Automagic

“Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience, making it beautifully simple, almost automagical because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly.”

 

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, apparently said this, as quoted by Shoshana Zuboff in her 500+ page tome, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I’m halfway through the book, and it’s about as depressing as my recent other apocalyptic reading. Zuboff draws back the curtain to reveal the driving force of behemoths such as Google and Facebook. There’s likely much she doesn’t know behind the scenes, but we she does reveal is illuminating – in a “how did we get to this screwy situation” kinda way, and perhaps we should have known better.

 

The essence of surveillance capitalism is the mopping up of behavioral data in its bits and bytes, with or without your permission. The more you get, the more you corner the market. It’s a rich-get-richer situation, not unlike autocatalysis and the evolution of life, I suppose. It might have started with wanting to help you streamline your life by efficiently helping you to find what you need and want. And seemingly free-of-charge to you, the social-media and web-browsing user. But you can’t sustain such a helpful service without income. All your clicking and typing, though, can be monetized if a profile of you – the personal you with all its quirks, conscious and unconscious – can be built up. Then we can start selling you stuff, predict your future behavior, or nudge you to do something at the right time and place. Automagic!

 

We’ve seen such scenarios in dystopian fiction and literature. The movie Minority Report is a good example of the dark side of being stuck in such a coercive system. Last week I was watching the second season of HBO’s Westworld. Does their vision seem too fantastical? We don’t have the skills to make human-like cyborgs yet, but the data collection to build up user profiles is happening and will continue to accelerate. “Behavioral surplus”, the data gold rush powering our tech behemoths, is there for the taking because we’re constantly feeding the beast, and the U.S. has little to no data privacy protection.

 

It’s hard not to feed the beast. I use e-mail, my credit card, access services online, search/browse the web, and occasionally log on to social media to keep in touch with friends and family. The pandemic means that I do more things online, especially with regard to teaching. Previously I delivered course materials through my own course website with no tracking of student activity. Now I use Zoom and the Learning Management System. And yes, these do track activity regardless of whether I care about such things as an instructor. In fact, we’re “encouraged” to use data analytics in our teaching. It’s supposed to keep us informed so that early warning signals can remind us to do “interventions” all in the name of helping our students be better learners.

 

As an academic adviser, I was encouraged to look at and use holistic data analytical tools that look beyond the classroom, with an eye towards student engagement or the warning signs of disengagement. I’m sure the folks in student affairs mean well, but after logging into such a system probably ten years ago to see what the hoopla was all about, I never did so again. If there’s an issue, I directly contact someone and talk to them. I was not going to feed data into the system, even when encouraged (but never forced) to do so. I refuse to subject my students to lockdown browsers that monitor them supposedly to reduce cheating – what a ghastly invention. I refuse to use Turnitin. Students who want to cheat will try anyway; I much prefer to get to know my students, establish mutual trust, explain my pedagogical strategies, why and how I grade, and hopefully show them through words and actions that I care about their learning. But it’s still their learning, and they have to put in the work to learn the material.

 

I cannot escape the system I’m caught in; I’m certainly not rich enough to go off-the-grid. No, I don’t think we are in a Terminator Judgement Day scenario, but I do keep my phone in airplane mode much of the time, and I never turn on location services. I don’t web-browse on my smartphone and hardly use any apps. No digital assistants. I’m not tempted to get an Amazon Echo. No wearables. I was intrigued by Roomba and Nest, but reading Zuboff’s book has convinced me not to do so. In fact, if anything seems automagical, I should be doubly alert.

 

While I grew up in an era without data scrapers trying to get every bit of data, my students are fully immersed in them. It’s scary to me. But they don’t seem too worried. That’s scary too. I’m sure they’d be happy to get more personalized education at their fingertips, and educational technology companies are happily trying to convince us that their products are in the best interests of our students. And to some extent they’re not wrong. But in this new world where behavioral surplus drives surveillance capitalism, it’s not worth it for them to deliver such useful products without the gold mine of data scraping access. Brave new world indeed.