The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Part 3 opens with Zuboff explaining that although guaranteed outcomes are the ultimate aim of surveillance capitalism, there can be no guarantee of outcome unless a power compels it to happen, because human beings have free will. The power of the surveillance capitalist rests in their ownership of the means of behavioral modification because they can modify behaviors to try and achieve guaranteed outcomes—and thus profit off them.

The power that drives this mission of guaranteed outcomes is instrumentarianism. Instrumentarianism is the form of control surveillance capitalism employs to build and establish power over society. Although many might interpret instrumentarian power as a form of totalitarianism, Zuboff insists they are different. As such, she devotes an entire portion of Chapter 12 to explaining the history of totalitarianism so that one might understand the differences. In the comparison between totalitarian and instrumentarian powers, one of the most important differences is that while totalitarianism relied on the body, using violence to construct an environment of control through fear, instrumentarianism relies on the mind, using behavioral modification to achieve control through psychological means.

The remainder of Chapter 12 turns its attention to the work of Harvard psychologist