--- title: The Surveillance Threat Is Not What George Orwell Imagined description: On the anniversary of George Orwell's 1984, Shoshana Zuboff argues we've feared Big Brother so much it left us vulnerable to Big Other canonical: https://time.com/5602363/george-orwell-1984-anniversary-surveillance-capitalism/ author: Shoshana Zuboff article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2019-06-06T16:11:18.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:52:45.529Z article:section: Ideas og:title: The Surveillance Threat Is Not What Orwell Imagined og:description: We've feared Big Brother. We should fight against Big Other og:url: https://time.com/5602363/george-orwell-1984-anniversary-surveillance-capitalism/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt42ff9895ddfef760/69894ae097cdff197f6b7eb5/george-orwell-1984-surveillance-big-brother.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1400 og:image:height: 788 og:image:alt: george-orwell-1984-surveillance-big-brother og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Surveillance Threat Is Not What Orwell Imagined twitter:description: We've feared Big Brother. We should fight against Big Other twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt42ff9895ddfef760/69894ae097cdff197f6b7eb5/george-orwell-1984-surveillance-big-brother.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Surveillance Threat Is Not What Orwell Imagined > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: State of the Art: 1984 [Watch (HLS stream): State of the Art: 1984](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/BZu5FVYf.m3u8) (3:02)  _Published 2017-04-05. The crowd at the sold out show at Nitehawk Cinema in New York was there to see a 30-year-old film that suddenly feels new again. 1984._ by [Shoshana Zuboff](https://time.com/author/shoshana-zuboff/) ## Shoshana Zuboff Jun 6, 2019 4:11 PM UTC  Orwell's 1984 was published on June 8, 1949. Orwell's 1984 was published on June 8, 1949. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt by [Shoshana Zuboff](https://time.com/author/shoshana-zuboff/) ## Shoshana Zuboff Jun 6, 2019 4:11 PM UTC George Orwell repeatedly delayed crucial medical care to complete [_1984_](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451524934/ref=as%5Fli%5Fqf%5Fasin%5Fil%5Ftl?ie=UTF8&tag=time037-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0451524934&linkId=802120e09e40ec7b81c1b2f470fd1e49)_,_ the book still synonymous with our worst fears of a totalitarian future — published 70 years ago this month. Half a year after his novel’s debut, he was dead. Because he believed everything was at stake, he forfeited everything, including a young son, a devoted sister, a wife of three months and a grateful public that canonized his prescient and pressing novel. But today we are haunted by a question: Did George Orwell die in vain? Orwell sought to awaken British and U.S. societies to the totalitarian dangers that threatened democracy even after the Nazi defeat. In letters before and after his novel’s completion, Orwell urged “constant criticism,” warning that any “immunity” to totalitarianism must not be taken for granted: “Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.” Since _1984_’s publication, we have assumed with Orwell that the dangers of mass surveillance and social control could only originate in the state. We were wrong. This error has left us unprotected from an equally pernicious but profoundly different threat to freedom and democracy. For 19 years, private companies practicing an unprecedented economic logic that I call _surveillance capitalism_ have hijacked the Internet and its digital technologies. Invented at Google beginning in 2000, this new economics covertly claims private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Some data are used to improve services, but the rest are turned into computational products that predict your behavior. These predictions are traded in a new futures market, where surveillance capitalists sell certainty to businesses determined to know what we will do next. This logic was first applied to finding which ads online will attract our interest, but similar practices now reside in nearly every sector — insurance, retail, health, education, finance and more — where personal experience is secretly captured and computed for behavioral predictions. By now it is no exaggeration to say that the Internet is owned and operated by private surveillance capital. In the competition for certainty, surveillance capitalists learned that the most predictive data come not just from monitoring but also from modifying and directing behavior. For example, by 2013, Facebook had learned how to engineer subliminal cues on its pages to shape users’ real-world actions and feelings. Later, these methods were combined with real-time emotional analyses, allowing marketers to cue behavior at the moment of maximum vulnerability. These inventions were celebrated for being both effective and undetectable. [Cambridge Analytica](https://time.com/5205314/facebook-cambridge-analytica-breach/) later demonstrated that the same methods could be employed to shape political rather than commercial behavior. Augmented reality game [Pokémon Go](http://time.com/4400791/pokemon-go-iphone-android-nintendo/), developed at Google and released in 2016 by a Google spinoff, took the challenge of mass behavioral modification to a new level. Business customers from McDonalds to Starbucks paid for “footfall” to their establishments on a “cost per visit” basis, just as online advertisers pay for “cost per click.” The game engineers learned how to herd people through their towns and cities to destinations that contribute profits, all of it without game players’ knowledge. Democracy slept while surveillance capitalism flourished. As a result, surveillance capitalists now wield a uniquely 21st century quality of power, as unprecedented as totalitarianism was nearly a century ago. I call it _instrumentarian power,_ because it works its will through the ubiquitous architecture of digital instrumentation. Rather than an intimate Big Brother that uses murder and terror to possess each soul from the inside out, these digital networks are a Big Other: impersonal systems trained to monitor and shape our actions remotely, unimpeded by law. Instrumentarian power delivers our futures to surveillance capitalism’s interests, yet because this new power does not claim our bodies through violence and fear, we undervalue its effects and lower our guard. Instrumentarian power does not want to break us; it simply wants to automate us. To this end, it exiles us from our own behavior. It does not care what we think, feel or do, as long as we think, feel and do things in ways that are accessible to Big Other’s billions of sensate, computational, actuating eyes and ears. Instrumentarian power challenges democracy. Big Other knows everything, while its operations remain hidden, eliminating our right to resist. This undermines human autonomy and self-determination, without which democracy cannot survive. Instrumentarian power creates unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge, once associated with pre-modern times. Big Other’s knowledge is _about_ us, but it is not used _for_ us. Big Other knows everything about _us_, while we know almost nothing about _it_. This imbalance of power is not illegal, because we do not yet have laws to control it, but it is fundamentally anti-democratic. Surveillance capitalists claim that their methods are inevitable consequences of digital technologies. This is false. It’s easy to imagine the digital future without surveillance capitalism, but impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without digital technologies. Seven decades later, we can honor Orwell’s death by refusing to cede the digital future. Orwell despised “the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment.” Courage, he insisted, demands that we assert our moral bearings, even against forces that appear invincible. Like Orwell, think critically and criticize. Do not take freedom for granted. Fight for the one idea in the long human story that asserts the people’s right to rule themselves. Orwell reckoned it was worth dying for. ## Transcript [ CROSSTALK ] Okay, we are now sitting for 1984. That's theater one, straight down that hallway for 1984. Have your tickets reader. A couple of months again, and fellow film programmer and I, by the name of Dillon [ UNKNOWN ], were commiserating by phone about a number of things about our business and industry. And we both decided that we really wanted to get more involved in making our cinemas vehicles and conduits for a community discussion. We were approached by Dylan Skolnick who had this idea to do a simultaneous screening of 1984 on April 4th, which is the day that Winston Smith begins his illegal diary in the book And it was something that immediately myself and my fellow programmers said, yes that we would like to do this. [ MUSIC ] What's amazing about this screening is it is happening in nearly every state in this country. I believe the final count is somewhere around 200 venues participating in this screening. Forces of darkness and the treasonable maggots who collaborate with them, must can and will be wiped from the face of the earth. It's a challenge to look back at films that were made before now as being predictive. Because we're gonna go back with what we know now and sort of read into those films. But I feel 1984 is very important for us. To look at this Orwellian idea of a dystopian future that talks about surveillance, which has actually been an issue that we've been dealing with since the 1980s. [ INAUDIBLE ] Not necessarily Trump specific, but things such as alternative facts, and the importance of the arts, which I think is Indicated by so many cinemas participating in this collective screening today speaks volumes that there are a lot of people who want to have a voice and need to have an outlet and that the warnings in 1984 should be heeded a little bit. I think today in our society, the art house cinema really becomes a place. For people to be able to engage in some form of socialization and dialogue. Most of the films here that we've been showing in our special events do have a message, whether that's 1984 or Stafford Wives that we're screening when we did West Side story that also took on a different tone that it had pre election One of like, the American dream, and race in America. So everything is kind of tinted with this tone now. And it's our job to respond to that. We hope that tonight's screening will be the start of something. And that we can use this as a springboard and launching pad for future screenings Of this nature, whether political, social, cultural, educational, or whatever the subject may be. 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