Governance by total data transfers social trust to an undefined ruling ‘we’

Evidence

Pentland is sanguine on this point: total knowledge is within reach. As he states, “In just a few short years we are likely to have incredible rich data available about the behavior of virtually all of humanity—on a continuous basis. The data mostly already exists.” The right to the future tense—and with it social trust, authority, and politics—is surrendered to Big Other and the transcendent computational systems that rule society under the watchful eye of a group that Pentland calls “we.” He never defines this “we,” which imposes an us-them relationship, introducing the exclusivity of the shadow text and its one-way mirror. It is an omission that haunts his text. Does it refer to the priesthood of data scientists like Pentland? The priesthood in collaboration with the owners of the means of behavior modification? — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1370

Categorization

• DEFINE: Zuboff names the mechanism: surrendering the right to decide the future cedes trust, authority, and politics to Big Other.
• XREF: The undefined ‘we’ and its one-way mirror recall the exclusivity/privilege critiques in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and earlier surveillance-capitalism chapters. — connects to: Data-driven governance converts democratic dialogue into a corporate-owned probability spectrum — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 645; Governance governs through anonymous processes rather than identifiable agents — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 237
• DEEPTHINKING: The phrase ‘the right to the future tense’ as the core of what is ceded is a dense, paradigm-shifting formulation worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Governance governs through anonymous processes rather than identifiable agents #expands (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 237