Tech companies bypass privacy laws daily, creating harm for profit. The information economy is plagued with hidden harms to people’s privacy, equality, finances, reputation, mental wellbeing, and even to democracy, produced by data breaches and data-fed business models. This book explores why this happens and proposes what to do about it. Legislators, policymakers, and judges are trapped into ineffective approaches to tackle digital harms because they work with tools unfit to deal with the unique challenges of data ecosystems that leverage AI. People are powerless towards inferences about them that they can’t anticipate, interfaces that manipulate them, and digital harms they can’t escape. Adopting a cross-jurisdictional scope, this book describes how laws and regulators can and should respond to these pervasive and expanding harms. In a world where data is everywhere, one of society’s most pressing challenges is addressing power discrepancies between the companies that profit from personal data and the people whose data produces profit. Doing so requires creating accountability for the consequences of corporate data practices—not the practices themselves. Laws can achieve this by creating a new type of liability that recognizes the social value of privacy, uncovering dynamics between individual and collective digital harms.

Tech companies bypass privacy laws daily, creating harm for profit. The information economy is plagued with hidden harms to people’s privacy, equality, finances, reputation, mental wellbeing, and even to democracy, produced by data breaches and data-fed business models. This book explores why this happens and proposes what to do about it. Legislators, policymakers, and judges are trapped into ineffective approaches to tackle digital harms because they work with tools unfit to deal with the unique challenges of data ecosystems that leverage AI. People are powerless towards inferences about them that they can’t anticipate, interfaces that manipulate them, and digital harms they can’t escape. Adopting a cross-jurisdictional scope, this book describes how laws and regulators can and should respond to these pervasive and expanding harms. In a world where data is everywhere, one of society’s most pressing challenges is addressing power discrepancies between the companies that profit from personal data and the people whose data produces profit. Doing so requires creating accountability for the consequences of corporate data practices—not the practices themselves. Laws can achieve this by creating a new type of liability that recognizes the social value of privacy, uncovering dynamics between individual and collective digital harms.

This chapter explains how the interplay between different societal factors and new technologies fosters a new form of social organization, which is no longer based on the individual or the traditional community but revolves around the idea of a network. Therefore, it discusses the idea of the network society along with the concepts of timeless time, the space of flows, and the weightless economy as well as the leading theories on network societies. The chapter outlines the effects of the increasing fusion of national public spheres with global information flows on public communication and presents two opposing developments: the participatory character of public communication and its restriction through economic interests and algorithmic processes. Furthermore, it focuses on the concept of network sociality, which is based on the assumption that networks and not communities are the dominant organizational form in a digital society. The chapter illustrates the role of social media in building and maintaining networks and introduces the term social capital, in order to understand network motivation. It ends with a reflection on the influence of algorithms on our socialities.

If the domestic near future operates with residual and dominant cultural forms, in Raymond Williams’s terms, it also provides glimpses of potential emergent formations. This chapter reads two novels that give a particularly vivid sense of the incipient genre of near-future revolution struggling within inherited genres that can register but not properly embody it. While the eponymous company in The Circle by Dave Eggers (2013) provides a more legible delineation of the Anthropocene than the environmental disasters that often populate the domestic near future, its victory relies on a similar investment in individual embodiment, that has as its correlate a latent antipathy to collective agency – such as might coalesce in the prospective revolution glimpsed at the novel’s close. Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich (2013) progresses from a devastating satire of apocalyptic capitalism into an oscillation between shattered human communities and a dangerous journeying: between capitalist realism in the shadow of dystopia and the adventure romance. However, almost despite itself, the novel dowses at its end towards another kind of collective that would also be another form of novel.

The contemporary world seems obsessed with stuff: how to get it, what to do with it, how to get rid of it. Although historians long assumed that rising consumption began with industrialization, we now know that the pace of consumption accelerated in the early modern world well before the age of mass production. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, women and men began to accumulate more clothing, carry more personal accessories, fill their households with more furnishings, and wear, smoke, snort, eat, and drink prodigious quantities of colonial products. Although scholars debate whether to call this growth in consumption “revolutionary” or “evolutionary,” they agree that is was transformational. It changed how people looked, ate, socialized, and thought, giving rise to debates about moral progress and ushering in new forms of revolutionary political activism. This book has offered a new interpretation of the consumer revolution by incorporating questions of empire, political economy, global trade, slavery, material culture, philosophy, politics, and revolution. One important theme that remains to be explored, however, is the relationship between consumption and the environment. Any solution to the climate crisis will require a revolution in how humans think about – and practice – consumption. Although today nothing seems more natural than relentless consumption, it, too, has a history. Heightening awareness of the fact that consumption in the contemporary world is a historical construct, an outcome of contingent historical factors, is an important first step toward resolving the climate crisis. For any invention of human society can be reinvented.

Chapter 15 concludes by describe two radically different future visions of the intelligent society. On one hand, instrumentarian intelligence assumes that algorithms tracking human behavior can predict human behavior more accurately than ever before. In western countries, this intelligence manifests itself in a new surveillance capitalism with companies like Google and Facebook constantly searching for behavioral surplus in both online and offline settings. In the political domain, instrumentarian intelligence seeks a reputation state built on a neobehavioristic governing model. The most prominent example is the nationwide social credit system in China that makes it possible to grade citizens on different behavioral indicators. In stark contrast, civic intelligence highlights a use of technology still controlled by the community and citizens in contrast to the dehumanizing aspects of instrumentarian intelligence. While machine intelligence also craves for informational diversity in its hunt for behavioral surplus, civic intelligence seeks a broader diversity that includes not only information, but also multicultural, cognitive, biological, and participatory diversity. The “fuel” of CI is people who are different from each other, with different interests and unique perspectives. Civic intelligence also builds on a strong knowledge commons and an open shared collective memory. It does not hide information to produce the best predictions, but it promotes complete transparency and individual empowerment. In contrast to instrumentarian intelligence, CI still lets human-to-human intelligence, and not the algorithms, be at the core of the human collective problem solving.

I arrived at 8:30 to begin observations and interviews, and was met by Bill, the company’s chief privacy officer, a man in sneakers and jeans roughly in his mid-sixties.1

Inside the information industry, management leverages the tools of coercive bureaucracies to routinize work that serves data-extractive ends. Corporate bureaucracies work subtly to set privacy discourses among company employees, inculcating corporate-friendly understandings of privacy as frontline workers approach their work. Organizations hobble privacy offices and amplify voices that interpret privacy law in ways that serve corporate interests. Management also constrains designers in the design process, feeding software engineers’ ambivalence toward privacy and using organizational structures to make it difficult for anyone to build better privacy protections into the designs of new technologies.

Privacy’s performances begin with discourse. This is an important step. By influencing how we think about privacy, by inculcating definitions of privacy that are so narrow, outdated, and corporate-friendly, tech companies can ensure that even those employees who consider themselves privacy advocates will nevertheless end up serving data-extractive business models in the end.

The information industry’s discursive performances have influenced everyone, including policy makers, privacy professionals, and ordinary users of technology. The campaign has seen its greatest success in the United States, where tech companies and their allies are actively undermining the push for a comprehensive national information privacy law, where studies show many people have given up on the hope that they can adequately protect their privacy online, and where many privacy professionals see corporate-friendly privacy discourses as ordinary, routine, and common sense.1

This book has been about the tools the information industry uses to routinize an antiprivacy ethos and practice through its organizations. Of course, not all tech companies use all of these tactics: some use a few, some use more, some use none. But these strategies are in use, and they have the effect of marginalizing privacy throughout the everyday work of law and design. More than just a collection of strategies, they are features of informational capitalism. They help explain how data-extractive capitalism persists.

Through a long campaign to inculcate corporate-friendly discourses about privacy, the information industry tilted our legal consciousness away from privacy and enlisted even those employees who see themselves as privacy advocates in their data-extractive missions. This softened the discursive ground on which we think and talk about privacy and weakened the privacy laws we manage to pass. Technology companies then took advantage of public-private partnerships explicitly built into those privacy laws to undermine their effectiveness. They used coercive bureaucracies and took advantage of power asymmetries to develop compliance programs that reoriented and recast privacy laws in ways that served their surveillant interests. As a result, the information industry undermined the institutions that are supposed to protect our privacy.

How can privacy law and corporate commitments to privacy be on the rise without it having a significant effect on the designs of new technologies? Tech companies use the tools of coercive bureaucracies to routinize antiprivacy norms and practices in privacy discourse, compliance, and design. Those bureaucracies constrain workers directly by focusing their work on corporate-friendly approaches to privacy. As information industry workers perform these antiprivacy routines and practices, those practices become habituated, inuring employees to corporate surveillance even as they earnestly profess to be privacy advocates. The result is a system in which the rank and file have been conscripted into serving the information industry’s surveillant interests, and in which the meaning of privacy has been subtly changed, often without them even realizing what’s going on.

We are told that accepting widespread corporate surveillance is a natural progression for human civilization. Peter Schwartz, a senior vice president at Salesforce: “Gradually, we will accept much, much greater surveillance. And in the end we won’t be too bothered by it.” Thomas Friedman in 2014: “Privacy is over.” Mark Zuckerberg in 2010: “The age of privacy is over.” Sun Microsystem’s former CEO Scott McNealy in 1999: We “have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”1