creates markets by exposure to intellectual properties while copyright secures economic benefit from the flow. We argue that a full and honest debate over issues of information access should be discussed in terms of contemporary values drawn from all cultures, with the realization that different societies and interests will privilege access and dissemination differently. Recognizing as legitimate and incorporating these different perspectives into the global governance structures of the Internet is the key challenge facing those who favour truly democratic global Internet governance.
Austral: Brazilian Journal of Strategy & International Relations, 2022
The 21st century is characterized by the transition of industrial to digital capitalism. In the last few years, an oligopoly was built in the US to explore these emerging digital resources, gaining ground during the Obama government. After this economic expansion the Trump era was faced by problems regarding the political power of the huge corporations of this sector. It was the beginning of an attempt, by the Executive and the Legislative, to contain them and protect the free market and individual freedoms. But are these containment attempts really an initiative to only protect the “free market”? In order to answer this question, the goal of the article is to analyze the relations of the big techs with US policies during the Obama (enlargement period) and the Trump governments (containment attempts). Keywords: Big Techs; Digital Capitalism; United States.
Internet Policy Review, 2020
Facing the fragmentation of digital space in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, this article considers regulatory models available to avoid the balkanisation of the internet. Considering government-led surveillance in particular, available strategies are investigated to create a trustworthy and universal digital space, based on human rights principles and values. After analysis and discussion of salient aspects of two relevant proposals, it is submitted that the lack of a common understanding of concepts makes global regulation unlikely. Nevertheless, a possible alternative to universal frameworks and national regulation might be the creation of 'blocs of trust', established through international conventions.
Global Media and China, 2022
In the early 1990s, US leaders promoted the internet as post-nation "global information infrastructure." However, throughout the 2000s, critical internet infrastructure became centralized under the tight control of a handful of US-based multinational companies. This paper examines the US government's willingness to leverage its regulatory control over privately run critical infrastructure to exercise massive internet surveillance (pulling information from sovereign states), massive influence campaigns (pushing information into sovereign states), and, increasingly, to levy unilateral cyber-sanctions on other sovereign states (cutting information flows through blockages and digital lock-outs). The US government is now asserting its territorial sovereignty over what it had presented as global infrastructure in order to advance its narrow national goals. I argue that the weaponization of corporate internet infrastructure by the US government marks a new era of internet governance and is one of the key drivers of what is often discussed as internet fragmentation in internet governance forums.
Internet, New Technologies, and Value: Taking Share of Economic Surveillance
U. ILL. J.L. TECH. & POL’Y, 2017
This review of (and discussion around) Valérie-Laure Benabou and Judith Rochfeld's as yet untranslated book, A qui profite le clic? Le partage de la valeur à l'ère du numérique, begins by briefly tracing the development of the Internet from disintermediation to today's situation where new Internet intermediaries capture the value of personal data and user-generated content created on or through the web. Once recent developments involving disclosure of mass surveillance and European adoption of new data protection legislation are discussed, the authors' book is introduced, and the discussion shifts to economic surveillance. Cookies—which are the tools that allow the giant, mainly American Internet companies to capture data about web-users' behavior—and reactions to their use are debated. The necessity for transparency and the failure of contractual provisions to mirror true consent are detailed. During the reading of Benabou and Rochfeld's book, we note that an important actor in the creation of value—the consumer—does not necessarily receive his or her share of the resulting value. The law, which has a role in defending certain values, whether it be copyright law, competition law, or contract law, has difficulties dealing with new paradigms created by new technologies and information. In Europe, fundamental rights and consumer law are supposed to help the web user, but do they go far enough? The book's authors propose beginnings of solutions to the law's difficulties in this context— based on transparency, technical mastery of content by the consumers who created it, control of consent, and collective action. Although the book leaves us hungry for more, it also leaves us thought-provoked as the reviewer comments. Citation: 2017 U. ILL. J.L. TECH. & POL’Y 469-485 (Fall 2017, Issue 2).
The threat of surveillance capitalism
Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales
Using Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the essay explores this latest form of capitalism and Zuboff’s claims about its organization. Her arguments are compared and contrasted with David Eggers novel, and the movie that came out of it, called The Circle, as well as other perspectives on capitalism (Marx, Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger) and the current dominance of social media companies (especially Alphabet/Google, Facebook, and Amazon) from Evgeny Morozov, Natasa Dow Schüll, Zeynep Tufekci, Steve Mann and Tim Wu. Zuboff’s description and critique of Surveillance Capitalism is a convincing and important addition to our understanding of the political economy of the early 21st Century and the role of giant monopolistic social media companies in shaping it.