Rendition can exist without surveillance capitalism, but never the reverse

Evidence

As we saw in Chapter 1, the Aware Home project developed at Georgia Tech just a year before the invention of surveillance capitalism employed different practices that embodied very different assumptions: (1) that it must be the individual alone who decides what experience is rendered as data, (2) that the purpose of the data is to enrich the individual’s life, and (3) that the individual is the sole arbiter of how the data are shared or put to use. Nearly two decades later, the Aware Home is barely more than an archeological fragment reminding us of the road not taken toward an empowering digital future and a more-just division of learning in society. Down that road, it is the individual who knows, decides, and decides who decides: an end in herself, not a means to others’ ends. The lesson of the Aware Home is that there can be rendition without surveillance capitalism. However, the lesson of this chapter and the next is that there can be no surveillance capitalism without rendition. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 735

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the relationship between ‘rendition’ and ‘surveillance capitalism’ by contrasting it with the Aware Home’s user-controlled data practices.
• XREF: The Aware Home as ‘road not taken’ echoes the reader’s existing interest in how alternate technological paths could have produced different surveillance economies. — connects to: Rendition is the first operational step of surveillance capitalism’s dispossession project — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 754; Facial rendition is the foundational operation surveillance capitalism cannot survive without — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 789

Broader Connections

• Rendition is the first operational step of surveillance capitalism’s dispossession project #contradicts (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 754
• Facial rendition is the foundational operation surveillance capitalism cannot survive without #contradicts (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 789