Response 4

Notes:

For this week, the prompt is

Shoshana Zuboff argues that there is a social and economic transformation taking place in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. We read her chapter after Book VII of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, in which he considers the virtue of temperance and its imperfections. This progression implies that the accumulation and use of surveillance capitalism may affect individuals at varying levels of virtue in different ways.

Explore the relationship between Zuboff's chapter and Book VII of Nicomachean Ethics. Your response should show how at least one direct quotation from Zuboff and at least one from Aristotle.

Quotations

From Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Chapter 3
“The result is data scientists trained on economies of action who regard it as perfectly normal to master the art and science of the digital nudge for the sake of their company’s commercial interests. … Even if it’s just 5% of people, you’ve made 5% of people do an action they otherwise wouldn’t have done, so to some extent there is an element of the user’s loss of self-control.”

From Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics Book VII (On incontinence and self-mastery)
“The incontinent man, knowing that what he does is bad, does it as a result of passion, while the continent man, knowing that his appetites are bad, refuses on account of his rational principle to follow them.”

Ideas

Zuboff’s examination shows that surveillance capitalism deliberately undermines habits of temperance and self-control by making environments that nudge people toward impulsive, profitable actions.
In Aristotelian terms, this environment intensifies the challenge for those who are not fully temperate—those whose reason does not perfectly control their desires—and makes it much easier to fall into incontinence, failing to act on what one knows is best.
Corporate manipulation of desire, as Zuboff explains, thus erodes the necessary conditions for virtue in Aristotle’s view, leaving people less free to exercise autonomy and rational self-mastery

Draft

In Book VII of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics he explores the idea of temperance and gives name for the levels of imperfection of this virtue, which connect with the concept described by Zuboff as "Surveillance capitalism" in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Chapter 3.

Aristotle discuss the challenge of self-mastery in this particular book, he establishes differences like unrestraint vs. disspation, and self-restraint vs. temperance, the latter one being the harmonious intersection of reason and desire.

In Aristotle's words, “the unrestrained person does things on account of passion while knowing that they are base, while the self-restrained person, when he knows that his desires are base, does not follow them, on account of reason.” (Nicomachean Ethics VII.3, 1145b13-16, Joe Sachs translation).

Knowing this, and after having read Chapter 3 of Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, we can see how her work demonstrates that new social and economic forces actively undermine this challenge, with the example of Google's evolution thorugh the dot-com bubble and after it, and her view of the "Behavioral Value Reinvestment Cycle".

More specifically she highlights "Google's inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users. ... Instead of deepening the unity of supply and demand with its populations, Google chose to reinvent its business around the burgeoning demand of advertisers eager to squeeze and scrape online behavior by any available means in the competition for market advantage" (Zuboff, 2019, p.88).

This shows how Google shifted itself away from a mutual benefit system to exploitative surveillance capitalism, which supports the claim that these forces undermine individual virtues like temperance by influencing desires and behaviors externally.

With the example of Google given by Zuboff, I conclude that by targeting those not temperate enough, surveillance capitalism shifts society in ways that directly compete with Aristotle's ideal of life guided by reason.

Aristotle's Temperance vs. Google's Surveillance Capitalism

In Nicomachean Ethics Book VII, Aristotle explores temperance and the stages of its imperfection, framing the struggle of self-mastery. He distinguishes unrestraint from dissipation and self-restraint from temperance, the latter being the true harmony of reason and desire. As he writes, “the unrestrained person does things on account of passion while knowing that they are base, while the self-restrained person, when he knows that his desires are base, does not follow them, on account of reason” (Nicomachean Ethics VII.3, 1145b13-16, Sachs trans.).

Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (ch. 3), shows how this struggle is undermined by new social and economic forces. She highlights how Google, after the dot-com crash, abandoned the original “Behavioral Value Reinvestment Cycle” and turned toward exploiting user behavior, which later led to the implementation of targeted ads, something completely against Google's founding principles: “Google's inventions destroyed the reciprocities of its original social contract with users...” (Zuboff, 2019, p.88). This shift illustrates how surveillance capitalism manipulates desires, eroding temperance and competing with Aristotle's vision of reason-guided life.