Notes from the New Frontier of Power

BLOG SERIES: Notes from the New Frontier of Power

Introduction to the Notes from the New Frontier of Power blog series by Professor Shoshana Zuboff, co-director of the Technology & Human Rights Fellowship at the Carr Center and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the blog series Notes from the New Frontier of Power, authored by the 2024-2025 Carr Center Fellows united in their commitment to advancing and deploying new knowledge refined at the frontier of the global contest between surveillance capitalism and democracy. We recognize this contest as among the most fundamental global challenges of our time, reflected in the international scope and extraordinary accomplishments of the researchers, policy specialists, and practitioners who comprise our Fellowship cohort. Expect to see collections of "Notes" on a rolling basis throughout the coming semester. Our aim is short articles on current developments that also advance our understanding of key themes in the larger map of “surveillance capitalism or democracy?”

Introduction

Surveillance capitalism redefined the internet as a surveillance prison with no bars and no exit. With their lucrative economics now entrenched in every sector and world region, it's fair to say that the leaders who preside over the giant surveillance capitalist corporations are historically unique. Like ancient Emperors or feudal Kings, the surveillance capitalist leaders are infinitely rich and powerful. But they have something else that the moguls of other epochs could only dream of—infinite knowledge about people and society along with the unique powers that accrue to such knowledge.

The surveillance capitalist giants are not merely oligarchs, wealthy elites who wield power over society. They are information oligarchs who control the production, distribution, and application of the computational knowledge that is the life blood of our digital century and our still young information civilization.

How did this happen? First, our societies thoughtlessly granted the private companies ownership and unaccountable power over broad swathes of the information and communication spaces that are mission critical to the daily life and democratic prospects of our young information civilization. Second, their machine systems are engineered to secretly steal vast flows of human data from unsuspecting subjects. Human data are instantly claimed as corporate property for manufacture and sales, destroying privacy as we have known it. Third, their information systems are blind-by-design. Unable to differentiate information integrity from corruption, they instead enable the unlimited algorithmic dissemination and amplification of dangerous and or false content. Fourth, the companies have learned to weaponize their troves of human data with methods to shape human behavior at scale, polarizing attitudes and weakening social trust. Finally, the last decade revealed the information oligarchs' growing appetite to challenge democratically elected officials over the rights and power to govern society (see Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization, 2022).

The U.S. Presidential election of 2024 brought the world to a new and perilous milestone along the new frontier. The leading surveillance capitalists now overtly pledge their unprecedented information power and the wealth it produces to advance the interests of an illiberal President. In return, they seek protection from the rule of law anywhere in the world where democratic leaders have the temerity to make, impose, and enforce public law. Indeed, the surveillance capitalists have come to regard their freedom from law as an entitlement essential to their surveillance economics built on secrecy and theft.

These new conditions are what I have called "the fusion scenario." The companies harness their information capabilities to the service of state power. The state renews in perpetuity the corporations' license to steal any and all human data. The bedrock economic operations are protected from challenge and the corporations remain free to exploit their massive data flows in the service of whatever forms of chaos advance their interests.

In the bright light of the fusion scenario under the protection of Executive power, surveillance capitalism's threats to democracy now gather at the new frontier unabashed and brazen.  The responsibility to witness, study, analyze, theorize, document, learn, communicate, and educate has never been greater.  In conjunction with my brilliant Fellowship Co-Director, Professor Mathias Risse, Faculty Director of the Carr Center, we are thankful for this Fellowship Program that answers the urgent call to understanding at a momentous crossroads in the life of our societies. We are grateful for this year's cohort of deep-thinking passionate scholars and practitioners ready to share their insightful notes from the new frontier of power.   

The Papers

The short papers that follow mark distinct points on the Surveillance Capital-Democracy frontier.

• Burcu Kilic's "American Workers vs. Surveillance Capitalism: The Future of Digital Trade Policy" considers the growing influence of surveillance capitalism in the last decades of trade agreements and concludes that behind the battle lines are questions more consequential than trade policy: "If the Trump administration genuinely seeks to champion the rights of American workers, it must address how surveillance capitalism is shaping the workplace... This digital transformation of the workplace demands entirely new categories of rights, privacy, and protection... It's about who gets to define the rules of the global digital economy and whose interests those rules prioritize."
• Patrick K. Lin's "Staring Back at the Panopticon" explains the likely intensification of domestic surveillance that will accompany the fusionists' commitments to radical deregulation of existing and emerging AI systems. "However, to fulfill the spoken and unspoken threats made on the campaign trail, Trump’s use of the surveillance state will likely be more targeted, malicious, and harmful." He concludes with a useful overview of tools and resources available “to protect ourselves, our communities, and our data."
• Nai Lee Kalema's "What DOGE Could Mean for the Future of Democracy" examines the weakening of democratic institutions as they cede critical public service and governance functions to Big Tech providers, hollowing out institutional skills, authority, and societal purpose. "With governments ever more reliant on the digital platforms of Silicon Valley’s companies and cloud and data-intensive infrastructures for their core day-to-day functions, these firms have been able to reshape governments more actively... At the more extreme end, prominent Silicon Valley actors have proposed disrupting democracies altogether through the advent of network states." Her observations alert us to profound choices for the future of society that are still within our grasp.
• Sebastian Smart's "Welcome to the Dance of the Left-Out Ones" challenges Mark Zuckerberg's January 7 comments warning the EU and the entire Latin American continent that "Meta would work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world" that impose laws and "censorship" on American companies. Smart reviews Latin American governments' efforts to shape effective laws, charters of rights, and legal actions to confront the social harms of surveillance capitalism. "This shift represents a profound transformation in the mechanisms of control. We are transitioning from the tyrannies of blood and torture, characteristic of authoritarian regimes, to the tyranny of surveillance capitalism, where the tools of dominance are less visible but equally pervasive." Smart provides an overview of democratic efforts to contest the new "tools of dominance," including Chile's constitutional protection of neurorights, the Brazilian Supreme Court's 40-day ban on X for failing to comply with legal requirements, the Brazilian government's investigation of competitive practices among ride-hailing platforms, Argentina's probe of WhatsApp, Mexico's antitrust investigations into Google and Amazon...and the continent's leadership "in regulating artificial intelligence, emphasizing digital sovereignty and the protection of fundamental rights." Smart concludes, "As we confront the challenges of surveillance capitalism, the proactive measures of countries like Brazil and the lessons of Allende’s Chile serve as a powerful reminder that democratic control over technology is not only possible but essential."
• Mathias Risse's "'The Potential for the Disastrous Rise of Misplaced Power:' A Tale of Two Presidential Farewells and a Recent Inauguration" raises profound questions about the progress of epistemic rights—the rights of persons as knowers and knowns—when illiberal political power is fused with the unprecedented ownership and control of information that defines the information oligarchy. He writes, "In this era of Surveillance Capitalism, it is these rights that are primarily in jeopardy." Risse contrasts the human rights orientations of Eisenhower’s and Biden's Farewell Addresses with Trump's inauguration speech. While separated by many decades, both Eisenhower and Biden mourned the "disastrous rise of misplaced power." In contrast, Trump’s elevation of the information oligarchs and disdain toward efforts to tame the flow of corrupt information spoke to his embrace of the unaccountable power concentrated in that small cadre, now a standing resource for his command.