Would you like some surveillance capitalism with your sandwich?

Why the demand for data leaves a bad taste

“Nothing ever becomes real till experienced." - John Keats

The next time you hear the word technology, think capitalism. And when you think of capitalism, think about which mutation of capitalism we are living through, and what it means for how our lived experience is evolving with that mutation.

On Tuesday night I lived through one of those moments where - as Keats says - something became real because it was experienced. The something was what Shoshanna Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’ which is an economic system based primarily on the harvesting and selling of personal data for profit. The experience was of trying to enter a supermarket to buy a sandwich for my son’s packed lunch the next day, but being unable to because I could only get past the barriers at the door if I downloaded an app on my smartphone, and agreed to sign up for a loyalty card.

I am not fond of this discussion! Honestly, I don’t want to be writing about consumer interests or consumer rights at all. I have no expertise in General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), I don’t identify as ‘a consumer’ (!) and I don’t even like shopping. Above all, this does not feel like my issue to carry. I have no strong feelings about Tesco, and have rarely shopped there. But I find myself in the thick of it.

The full title of Zuboff’s book is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. It is a great book, and essential reading in many ways because it gives a rigorous examination of the underlying political economy of surveillance capitalism, based on what Zuboff calls ‘behavioural surplus’ - the data extracted that is not used for product improvement but to predict human behaviour in a way that allows companies to market more effectively through algorithmically informed manipulation that targets our most precious resource - our attention, and thereby increase sales. Some even think Surveillance capitalism is so pervasive and fundamental to the political economy now that we live not in an age of capitalism but ‘attentionalism’.

One way to make sense of my thwarted sandwich purchase on Tuesday night is that I encountered the frontier of power in a direct way for the first time. There was literally a frontier of sorts - a barrier placed by corporate power that thwarted my presumed freedom to buy a sandwich from a household-name supermarket. There is a little story below that captured people’s attention (a viral Twitter thread now in the national news) which is perhaps no accident because narrative conveys meaning in a way facts and concepts and propositions cannot. However, the real story here is not about me, nor the sandwich, nor even about Tesco as such, but rather a much bigger human species story about the character of our future which will be defined by our relationship to data (as well as our relationship to ecological collapse, averting nuclear war, wise stewardship of exponential technology, economic sanity, metapolitical skill etc. As I’ve said before we need to Taste the Pickle).

The point is that what starts as a consumer’s inability to buy a sandwich in London can gradually morph into a democratic society’s inability to prevent a social credit system, such as the one they currently have in China. We are not there yet, but The Overton Window has been moving over the last few years. It feels to me like we are sleepwalking towards a dystopian future where others profit from our personal information while controlling us, to further increase their profits (or, in the case of governments, to tie us ever closer to their agenda). Corporate power of all kinds will sell technological innovation to people as efficiency and convenience, but those are often watchwords for control, more precisely their increase in control and your loss of control. The encroachment of private demands for data into our personal and public lives is world-changing, but it is happening so gradually that we hardly notice.

Tuesday night felt discontinuous, and so it woke me up, which is why I’m moved to write about it, because I know I risk falling back to sleep. For context, it was about 10.50 pm at night near Chancery Lane Tube station in central London and I was heading home after an enjoyable evening at the new Kairos Club where I had given an interactive talk on consumerism (curious, because my undesired identity as ‘a consumer’ was about to become so pronounced). Just before going underground, I received a text from my wife Siva to please buy a sandwich for our older son who needed a packed lunch the next day. I thought about my route home and there were no shops on it, so I was relieved when I looked up and saw a ‘Tesco’ across the road which looked open.

I described the experience on Twitter in a thread that has now been widely shared.

Jonathan Rowson @Jonathan_Rowson

1/2 Distressing experience @Tesco just now. 10.50pm near Chancery Lane tube after a work event I receive a text to get a sandwich for my son’s packed lunch tomorrow. I see a store, think I’m in luck, but I can only *enter* the store if I download the app & sign up to club card.

First, to clear something up for those who seem distracted by the premise of the late-night parental sandwich purchase: Takeaway food is not eco-friendly, I agree, but sandwiches tend to be on sale and otherwise thrown out at the end of the day, yet still fresh enough for the next day, and it would be almost midnight until I got home for a 6 am wake up the next day, and we were low on groceries; so while in an ideal world we would bake our own bread, churn our own non-dairy butter and harvest our own lettuce and so on, it was not such a silly idea to try to buy a sandwich, and a typical parental coping night before tag-team effort. In fact, I think the reason this tweet has gone viral is that it was such an ordinary setting and plot. Until the trouble kicked in.

After the initial shock of not being able to just walk into this apparently familiar place called ‘Tesco’, I was still running on my own ‘parental responsibility app’, so I pragmatically decided I would try to download the Tesco app. But as that was happening some doubts set in, and I ticked ‘no’ to the club (loyalty) card because I have always distrusted them. But then frustration began to grow because I still couldn’t proceed, so I showed my phone to the shop assistant. The assistant looked like he was in his late twenties and he was one of three standing at the door near the barriers to help who had advised me this was a no-checkout store when I first arrived, though I didn’t clock what he meant. He proceeded to ‘help’ (Every Little Helps is Tesco’s slogan) by changing my answer ‘no’ to club card to ‘yes’. I saw him do this and said I didn’t want to sign up for their loyalty programme, and he said in that case you can’t get into the store (it turns out I was too late and the email with my new loyalty card number was in my inbox a few minutes later. Such is the stickiness of such things that I have not had time to chase them to remove it - they might have broken data protection laws there, but it’s not about that either). While I did feel frustrated, the exchange was friendly enough, and he brushed off my objections in a convivial way saying, in effect, that people will soon get used to it.

I can offer three points for ‘the other side’, before I go on the attack. First, that guy was doing his job, and the legal, ethical and political issues relating to data harvesting were probably not salient when I asked for help to get into the store so I could buy a sandwich late at night. To put it kindly, he was trying to unlock the door for me. Second, I think there is a risk of fetishising the human being at the checkout who is apparently always engaged in heartwarming conversations with convivial community customers, but who is typically paid minimum wage to do menial work that is unbecoming of a human being living their best life. There is a prima-facie case for automising what can be automised - and yet, but, however - only if and when the motivation for doing that is humanistic and solidaristic in spirit, an emancipating act that actually liberates resources and energy so that people can do work they are better suited to do - but that is almost certainly not Tesco’s motivation. Third, it turns out that this particular store is one of only two Tesco ‘Getgo’ stores in the country. Getgo stores are a new concept where you enter with your phone and pay with your phone, and your purchases are tracked through your loyalty card number while your behaviour is tracked through the cameras. The claim is that this low-friction and high-efficiency process is appealing to some customers and that those who don’t like it are welcome to shop elsewhere, including at other Tesco stores where there are no barriers to entry and you might even find a human being at the checkout.

But that’s not how it felt. It is not always 10.50 pm of course, and I was particularly eager to get home and couldn’t see anywhere else open, but the notion that you always have a choice where to shop is bogus. More to the point, these stores are described as experimental now, rather than the plan for the future of supermarket shopping, but that does not seem credible. As long as customers comply, the supermarket gains a lot. To oversimplify, the money that would have been spent on checkout staff (a cost) will now be received as data (a kind of revenue).

What I felt on Tuesday night was not ‘I don’t like this particular version of this particular shop and so I’ll go elsewhere.’ What I felt was generalised alienation, a kind of estrangement from the reality I thought I knew. At the risk of over-dramatising the moment (and I accept that horse may have already bolted…) it reminded me of one of the early episodes of the screen version of The HandMaid’s Tale when women suddenly find their bank cards are no longer valid and their funds will have to be transferred to their nearest male relative - it’s a kind of disbelief, a low-level not yet physically threatened - but psychologically troubled - ominous horror that someone else is in control of your life. The counter-claim is that if you don’t like shops like this, that’s fine because many others do, and you can always shop elsewhere. But no, in practice, as time goes on, the translation might well be: No data? No food. Tuesday night felt like a beginning of something that was in motion. It was portentous.

The stock objections are worth getting out of the way because they risk distracting attention from the bigger issue. Some people may not have smartphones, true, or they may have run out of charge, or they might be older and technologically unskilled, or they may be just visiting London and want to pop in to buy a bottle of water…against all these objections the case goes: It’s not that kind of store. If you want that kind of store, go elsewhere, they say. But note that this means a fundamental shift of emphasis. If you are only open to those who pay the membership cost, which is a data cost you have created a private supermarket. That means, I think, that such stores are no longer public amenities as such where anyone can enter, but more like private members clubs where you can only enter if you’ve already joined. That might have legal implications for the ‘use of building’ in the lease. I suspect this has yet to be legally tested.

It has been common knowledge for some years now that our data has considerable value to those equipped to make use of it, but we don’t think of it as a kind of money or currency yet (though this incident helped me understand digital currencies as a blend of data and money that may yet prove to be an unholy alliance). But when I think about what compulsory data usage means, it feels like a kind of regressive consumer tax, as if for every purchase, in addition to the cash price, you pay an additional data price too. This point is already implicit in Tesco’s offers of reductions that apply only to those with club cards, and since it’s a commercial operation you can be sure that they get more ‘value’ from your data than you get from the reduction in price.

But this is all so much bigger! At the heart of the thwarted sandwich purchase is the matter of what my colleague Tomas Bjorkman calls The World we Create including his reference to ‘the constitutive rules of the market.’

Unless we (and yes, that might be The Impossible We) resist ubiquitous data capture, we appear to be drifting into a world where there are data barriers to simple transactions in almost every crevice of the social world. That’s not just a glitch. To acquiesce to live in a society where powerful private (and state) interests use personal data as the personal fuel to drive the direction of society is to change the character of the world as we know it into one where we willingly subject ourselves to a kind of cultural and psychological servitude. We risk becoming consumers with barcodes rather than citizens with voices. I don’t know what follows, but resisting the normalisation of compulsory data sharing is surely part of it. There might also be a broader case for returning to the use of cash, as argued by Brett Scott and many others.

Whether it’s a sandwich as an unsuspecting bulwark against social credit scores, democracy as resistance to data theft, or cash to tame the imprint of cards, we need to increase our vigilance or we’ll lose our resilience. As Samuel Johnson once put it: “The chains of habit are too weak to be noticed until they are too strong to be broken.”

@Jonathan_Rowson