Durkheim said:
The most remarkable effect of the division of labor is not that it increases output of functions divided, but that it renders them solidary. Its role… is not simply to embellish or ameliorate existing societies, but to render societies possible which, without it, would not exist.… It passes far beyond purely economic interests, for it consists in the establishment of a social and moral order sui generis.
Durkheim’s vision was neither sterile nor naive. He recognized that things can take a dark turn and often do, resulting in what he called an “abnormal” (sometimes translated as “pathological”) division of labor that produces social distance, injustice, and discord in place of reciprocity and interdependency. In this context, Durkheim singled out the destructive effects of social inequality on the division of labor in society, especially what he viewed as the most dangerous form of inequality: extreme asymmetries of power that make “conflict itself impossible” by “refusing to admit the right of combat.” Such pathologies can be cured only by a politics that asserts the people’s right to contest, confront, and prevail in the face of unequal and illegitimate power over society. In the late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, that contest was led by labor and other social movements that asserted social equality through institutions such as collective bargaining and public education.
The transformation that we witness in our time echoes these historical observations as the division of learning follows the same migratory path from the economic to the social domain once traveled by the division of labor. Now the division of learning “passes far beyond purely economic interests,” for it establishes the basis for our social order and its moral content.
The division of learning is to us, members of the second modernity, what the division of labor was to our grandparents and great-grandparents, pioneers of the first modernity. In our time the division of learning emerges from the economic sphere as a new principle of social order and reflects the primacy of learning, information, and knowledge in today’s quest for effective life. And just as Durkheim warned his society a century ago, today our societies are threatened as the division of learning drifts into pathology and injustice at the hands of the unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism has achieved.
Surveillance capitalism’s command of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of the two texts. The specific mechanisms of surveillance capitalism compel the production of two “electronic texts,” not just one. When it comes to the first text, we are its authors and readers. This public-facing text is familiar and celebrated for the universe of information and connection it brings to our fingertips. Google Search codifies the informational content of the world wide web. Facebook’s News Feed binds the network. Much of this public-facing text is composed of what we inscribe on its pages: our posts, blogs, videos, photos, conversations, music, stories, observations, “likes,” tweets, and all the great massing hubbub of our lives captured and communicated.
Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, however, the first text does not stand alone; it trails a shadow close behind. The first text, full of promise, actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text. Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how trivial or fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction. That surplus fills the pages of the second text. This one is hidden from our view: “read only” for surveillance capitalists.19 In this text our experience is dragooned as raw material to be accumulated and analyzed as means to others’ market ends. The shadow text is a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its analyses, and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves. Worse still, it becomes increasingly difficult, and perhaps impossible, to refrain from contributing to the shadow text. It automatically feeds on our experience as we engage in the normal and necessary routines of social participation.
