The Age of surveillance capitalism is a profound economical, sociological, political, philosophical, and ethical work by the American author, Harvard University Professor Shoshana Zuboff. In this work, she analyzes the new economic system, which she calls “surveillance capitalism.” This system revolves around the commodification of personal data, which allows human behavior to be predicted and “nudged” towards profitable ends. This system is historically unprecedented and has only become possible in the technological milieu of interconnected devices, which (...) appeared in the 21st century. In this article, I look at the issue of freedom in Zuboff’s work. I argue that her understanding of freedom involves three ethical dimensions, namely privacy, autonomy, and authenticity. I take “surveillance capitalism” as a theoretical framework, in which I explore several ethical challenges to freedom in the digital age. (shrink)

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff. London: Profile Books, 2019, 704 p.

In this article, we explore how digital marketers think about marketing in the age of Big Data surveillance, automatic computational analyses, and algorithmic shaping of choice contexts. Our starting point is a contradiction at the heart of digital marketing namely that digital marketing brings about unprecedented levels of consumer empowerment and autonomy and total control over and manipulation of consumer decision-making. We argue that this contradiction of digital marketing is resolved via the notion of relevance, which represents what Fredric (...) Jameson calls a symbolic act. The notion of the symbolic act lets us see the centering of relevance as a creative act of digital marketers who undertake to symbolically resolve a contradiction that cannot otherwise be resolved. Specifically, we suggest that relevance allows marketers to believe that in the age of surveillance capitalism, the manipulation of choice contexts and decision-making is the same as consumer empowerment. Put differently, relevance is the moment when marketing manipulation disappears and all that is left is the empowered consumer. To create relevant manipulations that are experienced as empowering by the consumer requires always-on surveillance, massive analyses of consumer data and hyper-targeted responses, in short, a persistent marketing presence. The vision of digital marketing is therefore a fascinating one: marketing disappears at precisely the moment when it extends throughout the life without limit. (shrink)

Clicks, comments, transactions, and physical movements are being increasingly recorded and analyzed by Big Data processors who use this information to trace the sentiment and activities of markets and voters. While the benefits of Big Data have received considerable attention, it is the potential social costs of practices associated with Big Data that are of interest to us in this paper. Prior research has investigated the impact of Big Data on individual privacy rights, however, there is also growing recognition of (...) its capacity to be mobilized for surveillance purposes. Our paper delineates the underlying issues of privacy and surveillance and presents them as in tension with one another. We postulate that efforts at controlling Big Data may create a trade-off of risks rather than an overall improvement in data protection. We explore this idea in relation to the principles of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation as it arguably embodies the new ‘gold standard’ of cyber-laws. We posit that safeguards advocated by the law, anonymization and pseudonymization, while representing effective counter measures to privacy concerns, also incentivize the use, collection, and trade of behavioral and other forms of de-identified data. We consider the legal status of these ownerless forms of data, arguing that data protection techniques such as anonymization and pseudonymization raise significant concerns over the ownership of behavioral data and its potential use in the large-scale modification of activities and choices made both on and offline. (shrink)

Carol Gould's article offers a powerful argument against the sufficiency of informed consent in an age of surveillance capitalism. In this review, I assess the three main claims that Gould makes in her article, namely that (1) democratic control is required by the all‐affected principle; (2) democratic control is a means of ensuring that surveillance corporations and governments track public, rather than merely private, interests; and (3) democratic control is constitutive of freedom as self‐development and self‐transformation.

Jan Bryant looks at the strategies visual artists and filmmakers are using to criticise the social and economic conditions shaping our historical moment. She then assesses how the world is being positively re-imagined through their work today.

The emergence of the ever-growing anti-corruption movement from the early ’90s onwards has proven itself to be of considerable importance in how we understand and explain global inequalities as well as in redefining corruption as a lack of transparency. This paper examines the timing and content of this international anti-corruption movement. It argues that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the deepening of an increasingly transnational capitalism, anti-corruption discourse has arisen as a new version of the ‘white (...) man’s burden’, a justification for intervention into the domestic politics of less powerful states as well as an explanation for their relative poverty. Concurrently, the anti-corruption movement has functioned to push states into increasing their autonomy with respect to local interests and fractions of capital in order to become more subservient and hospitable to transnational capital as a whole. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a Foucauldian reflection on our datafied present. Following others, I characterize this present as a condition of “digital capitalism” and proceed to explore whether and how digital conditions present an important change of episteme and, accordingly, an importantly different mode of subjectivity. I answer both of these concerns affirmatively. In the process, I engage with Colin Koopman’s recent work on infopower and argue that, despite changes in episteme and modes of subjectivity, the digital capitalist (...) present is continuous with biopolitics as Foucault understood it, though it does raise serious worries about the possibility of transgressive resistance. (shrink)

This article provides a history of private sector tracking technologies, examining how the advent of commercial surveillance centered around a logic of data capitalism. Data capitalism is a system in which the commoditization of our data enables an asymmetric redistribution of power that is weighted toward the actors who have access and the capability to make sense of information. It is enacted through capitalism and justified by the association of networked technologies with the political and social (...) benefits of online community, drawing upon narratives that foreground the social and political benefits of networked technologies. I examine its origins in the wake of the dotcom bubble, when technology makers sought to develop a new business model to support online commerce. By leveraging user data for advertising purposes, they contributed to an information environment in which every action leaves behind traces collected by companies for commercial purposes. Through analysis of primary source materials produced by technology makers, journalists, and business analysts, I examine the emergence of data capitalism between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s and its central role in the contemporary information economy. (shrink)

In recent years, after decades of largely avoiding engagements with political economy, discussions of the new forms of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the information society have become central again to critical theory. Following this recognition of the importance of political economy, this article aims at honing our conceptual tools to examine the political and social economies of contemporary capitalism, which I understand with Yann Moulier Boutang as "cognitive capitalism."1 I am particularly interested in how changing economic and social (...) practices inflect our political institutions and political and social practices and sensibilities, while at the same time these changes are not necessarily reflected in the... (shrink)

This paper aims to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Adorno’s thought for business ethicists working in the critical tradition by showing how his critique of modern social life anticipated, and ofers continuing illumination of, recent technological transformations of capitalism. It develops and extrapolates Adorno’s thought regarding three central spheres of modern society, which have seen radical changes in light of recent technological developments: work, in which employee monitoring has become ever more sophisticated and intrusive; leisure consumption, in which the (...) algorithmic developments of the culture industry have paved the way for entertainment products to dominate us; and political discourse, in which social media has exacerbated the anti-democratic tendencies Adorno warned of in the mid-twentieth century. We conclude by presenting, as a rejoinder to these developments, the contours of an Adornian ethics of resistance to the reifcation and dehumanisation of such developments. (shrink)

In the age of surveillance capitalism, the prevailing business model underlying the use of social media applications (“apps”) foresees the exchange of personal data for the allowance to use an online service. Such a data business model comes with many potential negative side effects ranging from violation of privacy issues to election manipulation. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to think of alternatives to the current data business model. The present study investigated how strong the support would be (...) for a monetary payment model among a sample of 210 participants. Participants were asked about their willingness to pay for social media, if in turn their data would be private and other problems concerning social media use would be tackled. Only one-fifth of participants (21.43%) supported such a model. From the Big Five Personality traits, Agreeableness was positively associated with support of such a model. Finally, data are also provided on how much participants would be willing to pay for social media on a monthly basis. The present study’s findings are of a preliminary nature and will contribute to the start of an important discussion. (shrink)

Patient online record access (ORA) is spreading worldwide, and in some countries, including Sweden, and the USA, access is advanced with patients obtaining rapid access to their full records. In the UK context, from 31 October 2023 as part of the new NHS England general practitioner (GP) contract it will be mandatory for GPs to offer ORA to patients aged 16 and older. Patients report many benefits from reading their clinical records including feeling more empowered, better understanding and remembering their (...) treatment plan, and greater awareness about medications including possible adverse effects. However, a variety of indirect evidence suggests these benefits are unlikely to accrue without supplementation from internet-based resources. Using such routes to augment interpretation of the data and notes housed in electronic health records, however, comes with trade-offs in terms of exposing sensitive patient information to internet corporations. Furthermore, increased work burdens on clinicians, including the unique demands of ORA, combined with the easy availability and capability of a new generation of large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots, create a perfect collision course for exposing sensitive patient information to private tech companies. This paper surveys how ORA intersects with internet associated privacy risks and offers a variety of multilevel suggestions for how these risks might be better mitigated. (shrink)

Drawing on struggles within academe between faculty that promote critical education and advocates of New Public Management (NPM) who endorse instrumental learning, I reimagine the university as a counter-space that positions it as a counter-power to informational capitalism. Initially, I outline its twin threats: ethical, as self-entrepreneurial academics are valorised by NPM; and political, with informationalisation conflating spaces of thinking. I then detail Scott Lash’s specific account of how the info-comm society negates critique. However, his monistic understanding of informationalisation (...) means Lash’s alternative of Informationskritik risks subsumption by it. I therefore defer to Jacques Derrida’s idea of the university. To ensure the autonomy of the principle of reason in a world of info-comm flows, the university is a supplementary body to society, yet intimately linked to it by its critical reflexivity, which is on behalf of society. Because Derrida does not elaborate the requisite institutional architecture, I conclude with Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as a quasi-illicit site that is different and other. Such an institutional design enables the university as a counter-space that is a bank of reason and an archive of its manifestation in social practices. It also upholds a space for thinking, which in the form of nominalist critical history proffers a counter-power to society as an informational homotopia. (shrink)

The capacity to provide satisfactory nursing care is being increasingly compromised by current trajectories of healthcare funding and governance. The purpose of this paper is to examine how well Marxist theories of the state and its relationship with capital can explain these trajectories in this period of ever‐increasing austerity. Following a brief history of the current crisis, it examines empirically the effects of the crisis, and of the current trajectory of capitalism in general, upon the funding and organization of (...) the UK and US healthcare systems. The deleterious effect of growing income inequalities to the health of the population is also addressed. Marx's writings on the state and its relation to the capitalist class were fragmentary and historically and geographically specific. From them, we can extract three theoretical variants: the instrumentalist theory of the state, where the state has no autonomy from capital; the abdication theory, whereby capital abstains from direct political power and relies on the state to serve its interests; and the class‐balance theory, whereby the struggle between two opposed classes allows the state to assert itself. Discussion of modern Marxist interpretations includes Poulantzas's abdication theory and Miliband's instrumentalist theory. It is concluded that, despite the pluralism of electoral democracies, the bourgeoisie do have an overweening influence upon the state. The bourgeoisie's ownership of the means of production provides the foundation for its influence because the state is obliged to rely on it to manage the supply of goods and services and the creation of wealth. That power is further reinforced by the infiltration of the bourgeoisie into the organs of state. The level of influence has accelerated rapidly over recent decades. One of the consequences of this has been that healthcare systems have become rich pickings for the evermore confident bourgeoisie. (shrink)

People increasingly live online, sharing publicly what might have once seemed private, but at the same time are enraged by extremes of government surveillance and the corresponding invasion into our private lives. In this enlightening work, Adam Henschke re-examines privacy and property in the age of surveillance in order to understand not only the importance of these social conventions, but also their moral relevance. By analyzing identity and information, and presenting a case for a relation between the two, (...) he explains the moral importance of virtual identities and offers an ethically robust solution to design surveillance technologies. This book should be read by anyone interested in surveillance technology, new information technology more generally, and social concepts like privacy and property. (shrink)

Review Articles : Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writ ings. Volume One: 1946-1955. From the Critique of Bu reaucracy to the Positive Content of Socialism. Volume Two: 1955-1960. From the Workers Struggle Against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of Modern Capitalism, trans. and ed. by David Ames Curtis.

Tocqueville suggested that "the people reign in the American political world like God over the universe." This intuition anticipates the crisis in the secularization paradigm that has brought theology back as a fundamental part of sociological and political analysis. It has become more difficult to believe that humanity's progress necessarily leads to atheism, or that it is possible to translate all that is good about religion into reasonable terms acceptable in principle by all, believers as well as nonbelievers. And yet, (...) the spread of Enlightenment values, of an independent public sphere, and of alternative "projects of modernity" continues unabated and is by no means the antithesis of the renewed vigor of religious beliefs. The essays in this book shed interdisciplinary and multicultural light on a hypothesis that helps to account for such an unexpected convergence of enlightenment and religion in our times: Religion has reentered the public sphere because it puts into question the relation between God and the concept of political sovereignty. In the first part, "Religion and Polity-Building," new perspectives are brought to bear on the tension-ridden connection between theophany and state-building from the perspective of world religions. Globalized, neo-liberal capitalism has been another crucial factor in loosening the bond between God and the state, as the essays in the second part, "The End of the Saeculum and Global Capitalism," show. The essays in the third part, "Questioning Sovereignty: Law and Justice," are dedicated to a critique of the premises of political theology, starting from the possibility of a prior, perhaps deeper relation between democracy and theocracy. The book concludes with three innovative essays dedicated to examining Tocqueville in order to think the "Religion of Democracy" beyond the idea of civil religion. (shrink)

Environmental commodification, trading and offsetting are business as usual approaches to environmental policy. There is also consensus across political divides about the need for economic growth. Many environmental NGOs have become apologists for corporate self-regulation, market mechanisms, carbon pricing/trading and biodiversity offsetting/banking, while themselves commercialising species 'protection' as eco-tourism. In this issue of Environmental Values the state and direction of the environmental movement are at the fore. D'Amato et al. contrast pragmatism with the need for revolutionary change and consider which (...) will achieve social ecological transformation. Parry raises the issue of how animal activists should operate within an idealised deliberative democracy and what they could then legitimately justify doing to further their cause. Quist and Rinne are concerned with the challenges that disenfranchised groups face in building shared agendas and expressing themselves in their struggles to protect the environment and their ways of life. How natural resource extraction issues are framed by the media is the concern of Davies et al. Issues of power, inclusion and representation in the environmental movement are also raised in the paper by Fenney, which addresses the challenges specifically faced by disabled people. Societal change is an inherently value laden and political issue. Environmental policy is no more a win-win than any other policy; this journal issue shows how different polices change winners and losers. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) pervades humanity in 2022, and it is notoriously difficult to understand how certain aspects of it work. There is a movement—_Explainable_ Artificial Intelligence (XAI)—to develop new methods for explaining the behaviours of AI systems. We aim to highlight one important philosophical significance of XAI—it has a role to play in the elimination of vagueness. To show this, consider that the use of AI in what has been labeled _surveillance capitalism_ has resulted in humans quickly gaining the capability (...) to identify and classify most of the occasions in which languages are used. We show that the knowability of this information is incompatible with what a certain theory of vagueness—_epistemicism_—says about vagueness. We argue that one way the epistemicist could respond to this threat is to claim that this process brought about the end of vagueness. However, we suggest an alternative interpretation, namely that epistemicism is false, but there is a weaker doctrine we dub _technological epistemicism_, which is the view that vagueness is due to ignorance of linguistic usage, but the ignorance can be overcome. The idea is that knowing more of the relevant data and how to process it enables us to know the semantic values of our words and sentences with higher confidence and precision. Finally, we argue that humans are probably not going to believe what future AI algorithms tell us about the sharp boundaries of our vague words unless the AI involved can be explained in terms understandable by humans. That is, if people are going to accept that AI can tell them about the sharp boundaries of the meanings of their words, then it is going to have to be XAI. (shrink)

This volume consists of an interesting collection of essays that highlight some of the difficulties societies and political systems are facing as a result of growing globalization and rapid technol...

Surveillance is essential for communicable disease prevention and control. Traditional notification of demographic and clinical information, about individuals with selected infectious diseases, allows appropriate public health action and is protected by public health and privacy legislation, but is slow and insensitive. Big data–based electronic surveillance, by commercial bodies and government agencies, which draws on a plethora of internet- and mobile device–based sources, has been widely accepted, if not universally welcomed. Similar anonymous digital sources also contain syndromic information, which (...) can be analysed, using customised algorithms, to rapidly predict infectious disease outbreaks, but the data are nonspecific and predictions sometimes misleading. However, public health authorities could use these online sources, in combination with de-identified personal health data, to provide more accurate and earlier warning of infectious disease events—including exotic or emerging infections—even before the cause is confirmed, and allow more timely public health intervention. Achieving optimal benefits would require access to selected data from personal electronic health and laboratory records and the potential to re-identify individuals found to be involved in outbreaks, to ensure appropriate care and infection control. Despite existing widespread digital surveillance and major potential community benefits of extending its use to communicable disease control, there is considerable public disquiet about allowing public health authorities access to personal health data. Informed public discussion, greater transparency and an ethical framework will be essential to build public trust in the use of new technology for communicable disease control. (shrink)

Considering formative twentieth-century theories in relation to contemporary technosocial developments, this article examines ideas of spectacle and surveillance as ways of approaching visual politics. I argue that the historically important relationship between the visual and political fields is now intensifying and mutating. First discussing Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, I show how his influential approach proves inadequate to the politics of image-saturated societies. I next show how critics of imperial and racial spectacles, from Michael Rogin to Claudia (...) Rankine and Tina Campt, provide better ways of engaging power and political contestation in the visual field. Third, I examine how Michel Foucault deployed notions of spectacle in his own work but argued for leaving the term behind, presenting surveillance as not just a different modality of power but also spectacle’s temporal successor. This account remains essential for both historical understanding and reckoning with contemporary surveillance. Fourth, however, as Simone Browne argues, Foucault’s separation between spectacle and surveillance is too stark, his history too prone to occlude race. Furthermore, recent surveillance technologies and practices have changed in ways that confound his terms, while extending and also altering the racial dynamics explored earlier in the essay. Today, even surveillance based on optical media contributes to a “postvisual” image world in which algorithmic, machine-machine communication abets forms of power neither tied to human perception nor graspable as subject formation. With surprising assistance from Debord, I end by discussing the significant theoretical and political challenges posed by the ironies of postvisual visuality. (shrink)

This article employs the animated feature film WALL-E to examine a contemporary incarnation of paternal authority, the anal father of enjoyment. Slavoj Zizek coined the expression “anal father of enjoyment” to identify a metaphorical father who operates counter to Sigmund Freud’s oedipal. Unlike the oedipal father, the anal father does not command the subject to sacrifice enjoyment as a price for entry into the social order. Rather, the anal father directs the subject to enjoy excessively. This article reasons that the (...) anal father figuration is a result of global capitalism. While a post-apocalyptic event, such as climate change, may destroy the planet, it does not end capitalism. Yet, WALL-E suggests that with the demise of the anal father, capitalism can be replaced with an alternative economic system. (shrink)

Using Michel Foucault’s conception of pervasive power, the purpose of this chapter is to analyse the contemporary paradigm of online surveillance from a philosophical perspective by unpacking the power dynamics involved in online surveillance, ultimately arguing, with McKenzie Wark, that there is an asymmetry of power that puts individual persons at risk. I then turn to Martin Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit as a helpful way to think through what an intentional stance towards online surveillance might look like (...) that does not escape the paradigm but is at least conscious of its influence. Finally, I utilise Immanuel Kant’s ethics and political philosophy to provide recommendations as to the appropriate ethical relationships that should exist between individual persons, governments, and corporations, ultimately arguing that respect for personal autonomy – that is, the right to choose our lives in accordance with our interests – must be at the forefront of conversations regarding the ethics of online surveillance. (shrink)

Based on an original synthesis of the work of Marx and Bergson, the key theorists of capitalism and creativity, the book presents an astonishing analysis of ...

There is increasing concern about “surveillance capitalism,” whereby for-profit companies generate value from data, while individuals are unable to resist (Zuboff 2019). Non-profits using data-enabled surveillance receive less attention. Higher education institutions (HEIs) have embraced data analytics, but the wide latitude that private, profit-oriented enterprises have to collect data is inappropriate. HEIs have a fiduciary relationship to students, not a narrowly transactional one (see Jones et al, forthcoming). They are responsible for facets of student life beyond education. (...) In addition to classrooms, learning management systems, and libraries, HEIs manage dormitories, gyms, dining halls, health facilities, career advising, police departments, and student employment. HEIs collect and use student data in all of these domains, ostensibly to understand learner behaviors and contexts, improve learning outcomes, and increase institutional efficiency through “learning analytics” (LA). ID card swipes and Wi-Fi log-ins can track student location, class attendance, use of campus facilities, eating habits, and friend groups. Course management systems capture how students interact with readings, video lectures, and discussion boards. Application materials provide demographic information. These data are used to identify students needing support, predict enrollment demands, and target recruiting efforts. These are laudable aims. However, current LA practices may be inconsistent with HEIs’ fiduciary responsibilities. HEIs often justify LA as advancing student interests, but some projects advance primarily organizational welfare and institutional interests. Moreover, LA advances a narrow conception of student interests while discounting privacy and autonomy. Students are generally unaware of the information collected, do not provide meaningful consent, and express discomfort and resigned acceptance about HEI data practices, especially for non-academic data (see Jones et al. forthcoming). The breadth and depth of student information available, combined with their fiduciary responsibility, create a duty that HEIs exercise substantial restraint and rigorous evaluation in data collection and use. (shrink)

This book challenges the hegemonic view that economic calculation represents the ultimate rationality. The West legitimises its global dominance by the claim to be a rational, democratic, science-based and progressive civilisation. Yet, over the past decades, the dogma of economic rationality has become an ideological black hole whose gravitational pull allows no public debate or policy to escape. Political leaders of all creeds are held in its orbit and public language is saturated by it. This dogma has pervaded all spheres (...) of life, ushering the age of post-rationality, especially in English speaking countries. The authors discuss several aspects of post-rational global capitalism still dominated by the Anglosphere: hyper-competition, hyper-consumption, inequality, volatile global financial markets, environmental degradation and the unforeseen effects of the internet-mediated communication revolution. The book concludes by discussing some utopian and dystopian future scenarios and asking whether the West can transcend its crisis of rationality. (shrink)

Shoshana Zuboff’s international bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal as a book that asks us ‘to pause long enough to think about the future and how it might be different from today.’ That description could work as the definition of the literary utopia or dystopia. In fact, Zuboff’s book has consecutive chapters titled ‘Big Other and the Rise of Instrumentalist (...) Power’ and ‘A Utopia of Certainty’. In the former chapter, the title of which seems to reference George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Zuboff argues that there now exists a ‘ubiquitous digital apparatus’ that ‘renders, monitors, computes and modifies human behaviour’. In the latter chapter she asserts that the ‘surveillance capitalist leaders [such as Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page, CEOs of Facebook and Google respectively] are sui generis utopianists’. This article critically assesses Zuboff’s claims in relation to Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle, where the eponymous utopian/dystopian company’s name, as well its motto ‘ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN’ gesture towards Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon writings. This article explores Zuboff’s factual and Eggers’ fictional examinations of surveillance capitalism. While Zuboff’s and Eggers’ works have different points of departure and modes of representation, a comparative reading suggests key points of overlap and disagreement about the impact of surveillance in the contemporary world, about what the future might hold, and about how we should respond. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the issue of surveillance in capitalism (surveillance capitalism), a phenomenon which has spread in that socio-economic system since the beginning of the 21st century. We attempt to point out the harmfulness of information technologies developing in the wrong direction, carrying the ideas of dataism and post-truth, which increasingly colonize human living space. It turns out that the information (traces) that people leave while operating on the Internet is a source of predicting (...) human behavior in the future (behavioral futures markets). Thus, for the most developed Internet enterprises in the world, they become a motive for violating what seem to be basic political rights, mainly freedom, property and security. As a result, under the influence of the disinformation often present on the Internet, people’s behavior may take the most socially undesirable forms, but desirable in the virtual world. The considerations in the paper are primarily theoretical. The descriptive method was used with elements of the conceptual analysis of surveillance capitalism in the context of dataism and post-truth. (shrink)

This volume consists of an interesting collection of essays that highlight some of the difficulties societies and political systems are facing as a result of growing globalization and rapid technol...

"East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves"-with these words on a sugar bowl, consumers of the early nineteenth century declared their power to change the global economy. Bronwen Everill examines how abolitionists in the Atlantic world shaped emerging ideas of ethical commerce to fight the system of plantation slavery that had become an engine of modern capitalism. How did consumers define ethical commerce? How did producers create markets for their products? Everill focuses on the everyday economy of the Atlantic (...) world rather than on the more familiar boycott movements against slave-produced goods. Different approaches to making money in ethical commerce-through commercial agriculture, government contracts, international trade, and money management-shaped the relationship between production, consumption, and morality in ways that determined how slavery and freedom came to be defined in the market economy. Companies such as Macaulay & Babington in Sierra Leone, Roberts & Colson in Liberia, and Forster & Smith in the Gambia used commercial networks and government subsidies to make "legitimate" commerce pay. Ethical commerce was also promoted by former slaves in such organizations as the Colored Free Produce Society, which promoted the idea that consumers bore responsibility for the plight of the slave and could change their buying behavior. This book illuminates global consumer society and industrial capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century, as well as underscores the roles of slavery and antislavery movements in the development of international capitalism. It also reminds us that concerns over fair trade and labor conditions remain relevant today. (shrink)

This book offers a critical analysis of the rise of the US to global hegemony against a background of increased erosion of democracy and rule of law, and a rising linear pattern of near-absolute capitalist development. The author argues that the significant shrinkage of the ideological spectrum globally, as a result of worrisome levels of business and government interpenetration, has created a dangerous 'prefascist configuration' whereby unthinkable levels of violence have been normalized through the use of technologies such as drones, (...) increasingly condoned even by 'liberal' groups and the so-called political left. Using the example of the Obama administration and its increased reliance on drone assassinations, the volume makes a case for the dangers that lie in today's unique convergence of lack of transparency in government, business-government interpenetration, informal social regimentation, and militarization of capitalism. (shrink)

The authors argue that Erving Goffman developed concepts that contribute to an understanding of historical changes in the construction of the self and enable us to see the new forms that self-construction is taking in a society driven by consumption, marketing, and media. These concepts include: commercial realism; dramatic scripting; hyper-ritualization; the glimpse; and the dissolution or undermining of the real, the authentic, and the autonomous. By placing Goffman's under-discussed work, Gender Advertisements, in rapprochement with the work of Guy Debord, (...) Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson, we draw out shared concerns over the ways that the self becomes externally defined and incoherent in advanced consumer capitalism. We then turn to Goffman's “Territories of the Self” in order to show that Goffman balances his historicist analysis with a theory of a self that can maintain its coherence amidst the fragmenting forces of the media and the consumer society. Thus we document the continuing relevance of Goffman's thought for cultural and media analysis in contemporary consumer society. (shrink)

Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional (...) wisdom by considering how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, socio-historical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific socio-political contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrust-rather than trust-can sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the inter-relationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions come from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society. (shrink)

This article critically examines the transition from Marx to Spinoza within Antonio Negri’s postoperaist thought and explores a potential alternative rooted in Mario Tronti’s concept of the ‘autonomy of the political’. In Negri’s postoperaismo, the embrace of Spinoza reevaluates Marx’s critique of political economy through an optimistic lens, suggesting a tendency beyond capitalism. However, Negri’s embrace of a Spinozian plane of immanence entails a problematic affirmation of what exists. The article argues that Negri’s worldview, despite its beginnings, ends up (...) resembling deterministic historical materialism. While critical theory exposes flaws in Negri’s theory, it falls short in providing a practical alternative. Returning to Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Treatise uncovers earlier arguments, rooted in paradoxes inherent to practical politics. However, reliance on the concept of the multitude highlights deeper issues in Negri’s approach. Rather than adhering to postoperaismo or critical theory, the article suggests an alternative in Tronti’s journey from operaismo, particularly in the concept of the ‘autonomy of the political’. Notwithstanding critiques, this attempted liberation from Marxist determinism allows for a clearer confrontation with politics. The article concludes that Hardt and Negri’s recent critical engagement with this concept advances their arguments but does not entirely overcome inherent limitations in their approach. (shrink)