Paying users for their data would legitimate rather than fix behavioral extraction

Evidence

Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities, and surveillance capitalism lays its claims to the stuff of human nature for a new commodity invention. Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project. It is obscene to suppose that this harm can be reduced to the obvious fact that users receive no fee for the raw material they supply. That critique is a feat of misdirection that would use a pricing mechanism to institutionalize and therefore legitimate the extraction of human behavior for manufacturing and sale. It ignores the key point that the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us. The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 299

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense, paradigm-shifting passage: the argument that compensating users would institutionalize the harm, the ‘no exit, no voice, no loyalty’ diagnosis (a brutal inversion of Hirschman), and the closing image of hiding from forces that hide from us — resists one-sentence summary.
• XREF: The ‘no exit, no voice, and no loyalty’ deliberately inverts Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty — a resonant reference worth flagging. — connects to: The key platform struggle is denaturalizing data abstraction, not securing payment for data — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 781; Paying users for their data would not remedy the harms of continuous surveillance — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 780; Data extraction needs to feel natural and normal, not like theft, to stabilize — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 134 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: ‘the compensation fallacy’ — why paying people for their data wouldn’t fix surveillance capitalism but would sanctify it, drawing the parallel to sumptuary-style legitimations through pricing.