Participate or perish – the implications of surveillance capitalism for your career

By Neil Patrick

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.

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.

HR data and analytics drives profits but at what cost?

By Neil Patrick

HR analytics can punish your employees, but you won’t worry about that if you want to win.

In his 1976 book, 'Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation', author Joseph Weizenbaum laid out the case that while artificial intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions, because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom. Weizenbaum made a crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. But it is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes us human. Choice, however, is the product of judgement, not calculation.

Stephen Hawking went even further when he said,  "...the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded."

I cannot say if this distopian vision will or will not ever manifest. But it is plain to anyone that we are racing down this path with scarcely any care. We are already seeing the first applications of big data and AI based workforce decision and management systems. HR leaders like it because it promises to solve several of their most longstanding and vexing problems.

HR has been fed up forever about not being taken seriously. HR big data and analytics promises to be their saviour. It suggests that HR can transition from being perceived (wrongly in my view) as fluffy and utilitarian to having a proper seat at the leadership table, because like its rivals in finance, sales and marketing, it can now deploy hard ‘scientific’ data to back up its proposals.

It also promises a happier, more engaged workforce. One in which every twist and turn of employee sentiment can be quantified and responded to. If the data says people are feeling worse about something, HR can know this quickly and help rectify the problem.

I wish this were true. But I fear the opposite. That’s because every technological advance includes the option of being deployed for good or evil.

What HR may not like so much is that HR data delivers an extremely useful tool for business leaders to push and punish people. It’s a deal with the devil, in which HR’s quest for happy, engaged workers, risks being hi-jacked by the rest of the business to brutally force up productivity and drive down cost.

Incidentally, my argument skims over the very real practical questions around HR data and its inherent unreliability as Marcia LaReau has convincingly described here in her post, ‘To a Hammer, Everything is a Nail’.

Business has some critical problems today. Growth and profitability are chief amongst these. And countless studies show there is little correlation between hard profit and employee satisfaction. Sure there are plenty of examples of firms growing successfully who also invest in their people. But when we look at the most established large firms who are making the most money, most care much less about their people.

This is actually a very simple economic truth to understand. In an open competitive market, whoever gets the most work done for the lowest cost, wins. And if that means some people suffer, then so be it.

Every employee survey I have ever seen identifies that a person’s manager is the single greatest determinant of job satisfaction. It’s not pay, it’s not perks, it’s not flexible hours. It’s the person who manages you. If they are inspiring, caring, transparent, supportive, their staff will enjoy their work.

But here’s the problem. Managers that display these qualities are becoming an endangered species. Because their bosses usually don’t care very much about strategic HR. They do care about smashing their immediate revenue and profit targets. HR gets people hired for them, sorts out people issues and keeps them out of court. Everything else is fluff.

It’s that simple. Good leadership (not data) delivers happy and productive teams.

But we also know that good leadership is a frustratingly elusive and expensive resource to acquire and maintain. One accidental bad hire of a psychopathic manager and the whole of an organisation’s carefully nurtured culture can be demolished in a few months.

So if good leadership is expensive and scarce, but data is cheap and plentiful, the choice becomes a no-brainer.

What is becoming visible now is that there are firms who take HR data very seriously. And what we can also see is just how punishing and dehumanising the application of HR data can be in practice. To verify this, all we need to do is examine the firms where HR data is most developed and embedded in the day to day operations of the organisation.

And right now, probably the most advanced organisation in this field is Amazon. In January 2019, Amazon became the world’s third most valuable company by market capitalisation, after Apple and Microsoft.




Yet in some US states, nearly one in three Amazon workers are on food stamps. For Amazon, this is even better than paying people almost nothing. It is the transference of part of Amazon’s wage bill to the taxpayer.

In Amazon warehouses, every second of people’s work is measured and evaluated. They may walk over twenty miles on a day’s shift. Their productivity is tracked and ranked against their peers, with whoever is at the bottom of the table likely facing disciplinary actions and threats. A toilet break can cost you your job if it exceeds a tightly prescribed time allowance. Many describe it as a daily hell, which they endure only because they have few other options.

Welcome to the brave new world of HR big data. It’s being corrupted from the get-go. And if you’re an HR leader, be careful what you wish for.

AI in recruiting really means ‘abdicated intelligence’

By Neil Patrick

What is advocated and marketed as technology-enabled recruitment processes increases the difficulty in finding and retaining great people. The best people are made not found. We don't need to get better at ranking people by increasingly tightly defined data points, we need to take ownership of our responsibility (and self-interest) to find good people and make them great. 

Artificial intelligence is the big topic in almost every professional field right now. From drones in farming to robot surgeons, the overriding narrative is about the tasks which AI will enable us to perform better, faster and cheaper.

HR and recruitment are no different. The application of AI is spreading like wildfire as new tools are developed which expand the range of tasks that AI performs to assist recruitment management processes.

Until now, it was relatively simple to integrate the digital world with our own professional world. Have a LinkedIn profile which is properly constructed. Expand our professional networking onto one or two social media platforms. Write some commentaries or blog posts. By these means, anyone checking us out could easily discover our credentials.

Some people understandably chose not to participate or did so in the most cursory way possible. They had no wish to participate in the online race. They had fears about privacy. They didn’t understand how social media worked. They had better things to do with their time. All these were legitimate grounds to not participate. But not anymore because…

This is now all set to change

The next wave of AI and big data is going to transform the processes of hiring way beyond anything we’ve seen to date. Traditional recruitment is a gruelling, complex process for employers and recruiters alike. Recruitment teams have to be heavily incentivised to commit to the heavy workloads involved. And this costs money. A lot of money. But AI will streamline and speed up these processes. It will be able to identify suitable candidates in a few seconds. It will message the chosen few and chatbots will perform initial screenings. Candidate selection decisions will be made on the basis of data and scoring algorithms rather than fallible human interactions. Very little human intervention will be needed.

Recruitment costs will fall even more. Hiring efficiency and speed will increase. Hiring choices will be validated and justified by the ‘scientific’ methods involved.

At least that is the vision. The reality is more worrying.

Why it’s flawed

Data is not science. The principal predictors of job performance cannot be discovered by algorithms. The first attempts to automate the selection process created a bigger mess than before. Online job boards and applicant tracking systems (ATS) drove application numbers sky-high and candidate quality tumbled. But acquiring 500 applications cost around $50. Using a professional head hunter costs about $30-$40,000 per hire for professional vacancies. These economics ensured that automated recruitment processes took hold and continue to grow in usage.

Nick Corcodilos explains in this video why the application of data driven metrics to recruitment ensures that employers miss many of the best candidates for any given role:





I agree with everything Nick says here. This process is flawed. It cannot find the best people because the available data points cannot determine that they will perform well on the job. And because quite a few of the very best people choose not to present themselves online in their professional capacity. Yet for all its weaknesses, automated recruitment is only going to expand because the cost differential is so compelling.

In a strong and growing economy, organisations can invest in quality processes. In an economy which is uncertain and faltering, when profits and growth are elusive, focus inevitably shifts to cost reductions. Cost trumps quality in such times.

Your career is at risk if you choose not to participate

It seems logical to me that the current and anticipated applications of technology and artificial intelligence in recruiting will continue to erode the quality of hiring decisions made. This may deliver short term cost gains, but will push up long term costs as turnover rises and employee performance falls.

Yet this is not my greatest worry. My fear is that the relentless advance of this technology will create a new underclass of smart, educated and capable people who have chosen for legitimate reasons not to present themselves online. These people will become completely invisible to the data capture bots. And that invisibility will slowly but surely eat away at their employment opportunities.

There’s not a ‘talent shortage’, there’s a leadership vacuum

 
For organisations, the deployment of recruitment AI encourages organisations to abdicate their responsibility to create and nurture their own human talent pool. This creates a downward spiral of ever increasing data point discrimination reinforcing the mythology of what employers disingenuously call their ‘talent shortage’.

And if the belief in the pseudo-scientific reliability of these systems persists within management, we will see the abdication of leadership’s responsibility for taking good people and helping them become great. Instead, the tools will be adjusted to cure perceived shortcomings, when the real shortcomings are rooted in the mistaken faith in progress through technology.

Artificial intelligence is well named. Because it’s not real intelligence…

PS. My good friend Marcia LaReau at Forward Motion Careers has a great post here about what jobseekers can do to avoid becoming a victim of this situation.