Read the Report | by John Richards, Harvard Graduate School of Education
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power is a thought-provoking new work by Shoshana Zuboff, emeritus professor at the Harvard Business School and also author of In the Age of the Smart Machine.
Zuboff describes what was initially a fair trade-off. We all provided data by searching and selecting, Google used that data to improve its search engine, and we were paid back by being better able to find the information we were seeking. But, it turns out we provide a surplus of information about our interests, our queries, and our searches. Google sells this behavioral surplus to the highest bidder. You look at a pair of shoes, and for the next few weeks ads for shoes pop up, emails about shoes arrive, and enticing text appears as you walk by a shoe store. That is capitalism after all – it could deliver helpful payback, but it also can be annoying.
However, Zuboff also argues that a more insidious scheme begins with the vision of empowering you through your “smart world”—your phone, TV, and home. Your calendar, phone, thermostat, lights, TV, and coffee maker are interconnected to ease you into your day. A personal assistant service leverages your history to select from news items and your messages; noting that you have not bought your favorite brand of milk in a while, and you may want to add that to your food order; pointing out that there is a sale on the new pair of shoes you have been researching; that linking to a (fake) news story that you will find compelling; ….
Zuboff’s warning is that Alphabet (Google’s parent), Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon are not only competing to get to know you better in order to present you to the most likely commercial interests; but also, in the best Skinnerian tradition shaping your all too human behavior towards what Zuboff calls, Instrumentarianism, a technique leveraged by “Big Other.” Through automated machine processes Big Other’s
…power reduces human experience to measurable observable behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of that experience. …These methods reduce individuals to the lowest common denominator of sameness…despite all the vital ways in which we are not the same (pp. 376-7).
Whereas Big Brother of Orwell infamy relied on terror, or overt power, Big Other relies on the hidden power of behavioral modification to promote purchasing and the bottom line, without our being aware of what is done to us. Zuboff claims that complex algorithms that constrain our choices, impact our decision processes, and alter society are evolving beyond the ability of humans to predict or comprehend. She argues that Big Other is implementing this Behaviorist vision behind Skinner’s Walden Two at a level even Skinner could not imagine.
Surveillance Capitalism in an information society, in Zuboff’s terms, “achieves dominance over the division of learning in society” (p.180, italics in original). The implication of this assertion for access to learning itself is captured by three critical questions:
- Who Knows?
This is a question about the distribution of knowledge. To what extent is a given individual included or excluded from learning?
- Who Decides Who Knows?
This is a question about authority. Which people, institutions, or processes determine who is included in learning?
- Who Decides Who Decides Who Knows?
This is a question about power. What is the source of the power behind the authority?
It is the third question that raises the issue of oligarchy in the market and the market dominance of Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon that is being compounded by lack of oversight and regulation. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 states “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” While this declaration certainly opened the gates for free speech, it has resulted in leaving these platform providers unaccountable. As former President Obama noted:
“The degree to which these [tech] companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there.” Barack Obama, The Atlantic, (Goldberg, J. Why Obama Fears for our Democracy, November 16, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/why-obama-fears-for-our-democracy/617087/ )
Just because you can do something it does not mean that you should. Our behavior is being modified, shaped, directed, but to what ends? The third question asks, by whom? And what is the source of their power?
Implications of Surveillance Capitalism for Teachers, Administrators
The edWeb audience will be asking, “How specifically does Surveillance Capitalism apply to the realm of education?” Educational institutions are aping other organizations in amassing “big data,” in this case, as fuel for Learning Analytics. The goals are to personalize the learning experience and adapt content and assessment to the interests and abilities of the student. Both objectives seem desirable. The image created is that the Google recommendation engine is being tailored for the education of each individual student. “Learners like you, who struggled with problems like this, benefitted from this paragraph/audio lecture/ movie/ …” But who are you and who are the learners like you? What information about you and them, has been gathered, sorted, contrasted, and subjected to personalization and adaptation algorithms?
It is good to create situations that make students more resilient, more agile, more liberal –oops – more conservative. Who is it that determines the objectives of learning? How are Big Other’s decisions made? To what extent are these decisions included in the algorithms that are driving the Learning Analytics? This returns us to Zuboff’s three questions regarding the division of learning in society.
Who Knows?
This is a question about the distribution of knowledge. To what extent is a given individual included or excluded from learning?
Personalization is the leveraging of Big data and analytics to adapt materials to a particular student’s interests and abilities.
What constitutes informed consent to analytics by students?
What constraints on collection of data are legitimate?
Who Decides Who Knows?
This is a question about authority. Which people, institutions, or processes determine who is included in learning?
Who decides that a student has access to learning?
What is the objective of access? Of learning?
Who Decides Who Decides Who Knows?
This is a question about power. What is the source of the power behind the authority?
As with Surveillance Capitalism generally, the third question raises the issue of oligarchy in the market and the market dominance of the publisher oligarchs of the education market, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Cengage. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple are increasing their disruptive presence and potentially disruptive power.
Should learning analytics and personalization be regulated by private or public organizations?
Summary
Zuboff has created a carefully researched, albeit overweight, analysis with over 130 pages of notes and references to the literature. The book includes a fun contrast of Walden Two with Brave New World, and an analysis of the evolution of the Surveillance Capitalist world going back to Brin and Page’s original article proposing Google search.
In education, surveillance began in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s as cognitive profiling of a learner so that adaptive learning environments could be created. The objective has evolved into more extensive efforts to determine the state of the learner. Now automated systems are gathering ongoing performance data from a clickstream and monitoring students’ interactive cameras as they participate in a Zoom class. Is a student smiling, frowning, do they seem engaged? Should the teacher switch activities?
Up to now, keeping student data private has been the primary concern of information ethicists. We are beginning to extract “… emotion data from pedagogical texts i.e., learning diaries, personal blogs, discussion forums, email, and chat communications” (Montero and Suhonen, 2014, p.165). From Zuboff’s perspective, as we develop algorithms to directly analyze and collect emotional inferences, we need to increase understanding of learning objectives and scrutiny over who is collecting big data and who is designing the algorithms that attempt to alter student behavior.
To that end, we need to reconsider Zuboff’s questions as they pertain to education:
- Who Knows?
Who is gathering the data? Who is shaping student behavior?
- Who Decides Who Knows?
Who maintains the authority in the educational context? Where is the locus of control?
- Who Decides Who Decides Who Knows?
To what extent is the power moving from institutions to the market oligarchs? Are the faculty, school boards, and state boards of education ceding their rights to algorithms that are beyond our understanding?
Reach out to John Richards by email or on LinkedIn to learn more.
CS4Ed works with publishers, technology companies, educational non–profits and higher education institutions as they negotiate the rapidly changing education marketplace. Learn more at www.cs4ed.com
John Richards is Founder and President of Consulting Services for Education, Inc. (CS4Ed). He is a Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Research interests include entrepreneurship in the education technology marketplace, digital media literacy, and extensions of the university to support lifelong learning.
John was President of the JASON Foundation for Education, GM of Turner Learning—the education arm of Turner Broadcasting—and Manager of the Educational Technologies Division of Bolt Beranek and Newman that launched the award-winning Co–NECT school design. Over the years, John has served on boards for a variety of education groups including NECC; Cable in the Classroom; Software Information Industry Association (SIIA), Education Market section; and the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP). John’s projects have won him numerous awards including two Golden Lamps and several CODIEs, as well as several EMMY nominations. He is a respected keynote speaker and has been responsible for the publication of over 1,000 educational products.
Recent books include The 60-Year Curriculum: New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy. (Editor, with Chris Dede) Routledge (2020) and Learning Engineering for Online Education: Theoretical Contexts and Design-Based Examples. (Editor, with Chris Dede and Bror Saxberg). New York: Routledge (2019).