雅思阅读 142: When Experience Becomes Raw Material（当个人体验沦为原材料——监控资本主义）

改编由 Shoshana Zuboff / The Age of Surveillance Capitalism（2019）及相关评论。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://handwiki.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

Reading Passage

A. When Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff coined the term "surveillance capitalism" in the early 2010s, she meant to describe something more alarming than the familiar fact that free websites show you adverts. Her argument, laid out at book length in 2019, was that a new economic order had emerged — one that claims human experience as a free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction and sale. The distinction matters. Ordinary advertising has always tried to match a product to a likely buyer. Surveillance capitalism goes much further: it harvests the digital traces of everyday life — searches, pings, likes, pauses, location — and converts them into products that predict, and increasingly shape, what people will do next. The user, in this arrangement, is not the customer. The user is the resource, and the customer is the company that buys a forecast. This inversion — the user becomes the raw material, not the purchaser — is what Zuboff argues makes surveillance capitalism a new economic form rather than a relabelling of old-fashioned advertising.

B. The system, Zuboff argues, was not designed in a boardroom. It grew out of Google's early search business, in which every query left a footprint. At first, those footprints were used to improve the search engine itself. Then someone noticed something more valuable: the leftover data — what Zuboff calls "behavioral surplus" — could be analysed to forecast what users were likely to want, click or buy tomorrow. Those forecasts could be sold to advertisers who wanted their messages to land in the right moment. Facebook, and later the whole ecology of social media, mapping and delivery apps, followed the same logic. What began as a side-effect of running a free service became the main product. The companies did not, in any meaningful sense, ask permission for this shift; they simply captured the surplus and refined it, under cover of dense terms of service that almost no one reads. The advertising model that grew from this insight became, within a decade, the most profitable business formula in the history of the technology industry.

C. The technology that makes this possible is predictive analytics. Every click, every swipe, every pause on a page is a signal fed into statistical models that are remarkably good at anticipating what a person will do next. Those models are then sold back to advertisers, political campaigns, employers and insurers as targeted access to particular minds. A UK parliamentary inquiry, taking evidence on the digital economy, described the result bluntly: platforms sell not only access to knowledge about their users, but access to users' weaknesses and vulnerabilities, mapped through years of experimentation. The same apparatus that recommends a film or a pair of running shoes can, in principle, be turned to nudge someone toward a political view, a payday loan, or an unhealthy purchase. Zuboff calls this a means of "behavioral modification" — not persuasion in the old sense, but quiet steering, invisible to the person being steered. The experiments on which the models are built are run continuously, at enormous scale, on users who have no idea they are being tested.

D. Why should anyone outside the digital industry care? Zuboff's answer is that this is not merely a commercial arrangement but a power shift. Classical capitalism, she argues, was disciplined by two constraints: workers could withhold their labour, and customers could withhold their money. Surveillance capitalism seizes a resource — human experience — over which neither workers nor customers have ever had to give formal consent. Because the extraction is invisible, there is no point at which a person can say yes or no; the terms are set unilaterally by the firms that own the platforms. The result, in her view, is a serious threat to individual autonomy, to the ideal of a self-determined life, and ultimately to democratic politics itself, because a population whose attention and impulses can be steered at scale is harder to move by argument. The word "surveillance" is chosen deliberately: this is not government spying, but it is structurally similar, and the two, she notes, have a habit of reinforcing each other. As platforms accumulate ever more detailed behavioural records, the temptation for state agencies to demand access to them grows correspondingly. The distinction between a commercial data broker and a state surveillance apparatus, in other words, is less clear than it once appeared.

E. Critics of Zuboff's argument, of whom there are many, charge that she overstates both the novelty and the menace. Users, they point out, do get something in return: free search, free maps, free communication across continents. To describe the whole exchange as pure extraction ignores the genuine value of the services. The predictive models, further, are not infallible; they nudge more than they compel, and most people resist or ignore a great deal of targeted advertising. Regulation — from Europe's general data-protection rules to newer American state laws — has begun to chip away at the most aggressive practices, giving users more control over what is collected. Whether those reforms are sufficient, or merely a polite amendment to a system that continues to run, remains the central argument. But the core of Zuboff's claim is harder to dismiss: the most valuable resource of the digital economy is not silicon, bandwidth or even code. It is the ordinary, unguarded stream of human life, extracted quietly, sold repeatedly, and studied by almost no one. Whether regulation, competition or a deliberate refusal to accept the bargain can rebalance that extraction is the question that now occupies both critics and defenders of the platforms. The debate has moved, in any case, beyond the simple question of whether free services are worth the privacy they cost.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. How the system grew out of leftover search data ii. Why Google makes so much money from cloud storage iii. The predictive engine and the sale of vulnerability iv. Why this is a shift in power, not just in advertising v. A UK inquiry into tax avoidance vi. The critique: free services, imperfect models, regulation vii. How Facebook makes physical hardware

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. According to Zuboff, what is the "raw material" of surveillance capitalism? A. Copper mines in the developing world. B. Human experience captured as behavioral data. C. The silicon used in computer chips. D. Government secrets.

6. What is "behavioral surplus"? A. The profit earned from selling hardware. B. Leftover data from running free services, harvested for prediction products. C. Extra hours worked by employees. D. Advertising space that no one buys.

7. How does the UK parliamentary evidence characterise what platforms sell? A. Only access to anonymous statistics. B. Access to knowledge about users, including their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. C. Physical goods delivered to homes. D. Nothing at all.

8. What do critics of Zuboff argue? A. She understates the menace of government surveillance. B. She overstates the novelty and menace, ignoring that users receive free services in return. C. She proves that advertising does not work. D. She is a former Google executive.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The term "surveillance capitalism" was coined by Shoshana Zuboff.
10. In surveillance capitalism, the user is the customer who pays for services.
11. Predictive models on these platforms are always perfectly accurate.
12. European data-protection rules have begun to restrict some data practices.
13. Zuboff worked for Google between 2001 and 2007.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

Zuboff argues that the platforms harvest a "(14) __________ surplus" of data and convert it into (15) __________ products sold to advertisers and other buyers.

答案与解析

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