How to Survive the Cyberpunk Dystopia 101 - Chapter 2: Survival Theory
“You take the blue pill - the story ends. You wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
- Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)
2.1. Intro to Surviving the Cyberpunk Dystopia
Let’s first talk about the Cyberpunk Dystopia. We need to understand what it is because knowing the enemy is half the battle, and Sun-Tzu said that “he who knows not himself nor the enemy will lose every battle”.
John Stuart Mill was the first recorded person to use the term “dystopia” meaning the opposite of “utopia”, and the word itself means “bad place”. It’s kind of clear that dystopias are bad places to live in, but Lyman Tower Sargent, in The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited, describes it as “a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived”.
Sofia Jacob Soares, in her thesis How to survive a dystopian world? Explains that “in the 20th century, dystopian fiction gained relevance, mainly because utopianism was under scrutiny due to its possible applications in political settings”. She explains that an overall feeling of despair and hopelessness, consequence of humanity being subjected to various wars over the year resulted in the rise of the dystopia, generally associated with totalitarian regimes and with “the possible negative effects of technological and scientific progress (…)”.
Cyberpunk, as I wrote in the first chapter of this chain, explores and embraces the dystopia completely. Weiyi Zhang, in the The Transformation of Cyberpunk from Resistant Subculture to Popular Style, says that “influenced by cybernetics, classic cyberpunk embodies that the disadvantages of technological advancement are unavoidable.”
He also, by being a much better writer than me, puts the core of the cyberpunk dystopia best in his own words. In essence, it is a world in which “the multinationals have centralized control over the lower classes, maximising their profits through the production of various products, while the people have to submit to being a passive link in the commodity production line in order to make a living”.
Writers in the subculture itself have a better grasp on the concepts behind cyberpunk as well. Consuming Cyberpunk, birthchild of Fraser Simons, author of The Veil: Cyberpunk, gives some good insights as to how cyberpunk achieves its dystopias, specifically leaning on the fact that the subculture gained prominence in the 80s and 90s, an era marked by prominent technophobia: “Cyberpunk will often borrow from horror to characterize technology as invasive; removing freedom and autonomy. It is also the means for the person to push back against oppression in the setting, turning the products initially created by ‘the system’ in order to make a profit and extend their influence, into the agency of the marginalized.”
The description, if you look close enough, is eerely similar to how Zuboff describes “Surveillance Capitalism” in her work. Let’s take a deeper gander at them and discover exactly what we’re fighting against.
2.1.1. Intro to Surviving the Cyberpunk Dystopia Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism does not mince words in its description of the eponimous system. She claims it “claims human experience” as a sort of prime material and turns it into “behavioral data”. Those of you who work in the computer engineering space, like me, know this kind of data is usually very valuable for QA and future product improvement. However, she also claims “the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus”, which is then fed into AI models to create “prediction products”.
What this means is that applications in your phone right now are collecting data on your behavior to create models that predict what the outcomes on certain tweaks to your behavior are. These are then traded in what she calls “behavioral futures markets”, which is just the normal market.
Companies engaged in surveillance capitalism buy this data, draw trends within the data and introduce changes in their applications that change user’s behavior in ways that increase their profits. She calls it “intervening in the state of play”, and this can be made with “ever-more-predictive sources of behavioral surplus”, like voice, personality and emotion.
Zuboff writes: “Surveillance capitalism runs contrary to the early digital dream (…) it strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being ‘connected’ is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the democratization of knowledge.”
She describes it as “parasitic” and “self-referential”, invoking Marx’s old depiction of capitalism as a a vampire that feeds on labor. What’s different about this vampire is that, according to her, it “feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”
This is very strange, because it also seems to pick up on how Edward Snowden described the PRISM program in his infamous disclosure to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras from The Guardian:
“NSA, and the intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible. (…) Originally, we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. Now increasingly we see that it’s happening domestically, and to do that, they – the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default. It collects them in its system, and it filters them, and it analyzes them, and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time, simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends.” (Source: Snowden’s PRISM diclosure to The Guardian)
Zuboff’s claims are almost transcripted from a Gibson novel, claiming that surveillance capitalists realized they could do as they pleased with this new system, and that the result was obvious.
“They were protected by the inherent illegibility of the automated processes that they rule, the ignorance that these processes breed, and the sense of inevitability that they foster.”
Data captured by these companies has, as she claims, passed the “targeted online ad” event horizon and is being applied to sectors like retail, finance, insurance companies. If it’s connected, it listens to us, and we pay for it to listen to us, so it can make up new ways of making us pay more.
And the worst part is that we now depend on these technologies so much that turning back around and tearing down the machine isn’t a solution anymore. As The Protomen put it, “flip a switch and turn it off; you won’t be able to breathe, so either way, you’re a casualty” (Source: “Light Up The Night” by The Protomen). Zuboff explains:
“This logic turns ordinary life into the daily renewal of a twenty-first-century Faustian compact. ‘Faustian’ because it is nearly impossible to tear ourselves away, despite the fact that what we must give in return will destroy life as we have known it.”
This conflict, she says, tricks us into ignoring how these systems track our behaviors, analyze them and modify them for their own profit. This is the systematic approach that surveillance capitalists want to implement on human beings, just as Simons and Zhang described the influence of corporations on populations in works of the cyberpunk variety.
2.1.2. Intro to Surviving the Unknown
We have never before had to fight such a reality in all of our lives. It’s not even a war we can be expected to win. That is why this chain is called “How to Survive the Cyberpunk Dystopia”. We’re not terrorists. We’re not cybernetically enhanced super soldiers. Some of us don’t even have notably special traits in this evermore digital world. We’re not the protagonist of some tabletop session, in general, and Zhang agrees with me:
“Most of the protagonists in this type of novels live on the margins of society and use advanced excellent computer skills to maintain their livelihood and achieve self-worth.”
Yes, I’m a computer engineer working in cybersecurity, so this claim would apply perfectly to me, but I don’t have the kind of “excellent abilities” these fictional characters have. Most of us don’t, and most of us shouldn’t even be expected to have to fight against systems like this, because we don’t know how. We don’t know how because we try to find some analogy, and mix unprecedented experiences with past experiences.
Zuboff claims that this kind of thought process “contributes to the normalization of the abnormal, which makes fighting the unprecedented even more of an uphill climb”.
Shoshana Zuboff’s research on “surveillance capitalism”, which involved interviews with enterpreneurs and staff and the documentation of “unexpected and disturbing practices” in the corporate environment took many years, beginning as early as 2006 and suffering a blockage some time before 2011, when her research data was lost in a house fire.
It is based on her research that I will work on trying to find ways to survive, i.e., to not become a puppet in the hands of said “surveillance capitalists”, or as we in the cyberpunk subculture call them, corpos.
2.2. A Brief History of our Cyberpunk Reality
Let’s look at the way our world has evolved briefly through the scheme Zuboff draws as “the Three Modernitites.”
The first modernity is classified as the moment when “life became ‘individualized’ for great numbers of people”: material conditions slightly improved and allowed people to escape from what I call our ‘fated life’ (if you also align with this and think fate is bullshit, I wrote a small article about it!) and gave people the way to shape their lives. What those lives were didn’t mean much because that set was still pre-defined by society and left many bound to lives they weren’t aligned with. As Zuboff puts it, it created several generations of “feminine mystique, closeted homosexuals, church-going atheists, and back-alley abortions”.
The second modernity is the middle tipping point, matched with an increase in life becoming ‘individualized’ and a rise of mass production of goods and mass markets. Not content with having just the means to build a life from a pre-determined set, Zuboff claims that we, members of this second modernity “(…) feel our entitlement to self-determination, an obvious truth to us that would have been an impossible act of hubris for [members of the first modernity].”
Like the main theme of cyberpunk works, the first modernity’s imposed, contained determination of you were as a person even if it gave the tools for you to choose, was broken by the second modernity’s solid foundation of self-determination.
“(…) the self is all we have. The new sense of psychological sovereignty broke upon the world long before the internet appeared to amplify its claims. We learn through trial and error how to stitch together our lives. Nothing is given.”
The first modernity came as a response to no modernity, and gave people means without choice. The second modernity came as a response to the first, and gave people means AND choice. It gave us the freedom to settle our political participation, our careers, our religions, our genders, our morality on our terms. It gave us the internet and its “burgeoning information apparatus” that we used and are now reevaluating.
However, the second modernity appears to be in a fight for its survival, with Zuboff claiming it is now facing a dispute against the “rise to dominance” of the “neoliberal paradigm”. She describes that this rise appeared near the mid-70s, as economic stagnation endured in the US and the UK and second modernity individuals in these countries came to the streets in outcry for political reform following two major earth shattering events that flipped proportions for politicians in power at the time: the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.
This gave neoliberals the opportunity to proliferate their “radical free-market theory” in the vacuum that had been left by both governments. What was once a “sweeping defense against the threat of totalitarian and communist collectivist ideologies” became an anti-authoritarian mechanism: a self-regulating market with no external interference - much like cyberpunk literature portrays their mega corporations.
“As the old collectivist enemies had receded, new ones took their place: state regulation and oversight, social legislation and welfare policies, labor unions and the institutions of collective bargaining, and the principles of democratic politics. Indeed, all these were to be replaced by the market’s version of truth, and competition would be the solution to growth.”
In 1976, the breaking point occurs, and the work of second modernists after years of attempts to achieve freedom while staying democratic are reduced to ashes, as at the time President Jimmy Carter makes drastic changes to economic policies in the US to align with Wall Street’s “market metrics”. These actions would be later improved and would define the Reagan and Tatcher era, and like the unseen tentacles proposed by the Eye of Providence, spread through economies around the world.
The result, nearly 35 years later, are massive social inequalities, massive poverty percentages, unemployment, unbearable life conditions and social unrest and protesting against all of the prior. The most notable were the 2011 London riots in Britain, the Indignados movement in Madrid and the Occupy movement in Zucotti Park near Wall Street.
“Despite a decade of explosive digital growth that included the Apple miracle and the penetration of the internet into everyday life, dangerous social divisions suggested an even more stratified and antidemocratic future.”
2.3. The Advent
But this isn’t where Zuboff ends her theory. In fact I’m only paraphrasing up to page 64 of her book and it goes on for almost 1000 pages. Yet, the section I want to look at now is the most important one, and it rides on everything else we’ve talked about thus far.
Technological companies around that time presented the promise of a third modernity: “(…) capitalism summoned by the self-determining aspirations of individuals and indigenous to the digital milieu. The opportunity for ‘my life, my way, at a price I can afford’ (…)”. The solution to the unprecedented proliferation of neo-liberal economics around the world.
This never came to be. For all the promises of the digital era, what followed was more of the same. I don’t think I even need to paraphrase Zuboff in this. Turn on the TV and check up on the news. The people have spoken and inequalities and insecurities presented at the advent of neoliberalism were treated in no other way than exacerbation in the last few decades (Source: CNN). In the very country where I live in, more than 80% of the population is in risk of living in poverty (Source: SIC Notícias). Social background and conditions are still a wide factor in access to education (Source: Expresso).
The promised technological revolution failed, but at least the people who did would now only serve us systems that function when we want them to. Right?
It turns out, these problems started even earlier than we thought. In 2004, Google already intercepted user correspondence in Gmail to serve targeted advertisements, “(…) reveling in the fact that users’ privacy was at the mercy of the policies and trustworthiness of the company that owned the servers”, as chronicler Steven Levy explains.
In 2007, it was Facebook’s turn, with a product that we know now as “cross-site tracking”, but that at the time was marketed as Beacon, which would enable “advertisers to track users across the internet, disclosing users’ purchases to their personal networks without permission”. It was closed around 2010, but by then, the privacy landscape had changed and Facebook had already laxed their privacy policies.
Zuboff introduces the story of a man named Jonathan Trenn about the impact Beacon had on his life, when Facebook announced a purchase he made of a diamond engagement ring on Overstock, so he could do a New Year’s surprise to his girlfriend. This story does exist, but Shoshana sources it wrong… first off, it links to this blog post which details ANOTHER person’s experience with Overstock and Facebook beacon.
So I thought “woah, did Zuboff make this story up?” Well, no. Jonathan Trenn is a real person. He’s the president of a marketing communications and digital media strategy company called InterActivate and he DID write the story Zuboff copied into her book and took it out of context, not taking into account that this actually happened to a guy named “Sean Lane”. I wouldn’t blame her since every other source also gets it wrong.
The story Jonhathan wrote is lost to the annals of history, but it did happen. It opened up a class-action lawsuit between Sean and Facebook, where Facebook was charged with breaching the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Video Privacy Protection Act, the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act, California Computer Crime Law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, among others, to which Facebook constantly denied any wrongdoing. The judge didn’t feel the same, which meant Facebook, which was facing strenuous circumstances at the time, had to jump through hoops to find a way to settle the case without going bankrupt. The results was a 9.5 million dollar settlement, of which Sean received 15 thousand. Facebook was also ordered by the court to close down the Beacon project, and they had two months to do so. (Source: Wikipedia - Lane v. Facebook, Inc.)
This was big breakthrough for privacy advocates, but Zuboff claims this was just another chapter in a much bigger book:
“At first, it had seemed that the new internet companies had simply failed to grasp the moral, social, and institutional requirements of their own economic logic. But with each corporate transgression, it became more difficult to ignore the possibility that the pattern of violations signaled a feature, not a bug. (…) These developments reflect the simple truth that genuine economic reformation takes time and that the internet world, its investors and shareholders, were and are in a hurry. The credo of digital innovation quickly turned to the language of disruption and an obsession with speed, its campaigns conducted under the flag of ‘creative destruction.’”
2.4. Intro to Meet the Cyberpunk Dystopia
This is how the cyberpunk dystopia we are now living in came to be. Second modernity instability led to neoliberal proliferation, that led to technocrat subjugation, that then spread the seeds of what would become the current system of Surveillance Capitalism.
“Eventually, companies began to explain these violations as the necessary quid pro quo for ‘free’ internet services. Privacy, they said, was the price one must pay for the abundant rewards of information, connection, and other digital goods when, where, and how you want them.”
The speed and impatience that defined Silicon Valley’s rethoric and the way their systems, platforms and apps were developed became the very thing they would try and sell people. The way they sold this was the same it always was. The wolf under the sheep’s clothing was far more insidious than before, though. Unlike what people usually think, that “if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product”, what we actually are is an input for the product. The product isn’t the money printing machine. We are.
“Surveillance capitalism commandeered the wonders of the digital world to meet our needs for effective life, promising the magic of unlimited information and a thousand ways to anticipate our needs and ease the complexities of our harried lives. We welcomed it into our hearts and homes with our own rituals of hospitality. (…) Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. In the absence of a decisive societal response that constrains or outlaws this logic of accumulation, surveillance capitalism appears poised to become the dominant form of capitalism in our time.”
For a long time, societies have only imagined oppression as coming through one state or the other. We could have never imagined that a science fiction based proposal such as “cyberpunk” - the idea that high tech companies would impose such a problematic system upon people and the low life it would cause - could ever happen. As cases like “Lane v. Facebook, Inc.” were treated as exceptions instead of the norm, we were left unprepared to face gigantic corporations and the regime they intend to keep as the status quo whose “most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation”.
The open internet that was promised to us at the beginning of the millenium has been usurped. Beaten, raped and morphed into a shell of its former self. What was to be a free network - the advent of a freer, more independent, third modernity - has become our doomsday machine.
The internet still has the potential to be a free and democratic space. To turn our backs on it is no solution. Instead, we have to learn how to survive the current digital landscape and build our own, better version of it.
All unquoted sections of this article were taken from Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”.