Surveillance Capitalism as a Form of Biopower in Historical Perspective

Abstract

Information has become the most important commodity of markets since the Oil Crisis of 1973. This period is also called as New Economy in which industry lost its previous value while services using the new information technologies are put in the core of economic activities. The rise of information technologies has brought forth new ways to generate profits. IT companies have directed their marketing interests to generate profits in behavioral forecasting models through which future behaviors of individuals can be predicted by means of machine intelligence. Accordingly, since the capital accumulation of the new stage is based on the surveillance of individuals, Shoshana Zuboff called this new stage as “surveillance capitalism”. This shift in the market interests can be understood within its historical context in which the management strategies were already being shifted from a sociological bureaucracy to new Taylorist scientific management based on continual surveillance. Thus, surveillance capitalism can be interpreted as a new “technology of the self” aiming at subordination of individuals through psychological manipulations within neoliberal governmentality. This article aims to put forth the historical link between the emergence of surveillance capitalism and the use of individualized management strategies as a new form of capitalistic biopower.

Keywords

• gözetim kapitalizmi
• neoliberalizm
• oyun teorisi
• biyoiktidar
• yönetimsellik
• surveillance capitalism
• neoliberalism
• game theory
• biopower
• governmentality