Host is so good to see you. Is so good to be here. I love the book is incredibly important the basic question in the first section of the book what is surveillance . What is your definition . Lets start with that. Back up a little bit and give a tiny bit of context has long been understood that in the history of capitalism the key way that capitalism evolves is by taking things that live outside the marketplace and outside the Market Dynamic to bring that into the market and as a state same historian wrote about the basic mechanisms of industrial capitalism and the idea was human activity that was claimed for the marketplace that made it possible for labor to be controlled and to be bought and factory work in all of those that became the hallmark of modernity and was reborn as real estate or early and so lets fastforward a century not the beginning of the 21st centur century, the insight was capitalism was invented we could take Human Experience specifically private Human Experience and we can bring that into the marketplace as behavioral data. Host so google and facebook say we can sell that in aggregate. We are coming into this space a private experience uninvited typically in ways that are secret and designed to invade your awareness we are registering your experience in a variety of ways and when we are trained to put that into the data that can be fed into our production process that Machine Intelligence goes to work to produce predictions i call it production on prediction products of your behavior and what you will do now now and later those prediction products are sold in two new kinds of markets that exclusively behavioral future as a new kind of derivative. One thing that struck me in the happening on in the opening of the book and it changed who we are with the factory workers surveillance capitalism is because those predictions. Do you see that connection fully realized where we in that spectrum . You ask such an interesting question because this really goes to the heart of the book because my a space in the book is that we dont understand the mechanisms and internal logic so this moves beyond economic beyond the commercial and the business side of things to create a new vision of society and an industrial world by industrial capitalism we had a vision of society that many viewers will remember like Charlie Chaplin with a new vision of Society Networks like clockwork and a factory where its not only mass production and mass consumption everybody has their role to play and their part to make a contribution thats very hierarchical and so forth and conformity and all of those values the social qualities that came out of the nature of industrial capitalism so what is the social vision of surveillance capitalism . And my argument is that stems from the whole Machine Learning framework to have various computers and devices so imagine self driving cars and a fleet as the intelligence of the cars learn something its not like one of the cars learns and the others are on an individual learning curve soon as one car learns they all learn there is the essential hard to go on reading the data and back to all the individual parts so the point is they all learn the same thing and they all move in the same direction as far as the learning goes and then to not stop bad a train crossing then all of them are learning the same thing. This is the hive mentality the hive structure and as i have studied how surveillance capitalism themselves think about society and how those breakthroughs will be transposed to the control and functioning of society that society itself becomes a organization were all in tune with the front tier of Machine Intelligence at any given moment Machine Learning taking place that is translated through the digital surround to all the devices and all the things that surround us those digital interfacing and in a variety of ways they are nudging and coaxing and hurting us and shaping and modifying our behavior in the direction of this one learning we are talking about surveillance capitalism so the learning isnt just learning for learnings sake not for better commercial outcomes but the other piece of the puzzle is that we are learning to be shaped and modified to move together in the direction with the commercial outcomes that they see. Host i always wonder the primary one that i find myself asking as i read your book is fundamentally who are the customers . We buy ad tracking . Because at some point we have to make that transaction to make it more classical to buy a product or service seek and pay for that advertising so if you think of those commercial outcomes how do you see those that are changing in the model you describe . This is so important. What we are seeing is going through the economy to their economic sector so that was invented and elaborated and spent the facebook and was the default model. Host can i quote you . You have a great like google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in the same way that gm invented and perfected managerial. You are right with me because here is where i am going right to gm and ford. So first the default model the logic of accumulation for Silicon Valley because they dont have an obvious product and there are many ways that these companies could have figured out how to modify and value and institutionalize the Value Proposition for actual people who are now called users. That they didnt do that because as soon as this path was discovered as the crow flies they skipped over those difficult Institution Building that they describe they took that snippet about Creative Destruction and left behind all the important learning about the years and decades and centuries it takes for those new models of Economic Production that aligned with the real needs of people in society. Straight to the new monetization process for now because of surveillance has been so lucrative and startling successful we see companies in every sector migrating in this dissection and there is where we come full circle to ford motor where mass production bega began, with the breakthrough to the model t back in the early days of the 20th century. Now is our viewers well now the Auto Industry is in a global slump and car sales are that there is no way out of this on the horizon the ceo of ford motor is now saying the new path to profit margin from Ford Motor Company will be monetizing data from their driver and what he says as we have 100 Million People driving cars with the little blue ovals. 100Million People in vehicles driving these ford cars and hes really excited about the amount of data we can get from these vehicles and he says we have ford credit and we already know everything about it. So now we have put together what you are doing in your car what you are saying where you are going in your car we put that together with all the Background Information we have about you and how you shop your mortgages and Financial Information and we have this deep dive data and he says to wouldnt want this data . Even the data that we can leverage so what happens if you ask about products what happens in this situation as we see in all kinds of situations is the product becomes a loss leader it is a supply chain interface and so this began with the strategy way back when the android was sold at a much lower price point and to create the opportunity as possible for all the data that could come with mobile so give it away if you can. Definitely low cost because its the data gathering device the supply chain. And with the android strategy and the twist and turns and they say everything you are saying and those goals are exactly as they describe that they are tone and optimism. So google made eye on android and gave the license for free. Microsoft has a monopoly in this market and then google might disappear and with that User Experience to search and then we dont charge anybody for a. Then we can leverage that. And then you describe the endpoint. And then you talk extensively in your book. And to any intelligent cloud. And then to have Smart Devices at the edge depending on the day right now. So they are saying these things so im trying to get at is the difference between their excitement and they are being rewarded for it. And your warning what is that difference . What about that specifically . Such an interesting question. I think there are a couple things to say about that. What on one is you are right they say the seams with the public pitch and public euphoria. They also say other things to each other and occasionally they may the journalist at pro public a than the times and the guardian and just so many journalists in my view who have died heroic work into the situations plussign a listen to earnings calls and all kinds of sources that are not typically produced by the reading public. That over the years we see the internal reports. So theres also a difference between what they say in a press release and what they say internally even in the case of android in the book i include some telling quotes about the android strategy at the time some people in google are arguing we have to make our margin on this phone its crazy to sell it so cheap and others say no. If we can get data for this phone its worth it to us to give it away. The second point surveillance capitalism is an economic logic that has been carefully concealed designed to be indecipherable and hidden and for the ignorance of the people who have now been converted into the sources of raw material and the behavioral data is raw material now we are the free source of raw material once without the services were free but now they think we are free so we have gone to that. So once you understand how the piece of surveillance capitalism work how they articulate and work together, then you understand unless you get more data at scale and scope and that we talk about in terms of the economies of action that i write about, they cannot make competitive predictions and without predictions, they cannot be successful in future behavioral marketplace. All of this depends upon the data flow. So once you begin to take those same lines with this smart and jan smart cloud once you put them into the context of how this logic really works , they become alarmingly revelatory. [laughter] but until you understand thi this, just seems like every other piece if you put one piece together that another and slowly it emerges. So i look at it the fable of the blind man and the elephant. Really i spent the last seven years trying to mask the elephant and i think once you get the picture of the elephan elephant, this changes and you can never rebuild those liens again without hearing and understanding something very different from what they thought they were conveying to the public. Host i will push him out a little bit. Of course i do agree with you, but you talk a lot about the 1000 contracts you are signing that you have to enter into so lawyers and these contracts and with those references and none of that is back to. But at some point he signed the contract and that provide some utility to you that you may not have gotten if it was that system we know in the region it is taking one spiking we know how long it takes for the house to heat up we will run it earlier shut it down slower because we cant predict your specific model of furnace. So as far as i can tell google and amazon provide an enormous amount of utility and then the crisis seems to be shifting utility for some of the services does that outweigh the trade we are making . My argument is the utilities are granted and so we always hope for with the digital. So let me give our viewers a quick example. I began the book with the example of a where home is a project Computer Science engineers georgia tech and it was all about in this where home with many of the same goals to inform the occupants of the process and the abilities to optimize how the home runs and functions maybe its more efficient and effective, also things that can aid the occupants with their health and communication with families and all of those things. When the internet put together the schematics the idea was a simple closedloop. One is the sensors embedded in the home itself and the other is the occupants of the home. And the designers imagined another device the occupants had all the data from the home went to the occupants and then they had tools to figure out what it means and what if anything to do with the data and so forth. That is the counterpoint which as you noted the analysis says if youre going to be vigilant you will have a thousand and privacy policies to review the more importantly, if you dont agree to the nest Privacy Policy you have it on your wall that you are losing the functionality that you look forward to in the first place and stop supporting the system and stop updating it and they actually say things can happen maybe your pipes will freeze or something will go wrong because the functionality is no longer going to be supported. So now there is a quid pro quo a hostagetaking that my data in return for the functionality. We can keep talking about what is the harm having all my data because thats a very important conversation but for now lets just assume i have arguments i believe are compelling that there are harms that go beyond known harms and economic harms but the point is they are holding this new functionality hostage and willing to hand over my experience for information of behavioral data for their futures markets. My argument is we signed on to the digital as a new era of empowerment and democratization of knowledge. Thats what i want. Thats we all deserve. Twentyfirst century citizen with an advanced Democratic Society we are hitting some speed bumps right now also another conversation i believe our democracies are holding. Weve been in tough situations before and we have come through them. I believe very deeply in the sanctity of democracy. And i believe as citizens of a Democratic Society, we should not be held hostage to this bargain made on the part of private firms who do not believe in the legitimacy of the vote who are self authorized in the claiming of the experience and what they do with the data from our experience we have no knowledge what they are doing we have no influence and it is expressly done in the way that bypasses and usurps our decisio decision. Companies have two responses. One is very classic and the other is more marketbased. The first one, the security argument when we put computers in the users home giving everybody windows pc they forgot to install the updates and when the network was taking the infection it is better for us to centralize management and keep the bad actors out we can do this more effectively. If you run your own mail server its more likely you will not be a good it person so gmail just do it for you and we will prevent the state actors which they are able to do does that seem compelling to you as a National Security argument . This is a rhetorical question right . And then google keeps the bad actors out . I think those arguments were made at a time when first of all surveillance capitalism was not yet prevalent. When there were more Security Issues as far as viruses and so forth. But those issues have gone down to be centralized. That yes in centralizing the security model, as we have the close the window open the door so we are more protected from viruses and even then is not protected but the fact of the matter is that to centralize the harm, the corruption of the systems that are centralize there is now corruption in the model that affects every single one of us is not just the corruption against Shoshana Zuboff but on the global system that can shift elections and transformed the sanctity of democratic elections. I think we are well past the argument for centralization and i also think from a technical point of view we have many more tools for treating security in a decentralized atmosphere then we had 20 years ago at the beginning of the story. So that is one thing. Host i tend to agree with you although im often called to fix my families computers. That you are not a corporation. You are part of the family. When you have aligned interest with your parents to make sure their home functions the way they wanted to. That the market question is that they could ask me for help that when i am aware of is many people are much worse at managing their Computing Devices and as they get smart and collect more data which i do think its important, you have to make some choices. Most people are blissfully unaware which is a problem that we point to. And the market question is they are choosing this they are choosing to buy an iphone where apple pushes the security update it will change overnight if you set the settings in the app store now thirdparty vendors have authorized apple to change on the phone. That tradeoff that the people and consumers are choosing to make. Thats the companys argument were buying the smart thermostat. You by that and you make a choice to let us into your home i can tell you dont think thats compelling but why are consumers overwhelmingly . Where does that interest come from if it works against us . Again that is a hugely important question for all kinds of reasons including the Market Opportunities and those failures represented. So what we have is a very contradictory situation. Surveillance capitalism has flourished in the past 20 years including the representation now of the product that has the words smart in front of it for surveillance capitalism. It with alexa and everything in between. It is remarkable that one of the biggest tv vendors in the country and the most controversial and i have the video tv when it is not performing optimally which is a lot. So the answer is very clear no shading or hiding im just trying to cover the cost with all this recommendation work that i do is very make money. And then is there with one transaction if its a dumb tv you have to pay a higher price. So it becomes this apparatus of this ongoing relationship. Bu