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

Surveillance Capitalism in America
edited by Josh Lauer and Kenneth Lipartito
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS, 2021, 267 PP. HARDCOVER, $65.00
ISBN: 978-0-812-25335-1

The concept of “surveillance capitalism,” first coined in 2014, emphasizes how technologies designed to extract massive amounts of data from the raw material of human behavior have become central to a hyperexploitative new economic order of intensified inequality and frightening concentrations of power. Since Shoshanna Zuboff ’s influential 2019 study The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the concept has emerged as a key paradigm from surveillance studies to science and technology studies and beyond.¹ As the title implies, central to Zuboff ’s formulation is the periodization of surveillance capitalism as a recent and unprecedented phenomenon. However, as Surveillance Capitalism in America persuasively argues, the key features of today’s panoptic digital economy emerged from deeply rooted structures spanning the long history of capitalism in the United States. As noted historian of privacy Sarah Igo observes in an incisive afterword, “Watching has always been the business of business” (204).

For this anthology, business historian Kenneth Lipartito joins with Josh Lauer, author of a history of consumer credit, to assemble a range of essays tracing the origins of surveillance capitalism across the American past. Their volume marks an early effort by historians to engage this paradigm, with three core aims: to challenge its periodization as an unprecedented digital age phenomenon; to emphasize the role of business in the history of surveillance; and to trace the interplay between the state and the marketplace in the emergence of American surveillance power. Their introduction synthesizes major developments in the field of surveillance studies and contextualizes them against a backdrop of the expansion of capitalism and development of surveillance practices across US history. With one exception, the nine chapters span the late nineteenth to the dawn of the twenty-first century, focusing on the significance of surveillance to American business from the Gilded Age through the dot-com boom.

The volume opens with an outlier, exploring the history of slavery in the British Atlantic world at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Historians such as Walter Johnson and Edward Baptist, who emphasize the centrality of slavery within the American capitalist development, have argued for the importance of regimes of surveillance within the “carceral landscape” of the US South’s plantation economy.² In the opening chapter of this collection, Caitlin Rosenthal and Cameron Black document the “information systems” of managers and watchmen that enabled plantation slavery to function within the British West Indies and interpret a Jamaican abolitionist newspaper as a strategy of countersurveillance.

From this opening, the volume shifts into its primary focus: case studies of how firms gathered information on consumers, competitors, and employees and put these data to [End Page 205] work to increase profits, enforce moral standards, or gain legal and political advantage. Richard Popp explores the world of late nineteenth-century mail-order companies, which led the way in monetizing personal data through sales of subscriber lists and targeted mailings—predating by nearly a century the direct-mail revolution that political historians have credited with enabling the rise of Reagan and the religious Right. Jamie Pietruska examines a legal battle between competing Pinkerton agencies to make the case for the centrality of paperwork and bureaucracy to the success of the private surveillance firms that played a pivotal role in the repression of labor movements. Daniel Robert describes how corporate managers leveraged emotional labor and employee surveillance as a strategy to offset political critiques of utility monopolies in the early twentieth century.

Jeremy Milloy’s exploration of the centrality of private employers within the Reagan-era War on Drugs underscores the porous boundaries between state-based and business-driven initiatives, illuminating the theme of the intertwined dual role of public and private power in driving surveillance practices. Historians of sexuality will take particular interest in the two chapters on the interwar period, focused on surveillance of guests by hotel staff and on sexual and gender policing in Manhattan nightclubs. Dan Guadagnolo’s account of how Black Harlem residents targeted by tobacco company advertising fought back through direct action and legal challenges offers a stirring example of resistance to the racialized impacts of data-driven marketing, relevant to today’s debates over algorithmic bias. The closing essay on the history of internet cookies details debates over the emergence of one of surveillance capitalism’s key technologies. Meg Leta Jones argues against Zuboff that the continuities shaping internet advertising, rather than its unprecedented features, best explain the entrenchment of surveillance capitalism online, as the “opt-out” approach first developed in the 1970s formed the basis for internet companies to sidestep more stringent privacy paradigms as they pushed forward the commercialization of the web.

As the editors acknowledge, substantial work remains undone in documenting the historical roots of twenty-first-century surveillance capitalism. These case studies are more suggestive than definitive as arguments for the editors’ more ambitious claims, raising more questions than they answer around issues such as the status of slavery within surveillance capitalism’s origins and the significance of transnational linkages. The collection aggregates distinct modes of surveillance that targeted either consumers, employees, or other firms but does little to analyze their linkages or assess their relative significance to the development of the surveillance capitalism that exists today. Igo cautions in the afterword against generalizing too broadly in the application of the concept of surveil-lance to quite disparate activities undertaken to turn information into profit throughout US history, which raises questions about the extent to which these diverse essays should be understood to form part of a unified narrative.

Nonetheless, this thought-provoking anthology provides a proof of concept, showing the insights that the surveillance capitalism paradigm can offer to historians while unequivocally demonstrating the need for a much longer historical lens to accurately understand it today. Readers will put down this volume convinced that the twenty-first century is only uniquely “the age” of surveillance capitalism in scope and scale, not in kind. Whereas Zuboff interprets today’s surveillance economy as a uniquely malevolent form of rogue capitalism, this collection raises troubling questions about precisely what is new about twenty-first-century surveillance capitalism—or indeed whether the term itself may be redundant. As the histories charted here show, American capitalism has always been [End Page 206] rooted in surveillance in ways that bear directly on the economic and political questions we grapple with in today’s digital age.