THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: The New Frontier of Power — Ihering Guedes Alcoforado
No livro The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Shoshana Zuboff busca ressaltar o confronto entre i) o poder das corporações high-tech e seus novos metodos de engenharia social na predição e controle do nosso comportamento e ii) os governos.
Vale ressaltar que Zuboff ao caracterizar o “surveillance capitalism” faz um deslocamento metafórico do conceito de mercado de bens e serviços para o âmbito comportamental, destacando, de um lado um novo tipo de marketplace for behavioral predictions, e, do outro lado, behavioral futures markets
“ Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as “machine intelligence,” and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.”
Foca sua análise na dinâmica competitiva destes novos mercados, em especial a aproppriação das “ever-more-predictive sources of behavioral surplus”, a partir do que se configura uma nova especie de poder: Instrumentarian power baseado no conhecimento necessário a indução do comportamento humano.
“ […]the competitive dynamics of these new markets drive surveillance capitalists to acquire ever-more-predictive sources of behavioral surplus: our voices, personalities, and emotions. Eventually, surveillance capitalists discovered that the most-predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes. Competitive pressures produced this shift, in which automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior at scale. With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. In this phase of surveillance capitalism’s evolution, the means of production are subordinated to an increasingly complex and comprehensive “means of behavioral modification.” In this way, surveillance capitalism births a new species of power that I call instrumentarianism. Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends.
Enfim, ele configura uma encruzilhada que abre caminho tanto para i) uma ameaça a autonomia individual, aos direitos democráticos e a consolidação uma nova forma de desiguladade social, como para ii) o avanço no sentido oposto, ou seja de empoderamento individual e democratização.