Shoshana Zuboff’s Techno-Inevitabilism
The Politics of Technological Change, Pt. I
‘Technological inevitability is the mantra on which we are trained, but it is an existential narcotic prescribe to induce resignation: a snuff dream of the spirit.’
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 516.
Of the many threads that comprise Shoshana Zuboff’s excellent book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, we must consider most deeply her comments on the ideology of inevitabilism: the belief that technological progress, even if it is catastrophic for the planet, inimical to effective human life, or disastrous for society at large, cannot be allayed, prevented or reversed.
For us, a discussion of this ideology is imperative. Four observations ground this assertion: as Zuboff notes, this ideology ‘is “ubiquitous” within the tech community’,¹ and to a lesser extent, the economics profession, and citizens of advanced economies; it is politically catastrophic, for it confers an untrammelled power upon capitalists, and an immoderate impotence upon their subjects; the ideology is ‘rarely discussed or critically evaluated’ among the public;² and, most importantly, it is completely wrong.
I “An Existential Narcotic”
One finds variants of inevitabilist ideology throughout the history of industrial and post-industrial society. People deploy this belief in service of a single end: to encourage people to accept as inexorable technological developments that could be otherwise; and, make the resulting social changes appear natural when they are political. In Zuboff’s words, capitalists ‘want us to think that their practices are inevitable expressions of the technologies they employ’.³ Promoting this belief is not entirely necessary for their activities — false consciousness is helpful, but capitalists are not beyond naked exploitation. However, were people to accept this argument, it can partly clothe, obscure and excuse otherwise indefensible practices.
Corporate powers, especially those that harm society, have an incentive to bewilder ‘the public’, and they do so ‘by conflating commercial imperatives and technological necessity.’⁴ Inevitabilism is essentially a public relations activity: all ideological deflections are. Thus, when inevitabilists speak of their creations, they recast their effects as the product of technological forces beyond their control. Those technologies, whose creation is said to be an unavoidable consequence of scientific progress, and which the capitalist must now use to survive, are the villains. Like the victims, the inevitabilist was swept up by forces that utterly exceed them, and whose results ultimately serve human development. In short, politics is foreclosed for the inevitabilist, for the new situation is desirable, unavoidable, and most importantly, a matter that sits beyond their powers, and the control of society at large.
Zuboff vividly describes arguments of this kind. For her, the ‘relentless drumbeat of inevitabilist messages’ depicts progress as ‘the product of technological forces that operate beyond human agency and the choices of communities, an implacable movement that originates outside history and exerts a momentum that in some vague way drives toward the perfection of the species and the planet.’⁵ To the inevitabilist, technological change is not the result of collective, and therefore, political, human ingenuity. Instead, it is a divine intervention that arrives from somewhere beyond society. Like an act of God or a natural disaster, we cannot control, predict or avoid it. As regards the change, then, a Stoic acceptance — or better yet, an enthusiastic affirmation, an amor fati — is the only rational reaction to our fate.
Zuboff herself is cognisant of this deflection unto nature: she says that inevitabilism equates capitalism and its power ‘with nature’, thereby likening it ‘not a human construction but something more like a river or glacier, a thing that can only be joined or endured.’⁶ Those familiar with Marx’s work⁷ will see that reification’s spectre haunts this statement. Reification is the ideological practice that treats the ‘products of human activity as if they were something other than human products — such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will.’ To ascribe technological development to nature, as the inevitabilist does, is not accurate historically or scientifically; it obscures the human origins of development. For this reason, Berger and Luckmann tell us that reification ‘implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and, further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness.’ Despite reification’s reliance on naturalism, the ‘reified world is’ ironically ‘a dehumanised world’.⁸ For a world whose events are the product of human subjectivity and creativity, this belief does its inhabitants — us — a terrible disservice. Reification leads us to underestimate our abilities, constraining our power to change the world for the better, while pressing us to accept the worst abuses of human power.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a gravely serious book of extreme, alarming, yet justified statements. Within its pages, she reserves some of her most cogent sentences for the inevitabilist position. To wit, in her chapter on ‘The Reality Business’, where she seeks to portray the inevitabilist ideology as a flawed interpretation of history, human autonomy and political processes, she describes it as a ‘weaponised virus of moral nihilism’.⁹ This belief, she tells us, is ‘programmed to target human agency and delete resistance and creativity from the text of human possibility’. And it achieves these ends by rendering us ‘helpless and passive in the face of [supposedly] implacable forces that are and must always be indifferent to the merely human’.¹⁰ For her, inevitabilism is a position promoted by the powerful to inspire impotence in everyone else: a sedative that demands we accept the intolerable. Having elaborated this position throughout the book, on page 516, she concludes her excoriating assessment of inevitabilism with a Wagnerian crash: ‘Technological inevitability is the mantra on which we are trained, but it is an existential narcotic prescribe to induce resignation: a snuff dream of the spirit.’ In the final analysis, Zuboff names inevitabilism as a soporific for unruly resistance; a euthanising barbiturate for human hope. Inevitabilism is a death reverie for the autonomous, moral agent.
What Zuboff describes with her critique, then, is how beliefs can act as anaesthetic agents. Our beliefs can blind us to pain, and dissolve abuses of authority, diffusing tyranny in an intellectual bokeh: the truth of power and its machinations become unfocused under its effects. Such anaesthesia, of course, serves those who wish to exploit others. But it also serves those who want to be exploited. Inevitabilism is an ideology for sadomasochists: those who enjoy dominance, and those who want to be overwhelmed with passive pleasure-dreams of passivity. Numb to the truth of their situation, the powerful can safely continue their operations upon the weak and ignorant without fear of interruption and restraint.
Progressive politics is often born of dissatisfaction and misery. But the ideology of inevitabilism is a sedative that benumbs the most dangerous afflictions that plagues the masses: the restless wish for democracy. We must therefore discard inevitabilism as an acceptable explanation of history and society. Failing to do so would be tantamount to rejecting a basic tenet of democracy: the individual’s power to express their thoughts, needs and desires, and to do so in concert, agreement and argument with others.
Endnotes
¹ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 221.
² Ibid, p. 222.
³ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 15.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 224.
⁶ Ibid, p. 397
⁷ Interestingly, she criticises Marx’s inevitabilist thought on p. 221 of her book, but she fails to locate her ideology critique in the long history of discussions on reification. She is right to claim that inevitabilism is rarely discussed, because she was the first to use the term in this manner; but it would be a mistake to believe that she is the first to identify this form of thought.
⁸ Berger & Luckmann, The Social Construction of Knowledge, p. 106.
⁹ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 224.
¹⁰ Ibid.
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