Narayan Prasad Ghimire

The tech companies, especially Google and Facebook, have emerged so powerful that they have succeeded in controlling almost the entire world's information, thereby posing a serious threat to the nations' capability to information gathering, storage, use and institutionalisation.
The information, knowledge and power the Facebook and Google exercise these days have not only taken the technology business by surprise but also the scientists, political powers, futurists and the entire world.
Revealing the aforementioned facts, a marvellous book penned by a Harvard Professor is gaining global attention. The book, "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power" has been written by Shoshana Zuboff. It is indeed an insurrection against Silicon Valley parvenu.
The book is a vivid description of the shift of power from politics to tech companies. The digital economy has further advanced to an emotion economy where self-objectification is rife and love and like quantified for others' benefit. The commodification of people already bolstered by capitalism has gone to the extreme in the age of surveillance capitalism.
The most sophisticated programmes including artificial intelligence, algorithm, machine learning are there to generate, store and manipulate data. They have changed the way power and wealth is generated in this modern world. The digital age is further expanded to the age of surveillance capitalism where enormous production of data with utmost speed and varieties but giving unprecedented benefit to technology barons.
On the surface, who are benefitted? Yes, every person. It is not beneficial for users but simply facilitation, the book suggests, arguing that the most benefited are some handful of tech companies like Facebook and Google. Although Facebook is said to be a public place, it is owned by a private company promoting online targeted advertising to earn money.
The Silicon Valley principle is the winner-take-all principle. Those with mighty technological talons rule the roosts, thereby crushing small tech companies and innovators.
The gross use of sophisticated technology for the predictability of human behaviour has badly ruined human emotion and created chaos. These tech companies are targeting users' emotion- like, dislike, anger, paranoia, anxiety etc. They trigger the users' emotion seducing them to like a page, join a group, click a website- all to monetize the behaviour.
According to writer Zuboff, Facebook's single most momentous innovation in behavioural engineering now is the 'Like' button which was adopted in 2009 and is ubiquitous. Facebook and Google have egregiously deviated from the norms, according to the Harvard Professor.
Making the book very comprehensive and compelling, the writer brings forth several references from diverse researchers, academia, technologists and the surveillance capitalists including the Facebook owner, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO, Sundar Pichai. In a reference, she states the failure to maintain positive equilibrium between inner and outer life in the wake of the digital deluge has relation to the 'adult personality disorder'. Similarly, the profile augmentation in social media for bigger visibility and expanding social networking does not always result in positive results.
She brings another reference: As one study concluded, "Expanding one’s social network by adding several distant friends through Facebook may be detrimental by stimulating negative emotions for users (Pg 462)." The writer even compares the model of surveillance capitalism between China, the US and Europe in line with their political and economic orders. She writes, "In China, the state vies with its surveillance capitalists for control. In the US and Europe, the state works with and through the surveillance capitalists to accomplish its arms (Pg 443)."
It indicates that irrespective of form and frontiers, surveillance capitalism is pervasive across global powers. The certainty created with predictive technology would jeopardize individual privacy and social relations. Everyone is falling victim to technological certainty, the utopist idea. The utopia of certainty the tech companies are believing and advocating is jeopardizing human decision and the human future.
Now, what’re her suggestions? Aware, organized, collaborative and institutional efforts are imperative to frustrate the resistant regime of tech giants and make technology human-centred. On the surface, technology is functioning for human kind, but modern technology is taking a toll on human nature. Saying it, Zuboff is not against technological development but for the protection of human rights by tech companies.
Facebook and Google should not exploit human behaviour but respect humans well. She strongly advocates for safe and secure humans in the modern tech world. Privacy and self-determination should not be destroyed for the sake of a competitive market. In order to secure a democratic future, she urges everyone to resist surveillance capitalism.
The book can compel tech giants to launch several reforms, thereby being accountable to users and extending solidarity to the campaign of creating human futures at the new frontier of power. We can take the example of current debates of content moderation intensified much after the Christ Church attack in New Zealand.
The book written amid the rapid expansion of computer technology and the internet will inevitably make the developed, developing and least developed countries aware of a data breach, the threat to digital and informational privacy, and free speech in the digital age. It undoubtedly triggers the national, regional and global debates on capitalism, digital economy, law, human rights, and development dimensions in light of the pervasive effects of the internet and technology.