The fourth industrial revolution will not be our saviour, it risks becoming our enslaver. Big data and the internet are assuming control.
We have entered a new economic age under immense ignorance about our personal data and its use by technology. Our human rights are not so much being abused, as being expropriated and monetised by information oligarchs who are all but invisible to citizens and governments alike.This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorising.
We are dazzled by the technological progress that the fourth industrial revolution promises. We are also blind to the invisible ways in which the digital world is assuming control of our very existence.
There is a fundamental problem even with calling this the fourth industrial revolution. That’s because this title implies that it is relational to previous industrial revolutions. It is not. Previous industrial revolutions delivered mechanical, transport and communication advancements. The fourth industrial revolution is capitalising on our very thoughts and actions.
It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society. Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.
And it is rolling out at breakneck speed, so fast that the legal and regulatory powers we trust to protect our lives and society are being left in the dust.
The relationship between speed of change and human lifespans is critical for survival.
If we experience fundamental change over the course of our entire adult lives, we have a fair chance to adapt and survive. When fundamental change is happening in more or less real time, we struggle.
The First Industrial Revolution involved the transition to new manufacturing processes in Europe and the US, in the period from about 1760 to 1830. It therefore took around 70 years – in other words more or less the average lifespan of a human being.
This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, the increasing use of steam power, the development of machine tools and the rise of the factory system.
The economic models associated with the first industrial revolution were the transfer of capital from a feudal elite, to a new class of commercial/industrial elites who owned and controlled not land but the resources and means of manufacturing production.
The Second Industrial Revolution
This took place between 1870 and 1914. It therefore happened within a period of forty years or so; about half a human lifespan. It used new power sources such as electricity and the internal combustion engine to expand communications, domestic comfort and personal mobility. Major technological advances during this period included the telephone, light bulb, phonograph and the internal combustion engine.
A key socio-economic change associated with the second industrial revolution was that women were increasingly freed of many domestic chores and their political emancipation enabled them to choose to free themselves of economic dependency on their husbands.
The Third Industrial Revolution
The Third Industrial Revolution, or the Digital Revolution, refers to the advancement of technology from analogue electronic and mechanical devices to the digital technology available today. The era started during the 1980s and was essentially mature by the early 2000’s. It therefore took around 20 years or about half the duration of the Second Industrial Revolution.
Advancements during the Third Industrial Revolution include the personal computer, the internet, and information and digital communications technology.
The economic characteristics which emerged in the Third Industrial Revolution were the rise of globalisation, the industrialisation of second world nations and the rise of disruptive business models.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution 2015 - present
This is fundamentally different from the previous three, which were characterized mainly by advances in technology. The fourth industrial revolution involves advances in what is called ‘connectivity’ rather than technology. Advocates claim this development has great potential to connect billions more people to the web, drastically improve the efficiency of business and organizations and help regenerate the natural environment through better asset management.
I don’t see it like that at all. That’s because these are merely technical possibilities. Whereas what determines what ultimately happens to our society hinges not on what is technically possible, but what is commercially advantageous to capital and investment.
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| Much scarier than Steven King... Zuboff lays the truth bare in her new book. |
This is what Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff has termed, ‘surveillance capitalism’.
Her definition of surveillance capitalism is:
1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales;
2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioural modification;
3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history;
4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy;
5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth;
6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that assets dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy;
7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty;
8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above; an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.
Surveillance capitalism is essentially parasitic. It feeds on the data that we all create though our engagement with the digital world. Google was the first to monetise this through the creation of targeted online advertising but today Google is applying the same business model to other applications. Apple, Facebook and Amazon have all followed in Google’s footsteps.
The big data we all create is the raw material for surveillance capitalism. It’s all but invisible and is given away for free. It operates largely without our knowledge. The legal basis for its use is hidden inside the endless pages of legal mumbo jumbo which form the basis of every user terms and conditions document we consent to every time we sign up to a digital service or platform.
The law and our institutions have been completely blindsided by the fourth industrial revolution. And that is because of the speed of mutation of surveillance capitalism. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation Rules (GDPR) which were introduced in 2018, began being drafted in 2012. They reflected the digital world as it was then, not as it is now. It’s little wonder therefore that it’s already hopelessly out of date and that the surveillance capitalists have moved on, leaving the regulators flailing in their wake.
Surveillance capitalism is now becoming the technology framework that underpins our career opportunities just like every other aspect of our lives. If you think career technology is Linkedin, job boards and online job ads, you’re about ten years behind what is happening. The latest recruitment technology is pulling data from places you’d never even think about. If your smart fridge is ordering mostly beer and pizzas, if you use online gambling, if you take a payday loan - that data or parts of it will find its way sooner or later into the data sets the internet holds about you. For better or worse, but most likely worse.
We can choose not to participate. We can choose not to use social media, or online shopping, or read online news reports. To live outside the digital grid. It’s increasingly difficult, but you can become digitally invisible. But in the age of surveillance capitalism, doing that is to choose to perish.
We all need a strategy to cope. To mitigate the exploitative forces which are at work, and as much as possible turn things to working for us rather than against us. Boycotts and protests are not a practical or realistic answer. But there are things we can do to reassert our own power of self-determinism. But that's for my next post here.
In the meantime, if you're not scared half to death already and you want to reassert some control, my friend Marcia LaReau at Forward Motion Careers has antidotes ready. I recommend you read her blog post, You are Being Stalked here.
