“Decarbonizing industries with connectivity & 5G” MIT Technology Review Insights whitepaper evaluates how senior technology, business and renewable energy executives are leveraging cellular technology to achieve environmental sustainability as well as operational efficiency objectives.
Introduction
Energy, manufacturing, and transportation sectors are among the biggest carbon emitters globally. Overall, energy use is responsible for about two thirds of GHG emissions, including both the sectors’ own emissions and energy consumed for other sectors, according to the Exponential Roadmap. This is made up of 32 gigatons (Gt) of annual CO2 emissions, plus 3.3 Gt of CO2 equivalent emissions (CO2e) from other greenhouse gases. The manufacturing sector is responsible for 17 Gt CO2e annually, which represents 32% of the global total, and transport-related emissions total 8.6 Gt CO2e per year, which represents 16% of the global total. Decarbonization in these sectors would have a substantial impact in meeting the goals of the Paris agreement, keeping global average temperature 1.5°C above preindustrial levels.
This whitepaper, “Decarbonizing industries with connectivity & 5G,” argues that the capabilities enabled by broadband cellular connectivity primarily, though not exclusively, through 5G network infrastructure are a unique, powerful and immediate enabler of carbon reduction efforts, and have the potential to create a transformational acceleration of decarbonization efforts, as increasingly interconnected supply chains, transportation, and energy networks share data to increase efficiency and productivity, hence optimizing systems for lower carbon emissions.
A draft EU regulation on artificial intelligence risks exclusion of the social partners and lack of compliance with data-protection requirements.
Introduced by agreement, AI may be enabling—an engineer helps an operator programme a robot arm for a production line (Gorodenkoff/shutterstock.com)
Discussions about a European regulation on artificial intelligence have burgeoned since the European Commission published its proposal in April. In the aftermath, we wrote about potential threats to labour and employment rights. The text, of course, is not definitive and it is possible the final version will significantly diverge—there is indeed room for improvement.
Amid calls from employers for a ‘laser-sharp’ definition, which would be prone to circumvention and unable to keep pace with technical developments, AI is described in the draft by reference to some of its functions: prediction, optimisation, personalisation and resource allocation. Due to the pandemic-induced digital acceleration, almost everyone is now familiar with the promises and perils of AI-enabled tools adopted to perform decisional tasks in a large variety of domains and, in particularly sensitive contexts, as working ecosystems.
The draft regulation mentions both ‘AI systems intended to be used for recruitment or selection of natural persons, notably for advertising vacancies, screening or filtering applications, evaluating candidates in the course of interviews or tests’ and ‘AI intended to be used for making decisions on promotion and termination of work-related contractual relationships, for task allocation and for monitoring and evaluating performance and behavior of persons in such relationships’. This largely encompasses the managerial functions entrusted to data-driven management models, often lumped together under the popular formula of ‘algorithmic bosses’.
The commission acknowledges that these ‘high-risk’ AI systems ‘pose significant risks to the health and safety or fundamental rights of persons’. In the draft, however, a ‘laissez-faire’ approach prevails, and such systems have merely to comply with a ‘set of horizontal mandatory requirements for trustworthy AI’. These include ‘appropriate data governance and management practices’, package-insert-like documentation proving compliance with current rules, transparency of procedures, human oversight and ‘an appropriate level of accuracy, robustness, and cybersecurity’. The practice, however, is mainly based on self-certification via the ex-ante ‘conformity assessment procedures’ conducted by providers themselves or, in a few cases, delivered through standard-setting bodies.
Ceiling rather than floor
We had expressed the concern that the regulation could end up being a ceiling for labour protection rather than a floor. Its liberalising legal basis is article 114 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, on harmonisation in the internal market. This could be used to trump existing national regulations providing for involvement of the social partners before introduction of any technological tool apt to monitor workers’ performance. This is all the more so when AI applications are embedded in ordinary tools already used at the workplace to protect business assets, assess working performance and track productivity—or flag deviant behaviours.
Several member states have devised a dedicated model for surveillance technology in employment, whereby worker representatives or public bodies are required to be involved and, in some cases, may exercise veto powers. While most ordinary monitoring devices have often to pass a codetermination phase before being introduced in professional environments, the model envisaged by the AI regulation risks displacing all these procedural protections. They, in fact, could be interpreted as exorbitant and disproportionate relative to the safeguards provided and thus hampering the free provision of AI-related services the instrument aims to promote. Hence, more protective domestic laws risk being watered down, if read as incompatible with the harmonisation aims of the regulation.
The regulation should specifically provide that it is without prejudice to any existing or future labour and employment protection aimed at governing the introduction and use of any AI-enabled tool in European workplaces. This would avoid the regulation being used to lower or abrogate labour standards, harming privacy, freedom of expression, human dignity and equality.
More specific rules
Such a provision would be consistent with the commission’s claim that its proposal ‘is without prejudice and complements the General Data Protection Regulation’. A paramount provision of the GDPR, article 88, allows member states, ‘by law or collective agreements’, to ‘provide for more specific rules to ensure the protection of the rights and freedoms in respect of the processing of employees’ personal data in the employment context’.
The GDPR refers ‘in particular’ to ‘the purposes of the recruitment, the performance of the contract of employment, including discharge of obligations laid down by law or by collective agreements, management, planning and organisation of work, equality and diversity in the workplace, health and safety at work’, as well as ‘the protection of employer’s or customer’s property and for the purposes of the exercise and enjoyment, on an individual or collective basis, of rights and benefits related to employment, and for the purpose of the termination of the employment relationship’.
Crucially, according to article 88 these rules ‘shall include suitable and specific measures to safeguard the data subject’s human dignity, legitimate interests and fundamental rights, with particular regard to the transparency of processing, the transfer of personal data within a group of undertakings, or a group of enterprises engaged in a joint economic activity and monitoring systems at the work place’.
This aims to allow responsive solutions to the emergence of new instruments and practices that may significantly affect workers. The reference to ‘law or collective agreements’, moreover, provides an opportunity to bring worker representatives to the table.
National data-protection authorities have read this in conjunction with article 5 of the GDPR, which establishes its principles of ‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency’ along with other guiding tenets. In particular, compliance with domestic provisions on employee monitoring and privacy regulation has been considered a precondition for fulfilling the principle of lawful processing, thus strengthening integration between the GDPR and national rules.
Explicit provision
The purposes for which article 88 encourages member states to adopt specific labour and employment protection correspond to, and even go beyond, the potential use of tools envisaged by the AI regulation. Therefore, interpreting the draft as preventing national measures providing specific labour and employment safeguards would be incompatible with article 88 of the GDPR, which explicitly allows for such measures. And if that were the case, the AI regulation would not operate ‘without prejudice’ to the GDPR, as the commission claims.
To foster legal certainty, for the benefit of providers and users, an explicit provision excluding any national labour and employment regulation being ‘dismembered’ under the AI regulation would be opportune. Moreover, AI-enabled managerial tools pose severe risks to workers’ rights, well beyond the realm of privacy. Therefore, consistency must be ensured with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and secondary union legislation on consumer protection, non-discrimination and equality, health and safety.
As citizens, trade unions, data-protection authorities and litigators gradually master the ability to utilise the GDPR strategically to tame algorithmic bosses, it is crucial to explore the full potential of the rights it confers. Its role would be severely undermined should the proposed AI regulation become operative as a prevailing EU secondary-law instrument. On the contrary, an AI act must be seen as one piece of a complex, multidimensional jigsaw, whose twofold goal is to uphold data flow while guaranteeing that European citizens’ and workers’ rights are fully respected.
Valerio De Stefano Valerio De Stefano is the BOFZAP professor of labour law at KU Leuven and co-author of New Trade Union Strategies for New Forms of Employment (ETUC, 2019).
Antonio Aloisi Antonio Aloisi is Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow and assistant professor of European and comparative labour law at IE Law School, IE University, Madrid.
As MEPs host the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen this afternoon, they need to step up their challenge to the surveillance capitalists.
Google’s European headquarters in Dublin—the company claims to have delayed the ePrivacy regulation (John And Penny / shutterstock.com)
Documents which have emerged in a legal action by several US states against Google have revealed that the company boasted about delaying a European Union regulation on ‘ePrivacy’, advanced in 2017 as a proposal to protect users from online commercial surveillance. Amazon has also claimed victory in this battle.
At the same time, Facebook has been rocked by a huge document leak by a former staff member turned whistleblower. Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on surveillance by the US National Security Agency, has it right: European lawmakers, data regulators and privacy authorities must recognise that it is time to revise their approach to internet giants, who have been actively and intentionally sabotaging proposals for digital reform and regulation.
Corporate triumphalism
‘We have been successful in slowing down and delaying the [ePrivacy regulation] process and have been working behind the scenes hand in hand with the other companies.’ So crowed Google in a 2019 memo, prepared for a meeting with Facebook and Microsoft, apparently to discuss how to co-ordinate efforts to forestall new US privacy rules. The corporate triumphalism, reported last month by Politico among others, came to light in the midst of a court case brought by state prosecutors against Google for anti-competitive behaviour.
It comes almost a year after Politicoreported on internal Amazon documents, which trumpeted having diluted the European Parliament’s stance on the ePrivacy proposal. Amazon gloated: ‘Our campaign has ensured that the ePrivacy proposal will not get broad support in the European Parliament. Our aim is to weaken the Parliament’s negotiation position with the Council, which is more sympathetic to industry concerns.’
The ePrivacy regulation has been the target of intense corporate lobbying since its conception, with companies which rely on surveillance advertising—including Big Tech but also publishers and telecommunications firms—especially active. An EU insider told Corporate Europe Observatory that this was ‘one of the worst lobby campaigns I have ever seen’.
Lobby onslaught
The industry campaign has been characterised by hyperbolic claims but MEPs largely saw through them and agreed a privacy-friendly position on ePrivacy. As Amazon correctly stated, however, the member states in the Council of the EU have been much more receptive to the lobby onslaught.
It took the council four years to come to a joint position, one full of industry-friendly loopholes: on metadata processing, data retention, cookie walls and a refusal to allow ‘do not track’ default browser settings. These undermine online-privacy protection for citizens. The file is now the subject of trilogue negotiations among the council, the parliament and the European Commission, with the outcome uncertain.
The latest revelations about Google’s ePrivacy lobbying have caused a stir but might be overshadowed by the news affecting another technology giant—the trove of documents leaked by the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. These show how the company lied to the public and hid research about its potential impact on teenagers and the way its algorithms amplified hate and misinformation across the world. If there is a thread running through the revelations it is that Facebook continuously chose profits over the public good.
Media stories have also indicated that Facebook’s content policies are under the influence of its own lobbying team—concerned most of all with preventing regulatory and political scrutiny of the company.
Dangerous implications
As MEPs hear directly from Haugen today, they should keep in mind how the stories about Facebook, Google and Amazon are connected.They all speak to the impact of corporate power and how lobbying has helped these Big Tech behemoths protect a business model which has dangerous implications for people’s lives.
As the academic Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, lobbying—alongside establishing relationships with elected politicians, a steady revolving door and a campaign for cultural and academic influence—has fortified Big Tech’s business model, built on violating privacy and unfairly dominating the market and flourishing without challenge.
In August, Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl reviewed the footprint of lobbying of EU institutions. The wide universe of actors was heavily dominated by technology companies and online platforms. Together the top ten tech firms spent over €32 million lobbying the EU in just one year—more than the biggest finance, pharmaceutical and fossil-fuel companies. Big Tech has the deepest pockets, the widest access to policy-makers and a chorus of funded organisations, ranging from lobby groups and consultancies to think-tanks and academics.
Canary in the coalmine
The success of corporations in shaping the ePrivacy discussions is the canary in the coalmine of Big Tech influence in Europe. It shows how, despite politicians’ loud public promises to rein them in, these companies can still flex their muscles and prevent much-needed reforms. EU policy-makers should keep this in mind during the ePrivacy trilogue and the lobbying blitz surrounding new rules for platforms covering content moderation, surveillance advertising and market power.
As Snowden suggests, it is time for the EU institutions to revise the way they deal with Big Tech and its allies. They can start by proactively seeking out those who have less resources: small and medium enterprises, independent academics, civil society, community groups. They should restrict the technology companies’ lobbying to public hearings, so the firms can be held to account for their claims.
But Big Tech influence is not just a problem in Brussels. Member-state governments need to come clean too about their links. The council must no longer offer a sympathetic ear to the industry, standing in the way of public-interest regulation to protect citizens.
Margarida Silva
Margarida Silva is a researcher and campaigner at Corporate Europe Observatory, a Brussels-based corporate-power watchdog. Margarida follows EU tech lobby battles and campaigns for lobby and ethics regulations.
A few days before the Nicaraguan presidential elections on November 7, Facebook and other social media companies began closing down many of the pages used by Sandinista supporters in their campaign to re-elect President Daniel Ortega. This blatant censorship move was said to be because they had discovered “troll farms” operated by government agencies. But many of the 1,500 accounts closed appear simply to belong to pro-Sandinista journalists or young commentators. TikTok, Twitter and Instagram took similar action, and Google said that it has closed 82 YouTube channels and three blogs in a related operation.
Among those closed were several well-known pro-Sandinista accounts with thousands of followers on Facebook-owned Instagram, including those of the online new sites Barricada, Redvolución and Red de Comunicadores.1 They even suspended the popular fashion organization Nicaragua Diseña.2 When such websites attempted to create new accounts, they were also blocked.
Censorship extended to neutral websites covering the election. For example, Carta Bodan’sdaily newsletter on November 2 carried brief descriptions of five opposition candidates.3 When colleagues tried to share this link on their Facebook pages it was rejected. The fact that there are five opponents of Daniel Ortega standing might be an inconvenient truth, of course, given that many of the reports of Facebook’s censorship repeated the U.S. government’s contention that the Nicaraguan elections are a “sham” with no real opponents (despite the fact that two of the parties standing were in government between 1990 and 2007).4
Facebook’s head of security, Nathaniel Gleicher, tweeted justifications for its actions, even admitting that “this is a domestic op, with links to multiple gov’t institutions and the FSLN party. We don’t see evidence of foreign actors behind this campaign.” Gleicher failed to respond to accusations that huge numbers of genuine accounts had been disabled.5
The Grayzone’s Ben Norton contacted several pro-Sandinista journalists and commentators who had lost their Facebook or Twitter accounts.6 These included young Sandinista Ligia Sevilla, who attempted to show her genuine status on her Twitter account, which was immediately suspended.7 The same happened to well-known Sandinista activist Daniela Cienfuegos.8 Darling Huete, a journalist, had the same experience.9 Some, like ElCuervoNica,10 managed to set up alternative accounts. Effectively many commentators suffered double censorship: blocked because they were falsely accused of being bots, then prevented from proving that the accusations were false when they posted videos of themselves as real people. One journalist who complained to Facebook was simply told that “For security reasons we can’t tell you why your account was removed.”
Exploring the motivations for Facebook’s actions, Norton points out its government connections. For example, Gleicher was director for cybersecurity policy at the National Security Council and previously worked at the Department of Justice. Other senior Facebook executives involved have similar government connections.
International media such as Reuters and the BBC simply took Facebook’s justification at face value–that it had disabled a “cross-government troll operation.”11 Even media such as Aljazeera, often critical of the U.S. government, carried reports on what Facebook had done without adverse comment.12 Apart from The Grayzone, only the U.K.’s Morning Star appears to have criticized Facebook’s decisions.13 Anti-Sandinista news sites, such as Artículo 66, listed the accounts affected, calling them “propaganda” and disseminators of “false news,” even though they are themselves well-established propaganda sources for the opposition.14 None questioned why this had occurred days before a crucial election, or how it happened that action was coordinated across different social media outlets. The Financial Timesreported, without comment, that the Facebook pages were followed by 784,500 users, even though this might have alerted them to the fact that most if not all the pages were genuine.15
The FT even compared the government’s operation to that of the Russian government’s St. Petersburg troll farm, accused of meddling in two recent U.S. elections.16 It ignored a crucial difference: that the Nicaraguan accounts closed were engaged in campaigning during theirown country’s elections, not interfering in anyone else’s. Even more obviously, having made this comparison, it failed to ask why Facebook is itself interfering in an election campaign, and whether it is doing so at the behest of the U.S. government.
John Perry is a writer living in Masaya, Nicaragua.
↩ See “Facebook says it removed troll farm run by Nicaraguan government,” www.reuters.com xxx and “Cómo funcionaba la ‘granja de troles’ desmantelada por Facebook en Nicaragua,” www.bbc.com
↩ “Facebook says it shut down Nicaraguan government-run troll farm,” www.aljazeera.com
↩ “Facebook accused of censoring Sandinista media organisations ahead of Sunday’s election,” morningstaronline.co.uk
As the digitization of life intensifies in the era of lockdowns, it is urgent to think about how the “Digital Revolution” is shaping a new economic order that extends the destructive hold of industrial capitalism over nature and society. Two recent works discussed here by economist Hélène Tordjman help us move forward on this path.
The digitization of economic and social activities is a fundamental movement, which affects all sectors and takes several forms: coordination tasks, even decisions, are entrusted to algorithms; at all stages of production, machines are interconnected by the Internet of Things; finally, data becomes an important raw material, provided by consumer-citizens as soon as they are on the Internet, social networks, or use “connected objects”. This data feeds the artificial intelligence disseminated everywhere, and opens a new field for the valuation of capital. In particular, they allow GAFAM to control the advertising markets, and to invent new commercial services based on an increasingly intimate knowledge of our actions, our preferences and even our emotions.
Two recent books offer interpretations of these developments. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, sociologist Shoshana Zuboff analyzes how Google, Facebook, and the like have succeeded in turning the traces each of us leaves on our way through cyberspace into hard cash. She sees the advent of a “rogue capitalism” based on the appropriation of our private data, and warns of the dangers of such appropriation. The economist Cédric Durand interprets these changes within a Marxist framework. He points out in particular two phenomena which would presage a return to a certain form of feudalism, a “feudal regression”: the dismantling of the wage system and the replacement of contractual relations of subordination by relations of dependence; and the growing share of rents in corporate profits1.
While these two authors each bring to light indisputable facts, their interpretations of them do not seem entirely convincing, for the same reason: a lack of analysis of the technical phenomenon. Here I mean technique in the sense of Jacques Ellul, the domination of a mode of action geared towards the search for maximum efficiency in all things2. More precisely, “Technique is the set of absolutely most effective means at a given time. This makes it possible to take down the Technique of the machine, because there are indeed many other techniques than those which relate to the machines (for example the sports techniques) 3 “.
In this sense, technique also encompasses modes of organization, certain areas of law, and what Ellul calls “human techniques”, psychology, advertising, propaganda, aimed at social efficiency. So everything that comes under social engineering belongs to the technical realm. This global perspective on the technical phenomenon resonates with Max Weber’s vision of capitalism seen as a great process of rationalization and the domination of a rational mode of action in the end, emblematic of the engineering spirit. If we adopt this point of view, contemporary developments do not signify a change of regime, but a deepening of industrial capitalism and its extension to new areas, more and more calculation and control, a desire to control nature and the ever-expanding society. ”
THE IDEOLOGY OF SILICON VALLEY
In the first chapter of his book, Cédric Durand traces the genesis of the “Silicon Valley consensus”. This consensus was formed in the 1990s, drawing both on the Californian libertarian ideology of the 1960s and 1970s, and that of neoliberalism, giving primacy to the individual and his freedom to conduct business. Thus, the beginnings of the Internet offered a glimpse of a more “horizontal” world, where everyone’s knowledge would be accessible to everyone, where individuals would emancipate themselves from the tutelage of the state and large companies. The Internet would allow decentralized economic and social organization and free exchanges, a utopia still present in free software circles. However, it was necessary to become disillusioned fairly quickly. By the mid-1990s, under President Bill Clinton, the financial prospects for new information and communication technologies became very attractive. Capital is pouring in, thousands of start-ups are created, this is the boom of the “new economy”. Several think tanks and foundations then play a major role in the dissemination of this digital entrepreneurial spirit, including the Progress and Freedom Foundation, “a key player in the crystallization of a right-wing ideology associated with the digital revolution4”. In 1994, this foundation published an important text, A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, which proclaimed the end of the pre-eminence of material wealth in favour of the immaterial wealth that is knowledge. Thanks to the Internet, a new territory is opening up, still without rules or laws, which reactivates the American myth of the Frontier, of a virgin space to be conquered. Wired magazine, created in 1993 in San Francisco, also conveys this right-wing libertarian ideology called libertarianism.
This new area of freedom, cyberspace, must remain free, without the intervention of a federal state which is still prone to bureaucracy. For example, we can read in the Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age that “if there is an industrial policy for this new knowledge age, it must focus on removing the barriers that hinder competition and promote deregulation massive telecommunications and IT sector. The advent of cyberspace means the death of all centralized organizations and bureaucracy. Cyberspace is America’s last frontier […] America, after all, remains the land of individual freedom, and that freedom extends to cyberspace ”5. The reference to the process of creative destruction popularized by Joseph A. Schumpeter is very often present, as is that to Ayn Rand, a writer singing the praises of freedom and competition, the only one capable of rewarding “creative spirits” and of punishing. the “assisted6”.
Besides the glorification of individualism and competition, the other pillar of the ideology of Silicon Valley is the sacralization of technique, the belief that a more satisfactory social organization will result from scientific and technical progress, in particular from artificial intelligence. This makes it possible to automate a growing number of actions and decisions, making the economic and social system calculable and predictable, like a large machine running smoothly. This representation is not new, but the benchmark machine today is no longer mechanical but cybernetic. Alain Supiot perfectly shed light on this shift from government to that of “governance by numbers”: “the governing machine is no longer designed on the model of the clock but on that of the computer. Acephalous machine where power is no longer localizable and where regulation replaces regulation and governance, government, […], which is supposed to regulate itself like a biological organism or a computer7 “
For Shoshana Zuboff, the main source of what she calls “the utopia of certainty”, this idea that social progress requires a reduction in uncertainty and surprises, is to be found in the work of BF Skinner and his “radical behaviourism”. By going fast, human beings are not much different from pigeons or rats. They overestimate their free will and underestimate the evolutionary determinants and environmental stimuli that make them act. An efficient organization of society can thus be achieved by a good structure of these stimuli, which behavioral economics has more recently developed under the name of nudge8. More fundamentally, in the age of surveillance, a large number of new technologies can be used to build an efficient society: artificial intelligence interpreting people’s behavioral data, sensors of all kinds (including facial recognition) , generalized tracing (as we can observe it in the Chinese system of social credit9)…, all technologies of social control.
In this vision of society, which Zuboff describes as “instrumental”, “social phenomena are only aggregations of billions of small transactions between individuals” (p. 572), and it is a question of “creating a nervous system. for humanity ”(p. 568). She quotes here one of the gurus of this movement, Alex Pentland, of the MIT MediaLab, for whom the digitization of all social relations, the extension of this “ubiquitous computing” makes it possible to approach this ideal of control. One can find roots of such a hyper-individualistic and technical perspective on the social as early as the 19th century, in particular with Jeremy Bentham, champion of social engineering. In other words, and as Alain Supiot reminds us, this desire for control is not new. However, the technological surge of recent decades has provided it with tools of unparalleled power. It is furthermore promoted by an ideology alongside which both Shoshana Zuboff and Cédric Durand have surprisingly passed, that of transhumanism. The latter, which aims to “increase” human and social performance through science and technology, was also born in Silicon Valley at the end of the 1980s, and is an integral part of the “consensus”. The utopia of a self-regulated society thanks to technosciences appears as such in a report by the National Science Foundation from 2002, which describes how the convergence of new sciences such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, information and cognitive sciences (the “NBIC convergence”) can found a “new renaissance10”, where “technology is a real alternative to politics11”. One of the most recent manifestations of this scientific and cybernetic social utopia is that of the Great Reset, the “reset” of the world economy following the crisis caused by the coronavirus, proposed by the Davos Economic Forum.
VALUE CREATION IN THE DIGITAL ECONOMY
“If it’s free, then you are the product.” This is how the business model of digital platforms was summed up at the start of their expansion. Shoshana Zuboff shows that it is not. We are not the product, but the raw material, the source of the valuable data from which these platforms make their products. She sheds light on the existence of what she calls a “behavioural surplus” made up of all the data we leave behind when we go online. Thanks to the increasingly sophisticated algorithms used by GAFAM, this data is interpreted to predict our behaviour, which in turn allows advertisers to target us in the most personalized way possible. “In 2016, 89% of parent company Alphabet’s revenue came from Google’s targeted advertising campaigns.” In the same year, Google and Facebook “together assumed nearly 90% of the growth in advertising spending12”.
Advertisers aren’t the only customers, these “markets for future behaviour” are of interest to many other industries. Hal Varian, author of popular microeconomics textbooks and senior economist at Google, sees it early on: he “addresses the example of ‘vehicle control systems’ which he recognizes as paradigmatic. When a motorist no longer pays the monthly payments on his car loan, it is much easier today to order the vehicle’s control system to block the engine and send the contact details of the car in order to make recovery possible ‘. Insurance companies, he notes, can also rely on these systems to judge a driver’s caution. ”13 S. Zuboff’s book is very rich and lists dozens of examples of how Google and Co are developing strategies to collect an increasing amount of personal data, aided in this by advances in nanotechnology and technology. artificial intelligence. Facial recognition software, for example, makes it possible to analyse the emotions of those who receive the advertisements, in order to adjust the latter even more finely. Autonomous cars, and connected objects more generally, are real data traps. With the launch of the Pokemon Go game in 2016, thousands of children and so-called adults were sent to search for these conveniently hidden virtual creatures at McDonald’s or any other retailer willing to pay to welcome them. Self-contained vacuums map the plans of the homes where they operate. Wearables, connected objects that you wear to measure the number of steps you take or your heart rate, connected mattresses (yes, it does exist) collect more and more intimate data, to such an extent that after The Internet of Things appears the Internet of Bodies… These mounds of data allow us to train algorithms, which therefore become more and more powerful in tracking our lives and collecting new data , in a spiral with no other end than that which the law could put there.
Zuboff insists precisely on the “psychic numbness” which makes us accept such a loss of autonomy and free will. Nevertheless, as C. Durand points out, his perspective is very individualistic, centered on the dispossession of the consumer by ill-intentioned capitalists. She advocates a return of governments in these matters, as if the state were a guarantee. The Marxist perspective of C. Durand makes him embrace the phenomenon in a more global way, by analyzing the global value chains from the beginning to the end of production, not in its only last stage of consumption, and not only those of GAFAM.
The concept of a global value chain captures the process of producing a good through the technical, geographic and fiscal fragmentation implemented by large firms in the globalized world that is ours, a fragmentation greatly helped by the digitization of activities and the remote coordination that it allows. It makes it possible to identify the stages of production that generate the most value. Various studies of these value chains show that today, value is essentially created upstream, when the product is designed, or right downstream, when it is sold. Manufacturing is no longer a real source of value, which is why it is generally outsourced to countries in the South with low labor costs and reduced social and environmental legislation. Apple, for example, is a firm without a factory, all manufacturing is subcontracted. The design and sale are enhanced by intellectual property rights, patents, designs and models, algorithms and databases, brands. “The concentration of value at the extremes of the chain is the expression of a process of intellectual monopolization at the end of which economic power is concentrated in a few strategic sites14”. These strategic sites are those where the most data is extracted and analyzed by manufacturers to improve “the user experience, design targeted advertising or sell personalized services15”. Data is now a fundamental raw material in the process of capital appreciation, and its exploitation gives rise to different types of rents.
Cédric Durand distinguishes four (chapter three). The first derives from the monopolization of knowledge deriving from intellectual property rights. It should be noted that the intellectual property regime has tightened considerably since 1980 and the beginnings of neoliberalism, and extends to scientific information in all its diversity: software and algorithms, databases, but also to the genetic information of living things, from microorganisms to humans, including animals and plants. A growing number of “intangible” things can now be appropriated. The second is a “natural monopoly” rent, in situations where it is more economical for a single firm to produce a good or service rather than several competing firms. This is the case with rail networks, but also with most network industries, such as the telephone industry. It is based among other things on “network complementarities”: Apple does not sell only iPhones, but all the products of the “Apple ecosystem”, operating system, applications, iPods and other tablets, all compatible with each other, and incompatible with competitors’ products. The third type of annuity is the “intangible differential annuity”, which arises from the difference in returns to scale between tangible and intangible assets. The latter being essentially knowledge, know-how and information, they are reproducible at a marginal cost which tends towards zero, which is not the case with tangible assets. Finally, C. Durand defines a “dynamic innovation rent”. The large firms that control global value chains organize the integration of productive processes. “Information accumulates in very specific places where the integration functions are concentrated.” These firms “centralize the data. However, these data are an essential raw material for modern research and development processes: thanks to them, it is possible to identify weaknesses, identify sources of improvement, virtually test innovative solutions16 “. Who controls this data has an advantage in the frenzied technological competition between big companies and big powers. In addition, the control of the material infrastructures necessary for the circulation and storage of data (submarine cables, electromagnetic frequencies, 4G and soon 5G antennas, data centers, cloud, etc.) confers an absolutely strategic position.
The digital economy therefore does not cover only the digital services offered by the major platforms. It is the entire productive system that is gradually digitized, a process that generates a change in the organization of value chains (that is to say in the international division of labor) and therefore in the places where value is created and appropriate.
SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, TECHNO-FEODALISM, OR DEEPENING OF TECHNOSCIENTIFIC CAPITALISM?
With the extension of surveillance, capitalism is crossing a new threshold. As Zuboff writes, “Industrial capitalism has followed its own logic of ‘shock and amazement’, seizing nature and conquering it in the name of the interests of capital; what surveillance capitalism now has its sights on is human nature ”17. All the digital devices aimed at extracting our personal data to better predict and guide our behavior form a ubiquitous infrastructure in which we are all caught, an infrastructure that Zuboff calls Big Other. This impersonal power mirrors our behaviors from another abstract point of view, to the same place as the Skinnerian experimenter guiding his rats through a maze with the right stimuli. And this in an essentially advertising perspective, as in the game of Pokemon Go.
However, publicity and propaganda in the service of social engineering aimed at controlling the masses have existed for more than a century. Their means were different, more artisanal, and have certainly been revolutionized by digital technology, but there is no radical novelty here, it seems to me. Zuboff sees the origin of surveillance in the desire of a few “rogue capitalists” to enrich themselves at our expense, but thinks that other, more respectful uses of digital technology were possible, and that States would be able to encourage them. by limiting the power of GAFAM. In other words, it is not the digitization of all human activities that would be bad, but the use that is made of it.
The belief in the neutrality of the technique is also shared by Cédric Durand18. The place of technique is a blind spot in Marxist approaches, all centered on what happens at the level of the appropriation of production, and not of its precise technical forms. This belief is at the heart of technical ideology and legitimizes most technological innovations. The atom promised inexhaustible energy, the bomb was only an unfortunate development. Biotechnology will produce new plants and new drugs, improving human health and solving the problem of world hunger, while experiments with genetically modified babies are the work of rogue scientists. Likewise, facial recognition is of great help in the fight against crime, and does not have to be used to hunt down honest citizens. These commonplaces testify to a lack of understanding of the technical phenomenon. As Jacques Ellul analyzes it forcefully, modern technique is characterized by its insecurity: it forms a system, a whole, and it is impossible to circumscribe certain parts to separate them from the others. On the other hand, its dynamic is one of blind self-increase, of a subjectless process developing in response to the questions it asks itself. Finally, it tends to be autonomous, that is to say, closed to any moral questioning, deploying itself in the sole dimension of the search for maximum efficiency. This autonomy is of course not complete, the entanglement of power games, ideologies and institutional funding priorities directing the technological paths that will ultimately prevail19.
Thus, the digitization of society and the economy is producing an increasing amount of data. What are they going to be used for? New algorithms performing new functions are developed and generate new uses. As the computing power continues to grow, infrastructure must be developed: from 3G to 4G, 5G, and soon 6G… This exponential volume of data makes it possible to “train” algorithms, which become more efficient in applications. more and more extensive, without ever questioning the order of meaning slowing this dynamic, and digitization continues. But this is not specific to the digital economy, as Zuboff and Durand write. It has been like this from the earliest days of the industrial era, until today’s NBIC convergence. “Anything technical, without distinction of good or bad, is necessarily used when you have it in your hands. This is the major law of our time20 ”. Not seeing this leads, it seems to me, the two authors to identify a change of regime where there is continuity and deepening of an already existing dynamic. Moreover, it is because technique is not neutral that it so disrupts our lives: it brings to light with it practices and social relations that are inextricably linked to it. Developments in the latter would be different if biotechnologies had developed on a large scale before information and communication technologies. The horizon would be Brave New World and Gattaca rather than 1984. But in both cases, calculation, predictability and control, the historical necessity of industrial capitalism.
Undoubtedly because of his Marxist perspective, Cédric Durand gives a great place in his developments to the transformations of work, while Shoshana Zuboff sees the human being primarily as a consumer. Following other authors, such as Alain Supiot, he sheds light on the changes brought about by digitization in labor relations, in particular in the platform economy, what is called “uberization”. The workers on these platforms are no longer bound to their employer by an employment contract but by subcontracting relationships. They are legally independent (therefore assume the risks associated with their activity), but must donate part of their earnings to the platform that allows them to work. Thus, from subordination, the working relationship shifts to dependence. “In the case of Uber drivers, this leads to a paradoxical situation, where the aspiration to autonomy comes up against the extremely strong hold of the platform on the activity: real-time control of the course of the race, submission the evaluation of passengers, opacity in setting prices, prohibition on taking customer details, incentive bonuses aimed at building driver loyalty or increasing the offer in certain areas, penalties that can go as far as deactivating the account, etc. 21 ”. The asymmetry of the working relationship is still there, but it has changed in nature: “the platforms are like fiefdoms”, and “the subjects are attached to the digital soil”. This is one of C. Durand’s major arguments for identifying “feudal regression”.
The other main argument put forward for qualifying the contemporary regime as techno-feudalism concerns the nature of profits. As mentioned, due to the evolution of global value chains, the share of rents in corporate profits is steadily increasing. In a Marxist view based on labor value, corporate profit results from the extraction of surplus value in the production process, part of the work, the “surplus labor”, not being remunerated. This, according to Marx, is the heart of the mechanism for the valuation of capital in the capitalist mode of production. Rent, on the contrary, produces value without production. It arises from the ownership of capital, material and / or intellectual, and does not find its origin in manufacturing work. Taking this perspective, it is not surprising that the author interprets the growing preeminence of rents over productive profits as a sign of a return to a form of feudalism.
However, if we move the point of view, this interpretation can be debated. Since the beginning of the 1980s and the advent of a capitalism regime described as financialized by the authors of the School of Regulation22, financial profits, which have the nature of a rent, have become more important than profits. productive, even for non-financial firms. To the four major types of annuity identified by Cédric Durand, we should therefore add the category of financial annuities, the overall value of which is much greater. However, these rents generated by the ownership of capital do not signify a return to feudalism, but rather an increase in the power of the owners of capital to the detriment of the workers. In other words, they testify to a deepening of capitalism: a change in the regime of accumulation but not of the mode of production.
Finally, against the thesis of a return to feudalism, and besides the fact that the idea of a “return” goes against a temporal vision recognizing irreversibilities, let us recall three of its linked features. The first is that feudal societies were societies of orders, of castes, where the positions of human beings were fixed by the laws of their birth. As Louis Dumont has shown, these were holistic societies: social relations were codified by statutes and traditions, crossed by multiple memberships of various communities (of orders, religious, profession), where the an individual in the modern sense of a subject acting “freely” did not exist as such23. The second concerns the motive of human action. It is only with the advent of capitalism that rational action in the end comes to dominate, and with a very narrowly defined end: monetary profit. The pursuit of material interest was previously considered to be unreliable, feudal societies valued the pursuit of beauty and glory on the battlefield, certainly not the pursuit of profit. Finally, the third fact refers to the place occupied by technique. The definition given by Jacques Ellul, as a principle of maximum social efficiency, allows us to broaden the perspective and understand how the emergence of individualism and the social atomization that followed were conditions for development. of modern technology. Regarding the Industrial Revolution, he writes: “There is no freedom of groups, but only of the isolated individual. […] This atomization gives society the greatest possible plasticity. And this is also, from the positive point of view, a decisive condition of the technique: it is in fact the rupture of social groups that will allow the enormous displacements of men at the beginning of the 19th century which ensure the human concentration required by modern technique25 ”. This atomization has continued to deepen, resulting in what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls a “liquid society”. Such fluidity is both permissive and created by technological innovation that constantly upsets the conditions of existence of human beings. This perpetual movement is contrary to the stability of orderly societies like European feudalism.
Thus, an Ellulien look at the technical phenomenon rather leads to register the digital upheaval in a longer dynamic of continuous technical acceleration since the end of the 18th century, the ultimate change of contemporary capitalism. However, whatever the differences in interpretation of current phenomena, the works of Zuboff and Durant are very rich and provide essential reflection for understanding the evolutions of contemporary capitalism.
Alagalla Community Infromation Centre organised a one day awareness seminar on Information & Communication Technology at Vavuniya /Alagalla Vidyalaya on 26th February 2005. This seminar conducted by Lankanet.
The participants for this seminar were community leaders, school leavers and some school children from Alagalla village.They were actively participated for this seminar and raised various questions about ICT and its effectiveness for their life and future developments.
The seminar was chaired by Mr.Upul Hemantha Chandrasekara, the principal of Alagalla Vidyalaya and Organised by Mr.G.A. Jothirathna, who is a community leader.
Lankanet conducted a five days Training Program on Computer Hardware and Software Installation for nine (9) young women and men from three community base organisations from 15th February 2005 to 19th February 2005. Six of them were young women. They were from Gampola, Nuwaraeliya, and Wellassa .
They represented three community base organisations called National Solidarity Foundation at Gampola, Ragala Community Information Centre at Nuwaraeliya and Uva-Wellassa Women Agriculture Organisation at Wellassa.
In the coming year, these young women and men hope to build their own comminity information service with the help from their organisations and technical support from Lankanet. Their names are as follows:
