Smartphones Aren't the Problem - Capitalism Is

By Nicole Aschoff, Jacobin

14 March 20

All of the fretting about social media addiction and smartphones destroying our attention span misses the point. Capitalism and the profit-seeking of big tech is the real problem.

ude selfies till I die.” Kim Kardashian’s 2016 Webby Award acceptance speech for “excellence on the internet” was totally #goals. It also speaks to the reconfiguration of the public and private in our smartphone society. Kim and her selfie-obsessed sisters post sultry snaps of themselves online — taken in their bathrooms, bedrooms, and cars — and millions of people devour them.

The formula is robust. Forbes named Kylie Jenner the “world’s youngest self-made billionaire” at twenty-one.

Of course, relatively few of us are cultivating our social media biopics for the Benjamins. Yet if we’re honest, many of us rival the Kardashians in how “extremely online” our lives have become. Three billion people a month spend an average of 135 minutes a day on social media, and 70 percent of our social media time is spent on our phones (total screen time stretches considerably longer). Social media experts say that “to decouple social media from mobile use is impossible.”

Much social media content is thematically similar to Kardashian fare. Instagram and Twitter are bottomless receptacles for our lovingly crafted “squinty” and duck-faced selfies snapped in restaurants, parks, museums, funerals, ambulances, and concentration camps.

Social media is more than smiling faces, however. It’s as if humanity had been waiting its entire existence to pin dream kitchens, to write pedantic reviews and vicious tweets, to share cat hilarity, celebrity memes, and letters telling off bridesmaids who wouldn’t shell out for a destination wedding. The amount of time and energy we spend posting, snapping, creepin’, sharing, trolling, and scouring is mind-boggling. It gives new meaning to the truism that humans are social creatures.

There are many layers to our social media obsession — the desire for experiences, status, and social control. Social media offers a sense of meaning and connection, even if it’s with people rarely or never met. But at what cost? From psychologists to tech experts, a growing chorus of voices calls for a return to “real life.” What seemed like a fun, positive thing is actually terrible, we’re told, turning us into narcissistic weirdoes and possibly destroying society.

We worry that social media is changing our subjectivity — that we’ve become so attuned to “likes,” retweets, and follows that our self-esteem begins to depend on them. Our conception of our self becomes inseparable from the social media story we construct.

In the midst of this intertwining, many of us become addicted to our small screens and the worlds they open up. Experts say we’ve lost control — that we’re fast becoming like those dead-eyed slot-bots with their quarter cups and fanny packs, slumped over the machines at an off-strip casino.

Recently, members of the tech community have stepped up to shoulder some of the blame. Confessing their sins, software engineers describe how the platforms they helped create exploit basic psychological tricks to keep users hooked. Former Googler Tristan Harris, one of a growing chorus of tech refuseniks, channels William Gibson when he says, “All of us are jacked into this system. All of our minds can be hijacked. Our choices are not as free as we think they are.”

Our failure to control our impulses, we’re told, has made us less human. Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu likens us to B. F. Skinner’s pigeons, while tech pioneer Jaron Lanier proclaims, “We’re all lab animals now.” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar and vocal critic of Google, implores us to “rehumanize ourselves.”

The fear of becoming less human and more beastly because we can’t control our impulses is rooted in an old set of ideas commonly associated with René Descartes, a seventeenth-century French philosopher. Descartes viewed the body as a beast that must be constantly reined in and controlled. In this framework, our “true” self — our soul or spirit — is something apart from and more pure than the body.

Losing control, and with it authenticity, has often been linked with technology. Adam Smith feared machines would turn us into monstrosities. Karl Marx spoke of humans becoming appendages to machines. In the late nineteenth century, media historian Neal Gabler argues, popular entertainment was said to generate Pavlovian responses; its consumption was unthinking, addictive. The old cultural order was being overwritten by a new, inferior one; the sublime was being replaced with fun.

These framings are echoed in how we talk about smartphones and our use of social media today: once again, a new machine has turned us into unthinking automatons, driven by desire, impulse, and algorithm rather than reason and thought.

We should be careful about how we frame our fears, however. It is easy to fall into mythmaking. Donna Haraway has long warned about the limitations of imagining a pure human who existed “before” technology. Eva Illouz notes how much of our critique reflects a “longing for purity,” and certainly the way debates about smartphones are framed reflects this obsession with purity and our “true selves.” The pervasive distinction between “real life” and “digital life” reflects this most of all. But there is no pure life apart from our interactions, whether they be digital or analog. As Erving Goffman said, “The world, in truth, is a wedding.”

The point here is not to dismiss our fears and critiques of social media and smartphones. On the contrary, we must take these fears very seriously and not allow them to be pigeonholed into a discussion about dopamine spikes or neural pathways. To understand change in this moment, we must move beyond framing our problem with phones as a body problem, or a brain problem, or a self-control problem. This framing reinforces a dominant way of thinking in neoliberal capitalism: societal issues are collapsed into personal troubles that can be resolved through a series of micro-choices.

Micro-solutions are certainly what tech companies are emphasizing today. Wary of getting the finger pointed at them, the tech titans are beginning to offer tools for self-monitoring designed for “digital well-being.” There’s just one problem. These companies don’t actually want you to put your phone down. Their business model depends on your spending ever more time posting, liking, searching, messaging, tweeting, self-monitoring.

It’s hard to overstate how much tech companies know about us. They are tracking us twenty-four hours a day, every day. The swipes and taps and easy slides into pockets and purses as we move along through our days and years adds up to something huge — a new frontier for global capitalism.

Capitalism and frontiers go together. When we think about how capitalism has spread slowly over the globe over the past five centuries, we imagine the frontiers that have brought new growth and change — the “New World,” the “American West” — and we often associate these frontiers with new resources or new machines: silver mines, forests, railroads, steamships.

But the process by which frontiers are opened up is a bit hazy for most people. This haziness is partly a result of how the history of capitalism is taught — as an inevitable, inexorable process of transforming the world, a “natural” evolution. The haziness is also a result of the language we use. We “open” new frontiers the way we open a door. We imagine rubber trees and silver mines and rich soil just kind of sitting there, waiting to be transformed into a profitable venture.

These dominant frames are not only wrong — they strangle our ability to comprehend the emergence of new frontiers and reinforce a determinism that locates change in technological advances, such as railroads or smartphones.

To comprehend where we are headed in this technological moment we need to stand on firmer ground in our understanding of economic change. Frontiers are made, not opened. Grasping how capitalism evolves and expands — how new frontiers are made — requires putting people, rather than machines or geographical features, in the driver’s seat.

So where are the people in capitalism? Most of the time, we imagine them buying things, or running businesses and inventing things, or working on an assembly line, or toiling in a mine. This isn’t wrong. These people and the work they do are central to capitalist development. Equally important, though not usually theorized as such, is all the unpaid work that has gone into creating new frontiers in the history of our for-profit system — the appropriated work of slaves, of colonial subjects, of women.

We can’t make sense of how capitalism has evolved without taking into account this appropriated unpaid labor. Only a small fraction of the work that goes into creating new frontiers is paid work. This is not a bug, it’s a feature, as the saying goes. Sociologist Jason Moore argues that capitalism depends on “cheap nature” — labor, resources, food, energy — and that the appropriation of unpaid work is (and always has been) as essential to the development of capitalism as paid work.

Today, Silicon Valley has found a new frontier of appropriation, and it’s using your smartphone to “open” it.

Instagram sold for $1 billion in 2012 despite only employing thirteen people at the time. WhatsApp had fifty employees when Facebook bought it for $19 billion in 2014. This is astonishing. Why are these companies worth so much? Business insiders say they are valuable because of their network potential. This is true, but also obfuscatory. Instagram’s or WhatsApp’s value, just like the value of so many other tech companies, is in the unpaid work they command, their ability to appropriate life — your life.

The appropriation of unpaid work isn’t new. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici illuminates how, in the long transition from feudalism to capitalism, women’s unpaid labor became concealed, transforming the process of accumulation, and thus power relations for both men and women.

In the development of the digital frontier, we are once again seeing a redefinition of life activities and the emergence of new power dynamics. In the making of the digital frontier, a new combination of appropriation and exploitation has been formulated, a model that has generated unimaginable wealth for the tech titans.

Once again, we are witnessing the concealment of unpaid, appropriated work. Except today, it’s not just women’s work that is being appropriated, being made to appear as a natural resource, a “labor of love.” It is all of our work — the hours we spend every day on our smartphones creating content and generating data through our constant connection to our hand machines. In these hours, our lives become ever more deeply enmeshed in the circuits of capital. Our appropriated work, and our digital selves more broadly, are the key to the digital frontier.

Right now, we accept big tech’s bargain. We get cool apps and tools to communicate with others and to entertain and educate ourselves. Companies get unlimited access to and control over all the data we generate with our perpetually connected hand machines.

This bargain is tenuous, however. We’re increasingly uncomfortable with the relationship we’ve developed with our smartphones, uneasy with the ways we interact and express ourselves in our phone worlds, and fearful that our increasing dependence on our smartphones will overpower our fragile sense of authenticity and self. Discussions about how we use our phones are laced with loathing and judgment, aimed at ourselves and others. We blame ourselves for being weak and narcissistic.

To a degree, we are weak and narcissistic. But we should be wary of explanations that blame individuals for an issue that an entire society struggles with. As more and more people become suspicious of the technology, institutions, and relationships embodied in their phones, they are taking a closer look at the companies that control them. Our fears express a growing awareness of our vulnerability vis-à-vis the tech giants — a growing sense that life itself is somehow being shaped around the needs of profit-making.

Naomi Klein: Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for Disaster Capitalism

By Marie Solis, VICE

14 March 20

Naomi Klein explains how governments and the global elite will exploit a pandemic.

he coronavirus is officially a global pandemic that has so far infected 10 times more people than SARS did. Schools, university systems, museums, and theaters across the U.S. are shutting down, and soon, entire cities may be too. Experts warn that some people who suspect they may be sick with the virus, also known as COVID-19, are going about their daily routines, either because their jobs do not provide paid time off because of systemic failures in our privatized health care system.

Most of us aren’t exactly sure what to do or who to listen to. President Donald Trump has contradicted recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and these mixed messages have narrowed our window of time to mitigate harm from the highly contagious virus.

These are the perfect conditions for governments and the global elite to implement political agendas that would otherwise be met with great opposition if we weren’t all so disoriented. This chain of events isn’t unique to the crisis sparked by the coronavirus; it’s the blueprint politicians and governments have been following for decades known as the “shock doctrine,” a term coined by activist and author Naomi Klein in a 2007 book of the same name.

History is a chronicle of “shocks”—the shocks of wars, natural disasters, and economic crises—and their aftermath. This aftermath is characterized by “disaster capitalism,” calculated, free-market “solutions” to crises that exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities.

Klein says we’re already seeing disaster capitalism play out on the national stage: In response to the coronavirus, Trump has proposed a $700 billion stimulus package that would include cuts to payroll taxes (which would devastate Social Security) and provide assistance to industries that will lose business as a result of the pandemic.

“They’re not doing this because they think it’s the most effective way to alleviate suffering during a pandemic—they have these ideas lying around that they now see an opportunity to implement,” Klein said.

VICE spoke to Klein about how the “shock” of coronavirus is giving way to the chain of events she outlined more than a decade ago in The Shock Doctrine.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Let’s start with the basics. What is disaster capitalism? What is its relationship to the “shock doctrine”?

The way I define disaster capitalism is really straightforward: It describes the way private industries spring up to directly profit from large-scale crises. Disaster profiteering and war profiteering isn’t a new concept, but it really deepened under the Bush administration after 9/11, when the administration declared this sort of never-ending security crisis, and simultaneously privatized it and outsourced it—this included the domestic, privatized security state, as well as the [privatized] invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “shock doctrine” is the political strategy of using large-scale crises to push through policies that systematically deepen inequality, enrich elites, and undercut everyone else. In moments of crisis, people tend to focus on the daily emergencies of surviving that crisis, whatever it is, and tend to put too much trust in those in power. We take our eyes off the ball a little bit in moments of crisis.

Where does that political strategy come from? How do you trace its history in American politics?

The shock-doctrine strategy was as a response to the original New Deal under FDR. [Economist] Milton Friedman believes everything went wrong in America under the New Deal: As a response to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a much more activist government emerged in the country, which made it its mission to directly solve the economic crisis of the day by creating government employment and offering direct relief.

If you’re a hard-core free-market economist, you understand that when markets fail it lends itself to progressive change much more organically than it does the kind of deregulatory policies that favor large corporations. So the shock doctrine was developed as a way to prevent crises from giving way to organic moments where progressive policies emerge. Political and economic elites understand that moments of crisis is their chance to push through their wish list of unpopular policies that further polarize wealth in this country and around the world.

Right now we have multiple crises happening: a pandemic, a lack of infrastructure to manage it, and the crashing stock market. Can you outline how each of these components fit into the schema you outline in The Shock Doctrine ?

The shock really is the virus itself. And it has been managed in a way that is maximizing confusion and minimizing protection. I don’t think that’s a conspiracy, that’s just the way the U.S. government and Trump have utterly mismanaged this crisis. Trump has so far treated this not as a public health crisis but as a crisis of perception, and a potential problem for his reelection.

It’s the worst-case scenario, especially combined with the fact that the U.S. doesn’t have a national health care program and its protections for workers are abysmal. This combination of forces has delivered a maximum shock. It’s going to be exploited to bail out industries that are at the heart of most extreme crises that we face, like the climate crisis: the airline industry, the gas and oil industry, the cruise industry—they want to prop all of this up.

How have we seen this play out before?

In The Shock Doctrine I talk about how this happened after Hurricane Katrina. Washington think tanks like the Heritage Foundation met and came up with a wish list of “pro-free market” solutions to Katrina. We can be sure that exactly the same kinds of meetings will happen now— in fact, the person who chaired the Katrina group was Mike Pence. In 2008, you saw this play out in the original [bank] bail out, where countries wrote these blank checks to banks, which eventually added up to many trillions of dollars. But the real cost of that came in the form of economic austerity [later cuts to social services]. So it’s not just about what’s going on right now, but how they’re going to pay for it down the road when the bill for all of this comes due.

Is there anything people can do to mitigate the harm of disaster capitalism we’re already seeing in the response to the coronavirus? Are we in a better or worse position than we were during Hurricane Katrina or the last global recession?

When we’re tested by crisis we either regress and fall apart, or we grow up, and find reserves of strengths and compassion we didn’t know we were capable of. This will be one of those tests. The reason I have some hope that we might choose to evolve is that—unlike in 2008—we have such an actual political alternative that is proposing a different kind of response to the crisis that gets at the root causes behind our vulnerability, and a larger political movement that supports it.

This is what all of the work around the Green New Deal has been about: preparing for a moment like this. We just can’t lose our courage; we have to fight harder than ever before for universal health care, universal child care, paid sick leave—it’s all intimately connected.

If our governments and the global elite are going to exploit this crisis for their own ends, what can people do to take care of each other?

”'I’ll take care of me and my own, we can get the best insurance there is, and if you don't have good insurance it's probably your fault, that's not my problem”: This is what this sort of winners-take-all economy does to our brains. What a moment of crisis like this unveils is our porousness to one another. We’re seeing in real time that we are so much more interconnected to one another than our quite brutal economic system would have us believe.

We might think we’ll be safe if we have good health care, but if the person making our food, or delivering our food, or packing our boxes doesn’t have health care and can’t afford to get tested—let alone stay home from work because they don’t have paid sick leave—we won’t be safe. If we don’t take care of each other, none of us is cared for. We are enmeshed.

Different ways of organizing society light up different parts of ourselves. If you’re in a system you know isn’t taking care of people and isn’t distributing resources in an equitable way, then the hoarding part of you is going to be lit up. So be aware of that and think about how, instead of hoarding and thinking about how you can take care of yourself and your family, you can pivot to sharing with your neighbors and checking in on the people who are most vulnerable.