The "dark heart of surveillance capitalism" is "a new type of commerce that reimagines us through the lens of its own distinctive power, mediated by its means of behavioral modification." This power "sustains and enlarges the surveillance capitalist project." In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff names this power:
"instrumentarianism, defined as the instrumentation and instrumentalization of behavior for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization, and control. In this formulation, 'instrumentation' refers to the puppet: the ubiquitous connected material architecture of sensate computation that renders, interprets, and actuates human experience. 'Instrumentalization' denotes the social relations that orient the puppet masters to human experience as surveillance capital wields the machines to transform us into means to others' market ends."
Detail from the cover of Short Film. Artist: Cel La Flaca
Once, she says, "the language of imperialism" was "the only framework at hand with which to articulate and resist" a certain "new power's murderous threats." This new power was eventually named totalitarianism, as it was indeed different from imperialism. The word "totalitarianism" was coined by Giovanni Gentile and was later popularized in Gentile's book co-written with Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism (1932). That book began by saying that "Fascism is totalitarian and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values — interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people." It described fascism as "a spiritual attitude." As Zuboff further explains, "the state was to be understood as an inclusive organic unity that transcends individual lives. All separateness and difference are surrendered to the state for the sake of this superordinate totality." For totalitarianism, "each individual inner life must be claimed and transformed by the perpetual threat of punishment without crime." That's more than "mere conformity," and the result can't be achieved through "remote control." It was essentially political, though it "converged with economics" to achieve its political goal.
As Zuboff points out, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) "was a detailed disclosure and a pioneering attempt to theorize what had just occured." A few years later, in 1954, the political scientist Carl Friedrich wrote that "virtually no one before 1914 anticipated" totalitarianism.
Today, instrumentarianism refers to a yet different kind of threat, one that "moves differently and toward an opposite horizon." It's essentially an economic project, though it "converges with the digital." It works not through "violence" but through "behavioral modification." And it is "best undestood as the precise antithesis of Orwell's Big Brother." Zuboff:
"Instrumentarian power has no interest in our souls or any principle to instruct. There is no training or transformation for spiritual salvation, no ideology against which to judge our actions. It does not demand possession of each person from the inside out. It has no interest in exterminating or disfiguring our bodies and minds in the name of pure devotion. It welcomes data on the behavior of our blood and shit, but it has no interest in soiling itself with our excretions. It has no appetite for our grief, pain, or terror, although it eagerly welcomes the behavioral surplus that leaches from our anguish. It is profoundly and infinitely indifferent to our meanings and motives. Trained on measurable action, it only cares that whatever we do is accessible to its ever-evolving operations of rendition, calculation, modification, monetization, and control."
The behaviorist B. F. Skinner, in his utopian novel Walden Two, envisioned "social equality and dispassionate harmony founded on the viewpoint of the Other-One, the 'organism among organisms,' as the object of 'behavioral engineering.'" The commmunity has laws "derived from a sicence of human behavior," so although it rejects "democratic politics and representative government," it has no need for force.
"Until the rise of surveillance capitalism, the prospect of instrumentarian power was relegated to a gauzy world of dream and delusion. This new species of power follows the logic of Planck, Meyer, and Skinner in the forfeit of freedom for knowledge, but those scientists each failed to anticipate the actual terms of this surrender. The knowledge that now displaces our freedom is proprietary. The knowledge is theirs, but the lost freedom belongs solely to us."
So the digital apparatus, Zuboff says, is not Big Brother (dominating our souls) but Big Other (influencing our behavior).
"Instrumentarian power cultivates an unusual 'way of knowing' that combines the 'formal indifference' of the neoliberal worldview with the observational perspective of radical behaviorism. ... [It] reduces human experience to measurable observable behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of that experience. I call this new way of knowing radical indifference. It is a form of observation without witness that yields the obverse of an intimate violence political religion and bears an utterly different signature of havoc: the remote and abstracted contempt of impenetrably complex systems and the interests that author them, carrying individuals on a fast-moving current to the fulfillment of others' ends. What passes for social relations and economic exchange now occurs across the medium of this robotized veil of abstraction."
When terrorism exposes a lack of trust, instrumentarian power shows up to promise certainty. It seeks "total information as the ideal condition for machine intelligence" and for "market dominance." We give up society, the real collective life; in its place, enabled by "the resources of the shadow text," we have certainty, "this imagined collective life," in which "freedom is forfeit to others' knowledge."
This pursuit of knowledge is for the sake of privilege and power. As surveillance capitalists increase their knowledge of us, our freedom decreases. Surveillance capitalism is dominating
"the division of learning in society. False consciousness is no longer produced by the hidden facts of class and their relation to production but rather by the hidden facts of instrumentarian power's command over the divison of learning in society as it usurps the rights to answer the essential questions: Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? Power was once identified with the owernship of the means of production, but it is now identified with ownership of the means of behavioral modification that is Big Other."
Pipikism
Naomi Klein wrote: “Philip Roth explored this push and pull in his doppelganger novel Operation Shylock: 'It's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,' he wrote of a duplicate Roth. That sentence has become my mantra during this uncanny period.”
Pipik is Yiddish for bellybutton. To pipik, in Roth's sense, is to reduce something serious to trivial nonsense. But in mocking the serious, one generates new pitfalls: one may fail to take seriously something that does pose a danger and, in its place, scapegoat or threaten a vulnerable group that isn't responsible for the real problem. It's a shifting of perspective, a misunderstanding of the problem, and with it, a misattribution of responsibility.
For example, as Klein explains, “the very idea of treating the pandemic as a portal to something new — something better, greener, and fairer — was being systematically pipiked in the Mirror World by people like my doppelganger. It was getting all mixed up and conflated with the conspiracy talk about how ‘globalist elites’ at the World Economic Forum were trying to harness the recovery for their Great Reset.”
To me, sometimes aspects of the fascist pipiking feel a bit murdery. But that may be an ancestral memory (one that they often deliberately invoke, if sideways). Yet they're usually not aiming for literal mass murder, not in the totalitarian way. Zuboff says that whereas "totalitarianism was bent on the reconstruction of the human species through the dual mechanisms of genocide and the 'engineering of the soul'," now "instrumentarian power...takes us in a sharply different direction. Surveillance capitalists have no interest in murder or the reformation of our souls."
Due to the “constantly expanding sphere of pipikism,” Klein says, it becomes “more difficult to talk” about anything politically serious. So, if "...'ecofascism' is the accurate term to describe the threat," Klein says, "how convenient it is for coalescing fascist forces if the term has been so abused and pipiked that anti-fascists are loath to use it to accurately describe events in the real world." It also repurposes the words to amplify their fascist redirections and reframes. Klein says of one occasion: "I couldn’t see how a serious discussion of actual disaster capitalism could avoid getting blended with truly dangerous anti-vaccination fantasies and outright coronavirus denialism. Pipikism had thwarted me."
Klein:
"When the figure of the buffoon becomes central to public life, the problem is not only that they say foolish things but also that everything they touch becomes foolish, including — especially — the powerful language we need to talk about them and what they are doing. I think of these
figures as ‘dumbpelgangers,’ and they pipik so many terms and concepts that they risk leaving us all speechless."
Yet, Klein says,
"we must never surrender...the language of anti-fascism. The true meanings of ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’ and ‘Holocaust,’ and the supremacist mindset that makes them all possible. Those words we need, as sharp as possible, to name and combat what is rapidly taking shape in the Mirror World — which is an entire cosmology built around claims of superior bodies, superior immune systems, and superior babies, bankrolled by supplement sales, bitcoin, and prenatal yoga.
It all would be so ridiculous — if it weren’t so serious."
Zuboff has a different way of saying that we have become indifferent to real stuff and instead privilege fake stuff:
"...radical indifference is a permanent invitation to the corruption of the first text. It sustains the pathological division of learning in society by forfeiting the integrity of public knowledge for the sake of the volume and scope of the shadow text. Radical indifference leaves a void where reciprocities once thrived."
'Short Film'
I think that last reflection on pipikism — on the frustrating taunts of an evil that doesn't really seem to come from exactly anywhere, because it isn't about anything so it isn't traceable — is part of what I was going for in my novel, Most Famous Short Film of All Time when I talked about the import of "nothing." "Nothing" can be good or bad. Things presented as unimportant can be quite important.
Detail from the cover of Short Film. Artist: Cel La Flaca
Who decides?
Here is Zuboff's question:
"Instrumentarian society defines the ultimate institutionalization of a pathological division of learning. Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides? * * * [These social principles] ... represent a stark break with the legacies and ideals of the liberal order. Instrumentarian society is a topsy-turvy fun-house-mirror world in which everything that we have cherished is turned upside down and inside out. Pentland doubles down on the illiberality of behavioral economics. In his hands the ideology of human frailty is not merely cause for contempt but a justification for the death of individuality. Self-determination and autonomous moral judgment, generally regarded as the bulwark of civilization, are recast as a threat to collective well-being. Social pressure, well-known to psychologists for its dangerous production of obedience and conformity, is elevated to the highest good as the means to extinguish the unpredictable influences of autonomous thought and moral judgment."
We have "fellow feeling" and "vibrate to one another." We have an "individually sensed inwardness that is the wellspring of personal autonomy and moral judgment, the first-person voice, the will to will, and the sense of an inalienable right to the future tense." But the new intstrumentarianism makes it so
"it is less that we resonate to one another's presence and more that we drown in its inescapability.
Instrumentarianism reimagines society as a hive to be monitored and tuned for guaranteed outcomes, but this tells us nothing of the lived experience of its members. What are the consequences of life lived in the hive, where one is perceived as an 'other' to the surveillance capitalists, designers, and tuners who impose their instruments and methods? How and when do we each become an organism among organisms to ourselves and to one another, and with what result?"
"Extinction is a design feature formalized in the conditions of no exit." Unfortunately, "continuously tightening feedback loops cut off the means of exit, creating impossible levels of anxiety that further drive the loops toward confluence." Exits are important because "every exit is an entrance" and "to exit means to enter the place where a self can be birthed and nurtured. History has a name for that kind of place: sanctuary." While some would ask "the guilt-inducing question 'What have you got to hide?'," we know "the real psychological truth is this: If you've got nothing to hide, you are nothing."
Transphobia, again
I bring this back to transphobia (as I did in my last post). The transphobes, aka the self-described Gender Criticals, are proponents of radical indifference — toward trans people, of course. They sense that the Big Other of surveillance capitalism is taking advantage of them. They don't know where it's coming from. They don't even know what "it" is. They feel victimized by modernity, and tehy try to pin their distress on a scapegoat. Their scapegoat is trans people. They resolve to be pointedly radically indifferent to trans people, which is to say, simultaneously neoliberal and behaviorist, because doing so makes them feel powerful again. They are doing to a minority what has been done to them.
For Zuboff says:
"Instrumentarianism's radical indifference is operationalized in Big Other's dehumanized methods of evaluation that produce equivalence without equality. These methods reduce individuals to the lowest common denominator of sameness — an organism among organisms — despite all teh vital ways in which we are not the same. FRom Big Other's point of view we are strictly Other-Ones: organisms that behave. ... There is no brother here of any kind, big or little, evil or good; there are no family ties, however grim. There is no relationship between Big Other and its otherized objects, just as there was no relationship between B. F. Skinner's 'scientists and subjects.' ... Big Other does not care what we think, feel, or do as long as its millions, billions, and trillions of sensate, actuating, computational eyes and ears can observe, render, datafy, and instrumentalize the vast reservoirs of behavioral surplus that are generated in the galactic uproar of connection and communication.
In this new regime, objectification is the moral milieu in which our lives unfold." ... Big Other poaches are behavior for surplus and leaves behind all the meaning lodged in our bodies, our brains, and our beating hearts, not unlike the monstrous slaughter of elephants for ivory. Forget the cliché that if it's free, 'You are the product.' You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The 'product' derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life."
The larger forces behind what we think of as our modern life with internet — the new market project of surveillance capitalism — is doing this to everyone. Transphobia is a sub-project that has grown to displace blame onto trans people. Transphobia claims that trans people are ripping valuable surplus out of the sexed/gendered lives of cis people — or, as transphobes would prefer to phrase it, "everyone else" —, or, as they'd really, really like to phrase it if they can get away with it, "biological women" and "biological men," since that adjective "biological" seems to infuse one's peopleness with enhanced reality. It's like saying really real people (as contrasted with less real people who don't have any biology, perhaps?). That's why one of transphobia's linguistic projects is to prevent trans people from uttering the word "cis." If we are able to see "cis people" as distinct from "trans people," we see that everyone is biological and that "trans" and "cis" are socially constructed categories, and then we see that there is not really a specifically cisgender surplus that has material value and that trans people can literally steal. By insisting that "trans" is a constructed category but refusing to observe how "cis" is the backside of that construction, they pretend that there is some reified value in sex/gender that dishonest people (i.e., trans people, the thieves) can steal. A question from a trans perspective is: Why would cis lives inherently have, and be the true owners of, this value, and why would trans lives not already have our own version of this value and equally legitimately own what is ours? Phrasing it this way unmasks the essential unfairness of transphobia.
See this in Playboy: "There’s a particular kind of cognitive dissonance involved with being trans and visible online in 2026. Scroll your newsfeed long enough and trans people are treated like abstractions, talking points, threats. Scroll just a little further and those same people are being loved, tipped, subscribed to, flirted with, obsessed over, chased. While anti-trans lawmakers increasingly pass legislation restricting where and how trans people can exist, trans people are also the target of intense romantic and sexual desire." — Trans Porn Is Booming. Trans Rights Are Fading: We asked trans models and creators about the complicated link between desire and politics. Playboy, March 5, 2026
The other books
Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2020.
Naomi Klein. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
See also on this blog: Four books on the strengths and frailties of democracy
On surveillance cinema: Go to this page and scroll to the heading "We ask that you refrain from talking about your experience inside the structure" by Sean T. Collins, Jan 19, 2024
