'We rushed into the internet full of joy and innocence. It's only three decades later that the internet has turned into a surveillance prison, owned and operated by private capital and its profit-seeking imperatives, molded by its political compulsions, and weaponized by the interests of its investors and its clients. There are no bars in this prison, but there is no escape. 

It is our shared fate to live at the dawn of information civilization, where inclusion in the coordinates of the world's atlas requires that persons, and increasingly all that is animate and inanimate, are rendered as and mediated by digital information. But who knows that information? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? These are the essential questions of knowledge, authority, and power that shaped the political foundations of a new social order. 

Yet here we are, midway through the third decade of the digital century, and it is the surveillance capitalist giants and their ecosystems - Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple - that hold the answers to each of these questions, though we never elected them to govern. They learned to secretly extract human data at massive scale, then claim that data as corporate assets available for proprietary analysis, product development, and sales. 

Normally when you take something from someone without their knowledge and then you use it to further your own interests, it's called theft. Surveillance capitalism is built on this foundation of theft. Immoral, illegitimate, but not yet illegal. Many of the worst harms that plague our societies are the downstream effects that originate in this theft. The destruction of privacy, information corruption, the concentration and control of knowledge about people, how that knowledge morphs into power to shape individual and collective behavior, the progressive desocialization of society, and the demise of social solidarity, the unaccountable control over the information space that now emboldens the giants to battle democracies for the authority to govern. Indeed, the abdication of the information space to surveillance capitalism, which began as a US story, has become the metacrisis of every republic because it obstructs solutions to all other crises. No democracy can survive these conditions. 

So here we are, careening toward dystopia, and we wonder, will the rights of the people to self-governance survive this century? Or will we be yoked to a machine world that feeds on our lives to better serve the interests of its masters? 

As storytellers, journalists, and publishers, you have a mighty voice. You have a critical role to play in this still unfolding drama because your work can expose the hidden structures of power and abstract violence that define our everyday conditions. This is how we learn to resist habituation to that which is intolerable. 

Help us understand where we have wandered. Help us imagine a new path home. This mandate is so crucial now because the information oligarchs work in the shadows, where they have perfected vocabularies of obfuscation and lies, misdirection, and gaslighting that succeed in making it so difficult to see what's in front of your nose, as Orwell put it. Journalists and filmmakers have been squeamish, squeamish about really calling out the illegitimate operations of surveillance capitalism that thrive behind the veil. 

Here are some principles I'd like you to consider. First of all, get smart about gaslighting and propaganda. Call it out. For example, right now, tech execs and right-wing politicians are united in their opposition to "censorship". But in their gaslighting dictionary, censorship means deprivation of the right to lie, even when those lies are killing millions of people as occurred with COVID disinformation. Don't simply repeat the gaslight. Strip it down, reveal its coded, naked meaning, and the violence that it intends. 

Another principle - get braver. Do not repeat the lies intended to imprison us. Starting with the reification of technology as an autonomous force. Technology should never be the subject of a sentence because it has no subjectivity. Never refer to technology as if it has agency or ethics. It's not the internet that helped Trump. It's not the algorithms that drive polarization. AI is neither ethical nor evil. The giants are compelled to reify technology because they protect their power with the myth of technological inevitability, and they do this in order to persuade us that our only reasonable choice is submission. 

A third principle, because technology is not the weather, it is not inevitable, it is not a force that visits us from the beyond. The stories you tell are, therefore, not about technology. They're about power. There is no such thing as technology independent of the economic and political forces that bring it to life. 

A fourth principle - now more than ever, we must make our own weather, and your art can inspire us. Be part of this grand undertaking. Here are some examples: tech wants to fragment and isolate us, desocialize spokes to their central hub. In rejecting the normalization of the anti-human, your stories can help us rediscover the genuine joys of real life. 

Show us communities, families, neighborhoods. Show us alliances, not enemies. Show us inclusion, not exclusion. When they celebrate each time the machines beat the humans, it's your turn to exalt and extol what humans are, and what humans do. When they mock slow, you celebrate slow. When their vision of the future shows us how we do not want to live, then you help us imagine and articulate how we do want to live, how we all yearn to live. 

These distinctions are good news. They tell us that the harms we experience are not the inevitable product of technological necessity. They remind us that democracy is innately adverse to inevitability, precisely because inevitability negates human agency, negates human dignity, and the very essence of self-governance. Anything made by people can be unmade and remade by people. 

Democracy may be the old and slow and messy incumbent here, but its strengths are difficult to match. Democracy inspires action. Just ask the people of Ukraine. Ask the people of Georgia. And democracy retains the authority and power to make, impose, and enforce laws that advance democratic governance, the one power that is most feared by tech giants, most feared by authoritarians, most feared by criminals. 

It is wholly within the capabilities of the democratic order to abolish surveillance capitalism and free the digital from its iron cage in order to reimagine, to reinvent, and to reclaim our information civilization for a democratic future nourished by data, information, and knowledge. And you, my friends, you, can show us that future. Godspeed, thank you.’

Shoshana Zuboff

3rd December 2024