Surveillance Capitalism in America ed. by Josh Lauer and Kenneth Lipartito

Abstract

Reviewed by: Surveillance Capitalism in America ed. by Josh Lauer and Kenneth Lipartito Dolores E. Janiewski (bio) Surveillance Capitalism in America Edited by Josh Lauer and Kenneth Lipartito. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 288. Inspired and provoked by Shoshona Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the creators of this volume situate contemporary surveillance techniques and institutional imperatives in a history ranging from Caribbean slave plantations to the now ubiquitous digital trackers innocuously called cookies. Challenging Zuboff's origin story that surveillance capitalism started with Google, editors Josh Lauer and Kenneth Lipartito and the other contributors discuss earlier examples of operational methods, economic imperatives, the collection of information, and efforts to control workers, customers, and public opinion. In a telling rebuttal of Adam Smith's "invisible hand," Lauer and Lipartito state that surveillance provides [End Page 230] the market's "eyes and ears" (p. 5). The diverse technologies, bureaucratic processes, and information collection discussed in the chapters that follow their illuminating introduction raise expectations about scope that cannot be fully met in an introduction, nine interventions into a history that spans three centuries, and a brief afterword by Sarah E. Igo. As the editors admit in their introduction's conclusion, the volume marks a "starting point" and an invitation for additional research rather than providing a comprehensive history of capitalist surveillance in America (p. 26). For those who focus on computational architecture, networked devices, and social media's intrusive collection of personal information, the final three chapters discuss the contemporary iterations of surveillance capitalism. In detailing the "war on drugs" in the workplace in the 1980s and 1990s, James Milloy points to the longer-term consequences of subjecting employees to intrusive drug testing as normative. Not only did the acceptance of urinalysis and other screening procedures lead to greater biometric surveillance, but it also turned workers' bodies and social lives into profitable sites for the drug-testing industry. Dan Guadagnolo's exploration of a failed attempt at marketing tobacco to African American consumers comes with a warning that personalized digital advertisements make resistance more difficult by concealing a racial agenda within their digital infrastructure. Meg Leta Jones adds a discussion of cookies and web privacy that attributes the failure of resistance to these recent examples of surveillance capitalism to the history that has created "powerfully entrenched structures, ideas, and mechanisms," which allow social media corporations to evade scrutiny and restrictions to their intrusions on personal privacy (p. 202). Three useful chapters compare historical surveillance methods from slave plantations in the late 1700s and early 1800s and the rivalries between detective agencies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Caitlin Rosenthal and Cameron Black, slave plantations operated according to a capitalist logic that included what Zuboff identified as the unprecedented social media goal of "behavioral modification." They add bureaucratic record keeping, enslaved watchmen, and media to this form of surveillance capitalism. As they note, the Jamaica Watchman, an antislavery newspaper, conducted countersurveillance on planters to suggest the difficulties of controlling the circulation of intelligence. Richard K. Popp jumps forward a half century to document a publishing company's collection of names and personal data using the postal service and correspondence to turn lists of names into "new forms of commoditized identity" (p. 63). Jamie L. Pietruska's analysis of paperwork, bureaucracy, and surveillance discusses the Pinkerton National Detective Agency's investigation of competitors who used the family's name by creating a documentary archive on their allegedly fraudulent rivals as an essential part of a surveillance infrastructure that used filing systems and cabinets instead of algorithms to defeat their adversaries. [End Page 231] Successive chapters analyze a twentieth-century economy where workers in customer-focused occupations lost their ability to express their authentic feelings while being subjected to surveillance by managers and the public as emotional labor became a job requirement. Viewing the emphasis on courtesy as a strategy to create a favorable public opinion and fend off government ownership, Daniel Robert extends the reach of capitalist surveillance from the open office to telephone conversations, homes, and the visible expression of emotions as technology and corporate strategy entrenched private ownership. Megan J. Elias finds that hotels demanded...