In an act of triumph upon purchasing Twitter, Elon Musk entered its headquarters holding a kitchen sink with a grand smile upon his face. This act was captured by him tweeting, “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” However, while the use of the idiom itself was apt, along with the visual pun and meme of it—a significant statement made independent of a kitchen/bathroom sink at a doorway wanting to come inside afterwards—there was a great insidiousness grounding this performance which ends up obsolescing the idiom and the meme.
How so?
Because the building and its doorway (and not just the building and doorway of Twitter, but buildings and doorways everywhere else, digital or not), the sink, future visitors, and your very self—the sponge, that which is to be sunken into as per the idiom—have all been commandeered as a part of the economic logic of Surveillance Capitalism.1
When we use the idiom “let that sink in,” we do so after something interesting, surprising, or consequential is said so it can be properly comprehended, akin to penetrating the mind.2 Yet, with Surveillance Capitalism and Instrumentarian Power,3 this no longer takes place.
If our behaviors (which can be claimed [theoretically and acquisitively] to be extensions of our attention and awareness)—including the behaviors of all devices a part of the Internet of Things—are extracted as behavioral surplus, then absolutely everything is interesting, surprising, and consequential due to the confirmation or disconfirmation of Surveillance Capitalist prediction products that mediate it all. It is totally redundant to “let” the “that” of “let that sink in” “sink in” when absolutely everything perturbs “that” to “sink in.”
But we can forget about any “sinking.” Indeed, there is no more deep reflection of thought associated with the idiom, let alone any penetration of the mind and subsequent comprehension; only the reflection of algorithmic biases of which the mind now serves rather than vice versa. Only the referendum of question and answer. Only the flow of finely tuned impulses. For nothing actually “sinks in” when a part of the service environment of prediction products and their guaranteed outcomes.
Under the auspices of Instrumentarian Power, one can no longer “let” “that” happen via volition either, whatever “that” may be. Yes, for you and the environment have been nudged, shaped, modified, controlled (not mind-controlled, however), seduced, manipulated, etc. To “let” “that” happen or not is now only corresponding with a binary logic of yes or no regarding a prediction, of which either response becomes (re)appropriated as behavioral surplus, to refine predictions towards even greater certainty, subsequently expanding this service environment in scale and scope and accumulating even more behavioral surplus.
Apropos the visual pun and meme, with Surveillance Capitalism one can no longer “let that sink in.” There is no more you, us, them, it, or all when everything is already an expression, an operation of the effects of its economic imperatives. Indeed, the extraction and prediction imperatives of Surveillance Capitalism function by operating in everything and everywhere at all times via ubiquitous computing through devices, bodies, architecture, clothing, appliances, their interactions, etc. The sink was already in. We are all the sink. Everything is the sink. Also, with acoustic space ushered in through electrical simultaneity, there is actually nothing to “let” “in” anymore anyway, for there is no more contained, visual space.
“Everything but the kitchen sink” is another obsolete idiom, whether expressing that one is giving everything they’ve got (hopeful or hopelessly) or that they’re overdoing things.4 This is because the excessiveness this idiom denotes no longer exists. Surveillance Capitalism and its economic imperatives do everything possible without any notion of overdoing things. Nothing is excessive and "overdoing" is no longer even in the lexicon.
When we think about the user, consumer, and producer of behavioral surplus, i.e., objects (you are considered an object by the Surveillance Capitalists, along with all the other objects a part of the Internet of Things, after all), they are always giving everything they have got, and unbeknownst to them. Indeed, the actions detected and inscribed upon the shadow texts of applications and their surveillance capabilities are beyond the users’ attention and awareness. What’s more, the scale and scope of the economic imperatives behind this are totally insatiable. Nothing can no longer be overdone, for everything must be deregulated through these dynamics. Everything must be visualized, refined, and predictable. Yes, there is no more overdoing anything because it is better to have everything to appraise risk (of taking place and not taking place) than be lacking anything and thus facing uncertainty.
Mr. Musk’s purchasing of Twitter and its altered policies and goal for an everything app are expressions of this obsolescence of “everything but the kitchen sink.”
The continuing turmoil at Twitter, which has also raised questions about the ultimate fate of the social media site, may have also thwarted some of the other plans Elon Musk had for his new acquisition — to create an app for everything.
The billionaire, a frequent Twitter user, has spoken about purchasing Twitter as part of his crusade for a free speech forum that is important for the "future of civilization" to have as a "common digital town square."
But he's also revealed a few hints that he has another goal in mind with the acquisition — to create, in his words, "X," "the everything app."
Although details are slim, Musk has suggested his inspiration would be China's WeChat, which offers a series of services for users such as messaging, social networking, peer-to-peer payments and e-commerce shopping.
…
"If I think of, like, WeChat in China, which is actually a great, great app, but there's no WeChat movement outside of China," he said. "And I think that there's a real opportunity to create that. You basically live on WeChat in China because it's so useful and so helpful to your daily life. And I think if we could achieve that, or even close to that with Twitter, it would be an immense success."5
An everything app wants to do everything, but to do everything it must also attempt to know everything about everything, including you. It is the Surveillance Capitalist goal to have you “live on” applications that maximize the scale and scope of behavioral surplus. No stone can be left unturned with the maximization of exchange and certainty, of which WeChat is a model. What Mr. Musk wants is total, centralized ownership of data and information, or at least a bigger piece of this pie.
In a sense, because of the dynamics detailed above, could we not replace this idiom with its formerly incorrect expression, “everything and the kitchen sink”? For not only does this denote the obsessiveness and ruthlessness of these dynamics while ignoring any notions of excessiveness, but also—if we include what has been said above about the visual pun and meme of “let that sink in” as well—the unfathomable invasiveness of them too. Yes, nothing can be overdone and nothing is excessive when everything is an operation and requires as much data and information as possible to achieve total certainty of behavioral modifiability.
If unfamiliar with Surveillance Capitalism and its economic logic, then this long primer will be helpful. Of course, reading the whole article would be better.
The accumulation of behavioral surplus is the master motion of surveillance capitalism from which key economic imperatives can be induced. The quality of prediction products depends on volume inputs to machine processes. Volume surplus is thus a competitive requirement. This dynamic establishes the extraction imperative, which expresses the necessity of economies of scale in surplus accumulation and depends on automated systems that relentlessly track, hunt, and induce more behavioral surplus. These systems, which began in the online environment and later spread to the “real” world, constitute an extraction architecture that has evolved in the direction of ubiquity, just as Larry Page anticipated in 2001. Under the lash of the extraction imperative, digital instrumentation has been transformed into a global, sensate, computational, connected architecture of behavioral surplus capture and analysis, fulfilling computer scientist Mark Weiser’s 1999 vision of “ubiquitous computing” memorialized in two legendary sentences: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave them- selves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
However, the volume of surplus became a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. Even the most sophisticated process of converting behavioral surplus into products that accurately forecast the future is only as good as the raw material available for processing. In the race for higher degrees of certainty, it became clear that the best predictions would have to approximate observation. The next threshold was defined by the quality, not just the quantity, of behavioral surplus. These pressures led to a search for new supplies of surplus that would more reliably foretell the future. This marks a critical turning point in the trial-and-error elaboration of surveillance capitalism and crystallizes a second economic imperative—the prediction imperative—as the expression of these competitive forces.
The first challenge of the prediction imperative is economies of scope. Behavioral surplus must be vast, and scale remains critical, but surplus must also be varied. These variations have developed along two dimensions. The first is the extension of extraction operations from the virtual world into the “real” world of embodied human experience. Surveillance capitalists understood that their future wealth would depend on new supply routes that extend to real life on the roads, among the trees, throughout the cities. Extension wants your bloodstream and your bed, your breakfast conversation, your commute, your run, your refrigerator, your parking space, your living room, your pancreas.
Economies of scope also proceed along a second depth dimension. The idea here is that more predictive, and therefore more lucrative, behavioral surplus can be plumbed from intimate patterns of the self. These supply operations rely on emergent rendition techniques trained on new forms of surplus from facial recognition and affective computing to voice, gait, posture, and text analysis that lay bare your personality, moods, emotions, lies, and vulnerabilities. As the prediction imperative drives deeper into the self, the value of these intimate sources of surplus becomes irresistible, and the competitive pressures to corner lucrative supplies escalate. It is no longer a matter of surveillance capital wringing surplus from what you search, buy, and browse. Surveillance capital wants more than your body’s coordinates in time and space. Now it violates the inner sanctum, as machines and their algorithms decide the meaning of your sighs, blinks, and utterances; the pattern of your breathing and the movements of your eyes; the clench of your jaw muscles; the hitch in your voice; and the exclamation points in a Facebook post once offered in innocence and hope.
Just as scale became necessary but insufficient for higher quality predictions, the demands of the prediction imperative eventually encountered the limitations of economies of scope. While behavioral surplus must be vast and varied, surveillance capitalists gradually came to understand that the surest way to predict behavior is to intervene at its source and shape it. The processes invented to achieve this goal are what I call economies of action.
Of course, advertisers and their clients have always tried to shape customer behavior through priming, suggestion, and social comparison. What distinguishes today’s efforts is that not only do they extend beyond advertising, but they employ a ubiquitous digital architecture––Page’s “cheap sensors” ––that is finally able to automate the continuous comprehensive monitoring and shaping of human behavior with unprecedented accuracy, intimacy, and effectiveness. Economies of scale and scope are well-known industrial logics, but automated economies of action are distinct to surveillance capitalism and its digital milieu.
In order to achieve these economies of action, machine processes are configured to intervene in the state of play in the real world among real people and things. These interventions are designed to augment prediction products in order that they approximate certainty by “tuning,” “herding,” and conditioning the behavior of individuals, groups, and populations. These economies of action apply techniques that are as varied as inserting a specific phrase into your Facebook news feed, timing the appearance of a BUY button on your phone with the rise of your endorphins at the end of a run, shutting down your car engine when an insurance payment is late, or employing population-scale behavioral micro-targeting drawn from Facebook profiles. Indeed, the notorious manipulations of the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which scandalized the world in 2018, simply appropriated the means and methods that are now both standard and necessary operations in the surveillance capitalism arsenal.
As the prediction imperative gathers force, it gradually becomes clear that economies of scale and scope were the first phases of a more ambitious project. Economies of action mean that ubiquitous machine architectures must be able to know as well as to do. What began as an extraction architecture now doubles as an execution architecture through which hidden economic objectives are imposed on the vast and varied field of behavior. As surveillance capitalism’s imperatives and the material infrastructures that perform extraction and execution operations begin to function as a coherent whole, they produce a twenty-first century means of behavioral modification to which the means of production is subordinated as merely one part of this larger cycle.
Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action - New Labor Forum.
…defined as the instrumentation and instrumentalization of human behavior for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization, and control. In this formulation, “instrumentation” refers to the ubiquitous, sensate, computational, actuating global architecture that renders, monitors, computes, and modifies, replacing the engineering of souls with the engineering of behavior. There is no brother here of any kind, big or little, evil or good—no family ties, however grim. Instead, this new global apparatus is better understood as a Big Other that encodes the “otherized” viewpoint of radical behaviorism as a pervasive presence. “Instrumentalization” denotes the social relations that orient the puppet masters to human experience, as surveillance capital overrides long-standing reciprocities of market democracy, wielding its machines to transform us into the raw material for its own production.
Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action - New Labor Forum.