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Is it just me or am I right to think that the only nations that function qua nations these days seem to be those run by autocrats? Even if the ideas deployed by these bastards are God-awful they do at least do something. Whereas there’s a real sense that the politicians of the Western democracies have turned into, well, supervisors, and flaccid supervisors at that: “We’ll keep doing what we’re doing”, followed, under their breath, with “we’re powerless to do anything other.”
I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist, but you do have to wonder what’s going on. Here in the UK we’re heading for a general election, and unless something truly extraordinary happens the party that will walk it is The-Other-Main-Party that has been out of government for a while - not because they have any startlingly wonderful policies (public debt is running at 98 per cent of GDP so there’ll be precious little scope to do much, anyway) but, rather, because they are not the party that is currently, if nominally, in power.
I know I’m not being startlingly original when I say that, over the past few decades, there has been the mother and father of all power shifts. On the global map, the striations of time zones and coloured inks defining nations and continents have been made meaningless by realtime technology and communications. This has led to the rise and rise of non-government organizations (NGOs) and global corporations that float free, able to define and impose their own social and moral orders. And all at the expense of the Nation-State and the Societies that helped the West become successful in the first place.
Put it another way, we switched the polarity on our key Relationships. Our Relationships with our countries. Our Relationships with our governments. Our Relationships with our business enterprises. And, most important, our Relationships with one another. They have all switched to the diametric opposites to those that they so recently conformed.
That’s where this rant originated - it’s all about Relationships. In a recent exchange in response to one of my pieces on Substack, an esteemed reader mentioned Shoshana Zuboff. And we discussed her a little. She is brilliant. She is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School. And she came up with the concept of Surveillance Capitalism.
To put this into perspective, I remember being very excited when, back in 2010, in an issue of McKinsey Quarterly, I read this:
The old logic of wealth creation worked from the perspective of the organization and its requirements – for efficiency, cost reductions, revenues, growth, earnings per share (EPS), and returns on investment (ROI) – and pointed inward. The new logic starts with the individual end user. Instead of ‘What do we have and how can we sell it to you?’ good business practices start by asking ‘Who are you?’ ‘What do you need?’ and ‘How can we help?’ This inverted thinking makes it possible to identify the assets that represent real value for each individual. Cash flow and profitability are derived from those assets.
“Who are you?” “What do you need?” “How can we help?” I’d spent decades in Marketing and this open, optimistic view sounded to me like a dream come true – the ability to respond more precisely to customer wants. And coming from a Harvard professor it surely carried great authority.
However, Professor Zuboff’s mood was to change dramatically. In 2019, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism1, she gave a closely argued, angry report of a dream gone sour. The original thinking, she said, had centred around an absolute understanding that personal data would remain the property of those to whom it related. But that promise had been tossed aside.
Apropos the idea of the smart home, she referred back to a Georgia Tech project from 2000 titled the “Aware Home”:
It was meant to be a ‘living laboratory’ for the study of ‘ubiquitous computing’. They imagined a ‘human-home symbiosis’ in which many animate and inanimate processes would be captured by an elaborate network of ‘context aware sensors’ embedded in the house and by wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants.2
Importantly …
… it was assumed that the rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s life would belong exclusively to the people who live in the house.3
But this was not to be …
By 2018, the assumptions of the Aware Home were gone with the wind.4
All of which brings me back to my headline - what’s the dead shark thing all about? Well, in the film Annie Hall, Alvy, played by Woody Allen says this:
A relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.5
A relationship has to constantly move forward to survive, huh? The problem at the moment seems to me to be that the great majority of us have no idea how the global players, political and commercial, define ‘moving forward’.
Thanks for reading.
Zuboff, Shoshana. Creating value in the age of distributed capitalism (McKinsey Quarterly, 2010 Number 4)
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019)
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019 Ibid.
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019 Ibid
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019 Ibid.
Allen, Woody. Annie Hall (1977 film)