Keywords

Introduction

Although the social sciences have been dealing with surveillance at least since the seminal studies of Michel Foucault, globalization and the development of new digital media have obviously profoundly changed both the reality and the content of theorizing on this subject. Hence the centrality of a new type of surveillance that has captured the attention of scholars and observers appears unprecedented for two main reasons. First, the asphyxiating control is not exercised over openly exploited and annihilated subjects but over users who are commonly supposed to be accomplices who are unaware of the surveillance or, in other words, unwitting victims who actively collaborate with their controllers by sharing, posting, or even simply surfing the Internet. Second, states seem to have largely abandoned their previous prerogative of monitoring citizens, contenting themselves with delegating surveillance, now more capillary than ever, to the great economic powers of the new digital capitalism.

Striving to some extent to query certain assumptions or clichés, the following pages attempt to answer a fundamental question: why do users generally pay little attention to the serious threats to their privacy inherent in new communication technologies? In other words, why do they continue to leave traces of themselves that make it possible to profile them and even to a certain extent determine their behaviors?

To provide at least some sort of answer, among the not insignificant number of views on surveillance, I choose two approaches that, in addition to being highly successful among epigones and nonspecialists, seem to be complementary in providing space almost exclusively to subjective factors (the first approach) and objective factors (the second). I refer to Zygmunt Bauman’s now classic view, focusing on the general need for visibility felt by subjects in a liquid society, and Shoshana Zuboff’s more recent but already well-known analysis of “surveillance capitalism.” I will try to show that both approaches are extremely interesting but that they do not seem entirely convincing in their depictions either of the user or of the responsibilities they attribute to states.

Thereafter, I propose broadening the theoretical framework that is helpful in thinking about surveillance by taking into account the strong symbolic power exercised by charity. Indeed, as scholars of “philanthrocapitalism” have critically remarked, the most important tycoons of information capitalism are also the undisputed and visible protagonists of a new kind of philanthropy that is radically changing both global power relations and our ways of thinking and feeling. Therefore, I will put forward the hypothesis that, on closer inspection, the nonchalance of users of new technologies and social networks can be more fully understood by taking into account the trust that can be generated by such ostentatious prodigality. Since ordinary people see the alleged generosity of the owners of Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook widely publicized, it may be reasonable to suppose that they are unconsciously predisposed to think that those “modern-day heroes” are offering their services for free to everyone for the common good.

However, as I will briefly state in my conclusion, it is not essential to assume that users are totally unsuspecting. They may be at least partially aware of the dynamics entrapping them but nonetheless accept that involvement by grasping aspects of it that are not entirely negative or that are even desirable. This is not necessarily related to a selfish drive for self-representation or self-assurance but could be linked to the idea or hope of a better future for all. It is difficult to keep one’s guard up when facing someone who is universally regarded as selfless.

Bauman and the Need for Visibility in a Liquid Society

Having spent many years painting a picture of ways of life in a liquid society, Bauman could deal only with surveillance. However, as a scholar of both Baumanian themes and surveillance itself righty observed (Lyon, 2010), he did so starting with Legislators and Interpreters (Bauman, 1987) and Freedom (Bauman, 1988), both written before the mass spread of the Internet and social networks. It is not surprising, then, that in that period, his attention, far from being devoted to communication techniques or the digital revolution, was directed more generally toward the central issue of all his sociological research: the transition from classical modernity to liquid modernity. In that context, he spoke of a shift from the old centrality of the Panopticon model, so significant from Bentham to Foucault, to postpanoptic forms of control, in which surveillance was, so to speak, “privatized.” While modernity’s maniacal need for order had given life to forms and techniques of coercion and regimentation, Bauman saw an epochal change driven mainly by the seductive power of consumerism. Since people’s “conduct is made manageable, predictable and hence non-threatening, by a multiplication of needs rather than by a tightening of norms” (Bauman, 1987: 168), the old repression was becoming superfluous or even counterproductive. Ordinary people themselves did the dirty work of maintaining the ranks, made docile by their unquenchable desire to buy ever newer goods and services and to become full citizens of the new society. The privatization of surveillance seems, in short, to be directly linked to the privatization of the fight against ambivalence themed in an exemplary way in the second part of Modernity and Ambivalence (Bauman, 1991). Ultimately underestimating the power still held in many ways by states to label people and induce conformity (Susca, 2021b), Bauman saw a world where no authority wanted or was able to enforce anything anymore. As a result, masses of people were forced to seek direction and answers within themselves.

Subsequent works have offered a number of interesting considerations of such self-monitoring, in particular linking it to the exclusionary policies and growing inequalities that have emerged with globalization. Bauman famously saw a deepening gulf: on the one hand, the privileged who have full access to increasingly satisfying consumption and, on the other hand, the masses of the excluded, the refuse of our opulent times, or at best useful servants for the comfort of the wealthy. Surveillance techniques allow the former to move, pay, and live in general without complications and, for this reason, seem to represent the perfect reversal of the previous control that strictly circumscribed the range of action of the subjects. The prophecy or dystopia of George Orwell was thus overturned: “Today’s Big Brother is not about keeping people in and making them stick to the line, but about kicking people out and making sure that when they are kicked out that they will duly go and won’t come back” (Bauman, 2006: 25).

Guaranteed by increasingly sophisticated techniques, the mobility of the most fortunate appears to be a nonstop journey from one city to another and from one experience to another. Additionally, technologies themselves have made it possible to exclude people cut off from the circuits of well-being because they are undesirable and, especially after September 11, even banned from proper civilian life because they are labeled potential terrorist threats.

The work by Bauman most directly concerned with my present topic appeared a few years later under the title Liquid Surveillance (Bauman & Lyon, 2013) and is both an interview and a dialogue with David Lyon, a scholar of communication, particularly surveillance. Lyon urged his illustrious interlocutor and, to a certain extent, his teacher to provide a full account of the social consequences produced by technology itself, which are even more evident when possibilities are made available on a large scale that upsets the daily lives of millions, if not billions, of subjects. In contrast, Bauman preferred to speak of two concomitant drives:

I believe that the most remarkable feature of the contemporary edition of surveillance is that it has somehow managed to force and cajole oppositions to work in unison, and to make them work in concert in the service of the same reality. On the one hand, the old panoptical stratagem (“you should never know when you are being watched in the flesh and so never be unwatched in your mind”) is being gradually yet consistently and apparently unstoppably brought to well-nigh universal implementation. On the other, with the old panoptical nightmare (“I am never on my own”) now recast into the hope of “never again being alone” (abandoned, ignored and neglected, blackballed and excluded), the fear of disclosure has been stifled by the joy of being noticed (Bauman & Lyon, 2013: 23).

Rather than factors that produce or at least accelerate change, Bauman saw the new techniques as deadly weapons of control at the disposal of the powerful but also, and above all, tools that responded to an insatiable need experienced firsthand by users themselves, hence an apparent paradox that broadens the idea of self-surveillance mentioned above. The real protagonists and culprits of the change taking place are not so much privileged people who enjoy the unprecedented possibilities offered by globalization, but ordinary people who collaborate incessantly and even enthusiastically in surveillance in order to not feel alone and have the illusion of living in meaningful bonds. They make themselves everlastingly observable and traceable by continually putting themselves “in the shop window” for fear of being relegated to insignificance, almost obeying a sort of law formulated earlier by Bauman himself: “Whether in their consciousness or their subconscious, men and women of our times are haunted by the spectre of exclusion” (Bauman, 2004: 47).

While there is no doubt that Bauman’s focus is definitely on subjective factors, and more precisely on the motivations of individuals, we can rightly speak of a substantial indifference to technology as an objective driving factor. Deliberately ignoring the peculiarities of digital tools, Bauman was certain that people practice self-promotion through social media simply because social media exist and are available. That is why he fully endorsed the words of a digital creative director of an advertising agency: “The Internet doesn’t steal our humanity, it reflects it. The Internet doesn’t get inside us, it shows what’s inside us” (Bauman & Lyon, 2013). In a society without Facebook or similar possibilities, we would all find other means to behave in the same way and achieve the same results.

At the root of it all, then, is complicity, but this kind of complicity concerns only vain and insecure users, while it has practically nothing to do with the possible relations between the “old” political power and the new power, economic and otherwise, of the digital megaindustries. Nor is this actually surprising. Bauman probably viewed with indifference states and governments that do little or nothing to protect the autonomy and privacy of their citizens owing to the simple fact that he interpreted that passivity as one of the manifestations of liquidity. According to him, such capitulation is a much more general issue, and one that concerns the overriding political inability to direct people by organizing their existences from both a material and symbolic point of view.

Zuboff and the Rise of Surveillance Capitalism

The first striking aspect of Zuboff’s research on surveillance capitalism (2019) is probably the great commercial success it has achieved. However nonchalantly willing to put everything about themselves on show in order to promote themselves as merchandise, ordinary users may not infrequently be concerned to learn more about the logics in which they are embedded. This may not in itself be decisive or politically mobilizing, but it can hardly be considered counterproductive that people are increasingly becoming aware of the immense power placed in the hands of those who drive the new digital economy. The latter are individuals whom no one has chosen, let alone voted for, but who increasingly decide our lives.

Strictly examining the issue of surveillance, Zuboff wants above all to make us understand that digital megacorporations are not simply able to know everything about us and predict our future behavior. Rather, they are able to determine our future, making us do more or less exactly what is most useful to further increase their immense profits. As shocking as her remarks on control and monitoring may seem, they are only one part of her argument. Viewed as a whole, her research aims above all to make manifest the economic principles and laws that tend to remain hidden behind the scandal of the violation of privacy and the disasters represented by the threat to individual autonomy and democratic coexistence. All this is based on the conviction that capitalism has made a real evolutionary leap owing to the exploitation of areas and possibilities that have suddenly become available.

Therefore, she presents her research project by talking not only about lucrative “extraction” and “prediction” operations but also about a process of “construction and elaboration of means of behavioral modification” that is inextricably linked to the artificial intelligence of machines and has become a fearsome “instrumentarian power” (Zuboff, 2019: 67, italics in original). However, there is no concession to a more or less revisited Luddism. As she frankly admits, and as her intellectual itinerary testifies, her point of view is that of a scholar who has scrutinized and in some respects continues to scrutinize the revolution in progress without preconceived hostility and even with a certain amount of cautious optimism (Zuboff, Möllers, Murakami Wood, & Lyon, 2019: 265). Not only does she believe in the emancipatory potential of the new techniques, but she still appears convinced that things are not as they are through some necessity or iron law (which of course also means that things could be different).

In any case, what is more important for my argument is to clarify the relation in which Zuboff places subjective factors (users’ propensities) and objective factors (technology above all). Does she see a real intertwining of the two sides? Or does she allow one to prevail, leaving the other in the shade? As I will try to explain in a moment, and reasoning as a whole, it is difficult to deny that she shifts the focus toward objective factors: the economy and above all technology, the latter conceived as the truly decisive factor in the emergence of a dangerous variant of information capitalism.

However, my statement certainly needs to be better specified, especially with regard to the relationship between economics and technology and the related question of how far technology itself can be considered neutral or inherently responsible. These are two points on which Zuboff herself seems extremely clear:

Surveillance capitalism is a market form that is unimaginable outside the digital milieu, but it is not the same as ‘digital’ […] the digital can take many forms depending upon the social and economic logics that bring it to life. It is capitalism that assigns the price tag of subjugation and helplessness, not the technology (Zuboff et al., 2019: 15).

As I have just pointed out, arguing against any demonization of technology and of the Internet and the digital in particular, Zuboff wants to highlight the responsibilities of capitalism as it is reconstructed today. It is in this sense that she stresses that surveillance capitalism “is a logic in action and not a technology” (ibid.).

While the digital itself is not to blame, the focus is on capitalism or, more specifically, on those degenerations that make information capitalism responsible for new liberticidal dynamics. Nonetheless, despite her assertion above and similar ones, Zuboff ultimately does not conceive of technology as a mere means but rather as a necessary infrastructure that is coming or has already come to act as a largely autonomous driving factor or even, as it were, as a soul. This means not only that without the technology to collect and process immeasurable amounts of data, surveillance capitalism would not even exist but also that the technology itself tends to behave increasingly less as a mere means. In this regard, we may consider her description of how giants such as Google and Facebook are now obliged to strengthen the deregulation that allows them to freely mine and then exploit data:

It is important to understand that surveillance capitalists are impelled to pursue lawlessness by the logic of their own creation. Google and Facebook vigorously lobby to kill online privacy protection. Limit regulation, weaken or block privacy-enhancing legislation, and thwart every attempt to circumscribe their practices because such laws are existential threats to the frictionless flow of behavioral surplus (Zuboff, 2019: 105, emphasis added).

In short, one could say that “creation” has come to life and is taking possession of its creator. However, as illustrated especially in the third chapter of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, this perverse dynamic did not apply from the very beginning and en bloc to all new technologies. In particular, as is fairly well known, Zuboff attributes to Google a pioneering role in terms of its ability both to produce algorithms capable of learning to understand and predict and to translate innovations into a model of targeted advertising. Once invented and established, Google’s standard would have imposed itself on its competitors, leading the way and outdoing any alternative that was more creative or even simply less harmful to users’ privacy; hence, the idea that the other main Internet companies (i.e., Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and especially Apple) found themselves in the unenviable position of having to follow, even at the cost of betraying their own ideal vocations or abandoning, at least in part, other innovations or possible uses they were working on.

Ultimately, while I would not speak of a true technological determinism in this regard, and while I am aware that Zuboff considers the goals that someone assigns to technology from time to time important, I think that in her approach, it is the technology itself, neutral or not, that truly governs. Nor should it be surprising that she insists that the culprit is not the medium itself but the way in which some capitalists have appropriated it. In addition to explaining and disclosing the facts and their connections, Zuboff clearly intends to fight the possible resignation of users and to expose the responsibility of the real culprits who make extraordinary profits and their various accomplices. If what is happening is not the inevitable effect of innovations that are inherently endowed with deadly power, then the megacompanies that produce our behavior cannot claim innocence; at the same time, states, governments, and even citizens cannot wash their hands of responsibility.

Compared to the role played by objective factors, the weight of subjective factors is frankly much less important. According to Zuboff, ordinary people, i.e., citizens who are mere users, are, or have been until now, unconscious and powerless victims of sophisticated technological manipulations; hence, what could be defined as her pedagogical vocation, which leads her to inform and warn readers so that they can react by interacting with states and governments, asking them for adequate political decisions and new rules, including supranational and global ones. In contrast, her discourse toward the states is markedly different, as she basically holds them jointly responsible both for the deception and exploitation suffered by ordinary citizens and for the far from remote danger of a substantial failure of democracy. Therefore, like Bauman, Zuboff speaks of complicity but traces it back to a distorted or frankly pathological relationship between the new powers of the digital industry and the various nations. If the former have collected almost all the profits of the current exasperated version of information capitalism, the latter are at least guilty of letting themselves be carried away by credulity or disastrously wrong calculations. In a completely unfair quid pro quo, states are said to have ceded to private actors surveillance power that has subsequently grown out of all proportion and to have gained above all a helping hand against the threat of global terrorism. The commercial exploitation of everybody’s data seemed a reasonable price for neutralizing certain malign actors and saving democracy, but in the long run, it would strike a mortal blow against democracy itself.

The Almost Irresistible Fascination of Generosity

Zuboff has the merit of focusing on the role played by states, thus somewhat objectively filling a gap in Bauman’s approach. However, the picture she proposes does not seem entirely realistic. Can we truly think that states have surrendered to digital megacompanies purely through stupidity or short-sighted calculation? Are they truly powerless? Despite the fact that more than a few theorists of postmodernity have held the opposite opinion, states (or at least some states) continue to hold enormous power, in some respects even greater than in the past. In particular, the USA, the veritable vanguard of surveillance capitalism, holds global supremacy both politically and economically. It is true that its dominance finds objective limits in some protagonists of international politics, above all China, but is it plausible to think of it as surrendering to the web giants? Can one truly think that the USA imposes ridiculously low taxes on Microsoft or Facebook merely through silliness or impotence?

Zuboff’s remarks on subjective factors seem no more convincing, particularly with regard to the idea of unsuspecting users. The impression, far from superficial, is that what one may call the “ideological” power of the new surveillance is in her view underestimated or overlooked. In fact, surveillance is highly seductive, being ultimately capable of producing acceptance even at the expense of sensible reasoning. This means that, in general, people are not necessarily unaware that someone or something is constantly watching them and deeply influencing their lives. Rather, they seem to deliberately pretend to ignore surveillance, as if persuaded that it exists as a harmless or even beneficial project.

It may therefore be necessary to explain the reasons for what seems to be neither a simple unconscious error (Zuboff) nor merely the effect of an eagerness to appear (Bauman), i.e., the trust placed in technologies that are known to be responsible for serious limitations of individual freedom or even the decay of traditional democracy. Although users may well be thought to willingly shed important aspects of their autonomy, this does not necessarily mean that they do so out of fear of being alone. Rather, they may consider what they rely on desirable in itself, or at least the lesser evil. The reason may be that technology presents itself to them in the guise of familiar and good, or at least far from bad, faces. To name just a few of the best known, these faces include Bill Gates, who has long supported a wide range of health and educational projects; Jeff Bezos, who recently topped the list of benefactors; and Mark Zuckerberg, who celebrated the birth of his daughter by donating lavishly to build a better world.

In brief, I think one can better understand the reasons for the success of surveillance by taking into account studies and perspectives that have little direct connection with what technologies allow us to do or how we specifically use social media and devices. I am referring in particular to a very extensive bibliography of studies dealing with the social and economic impact of new forms of charity, among which there are fortunately some general introductory works (Callahan, 2017; Dodgson & Gann, 2020; Jung, Phillips, & Harrow, 2019; Maurrasse, 2020; Reich & Cordelli, 2016; Vallely, 2020). Nor, of course, should one neglect studies devoted more specifically to so-called philanthrocapitalism, the neologism with which some authors, mostly but not always critical and pessimistic, indicate the extension of market logic to fundamental sectors such as health, food, environmental protection, and education (Bishop, 2013; Bishop & Green, 2008; Dentico, 2020; Edwards, 2008; McGoey, 2021).

I can say only a few words about it here, but the change that charity has undergone is so important and consequential that it can without exaggeration be called epochal. The increasing process of institutionalization has become an essential tool for the reorganization processes of mature capitalism and has, moreover, affected in various ways all the areas of the world where industrial development is most intense. Indeed, one often speaks of the West and the USA in particular, where the all-Protestant asceticism conceived by Max Weber (1930) seems to stay more alive than elsewhere and even to have been radicalized into extreme forms such as the “prosperity theology” (Lee, 2007; Wrenn, 2021). However, it would be wrong to think that this issue concerns only the USA and its culture, which is supposedly more inclined to conceive of the restitution of part of one’s possessions as a means of flaunting one’s wealth and feeling righteous at the same time. Often little observed and even less regulated by the European Union and its members, the change is also affecting Europe as a whole (Carnie, 2017) and even countries where asceticism or even civic-mindedness does not seem particularly present, such as Italy (Caroli & Bulgari, 2014; Piaggio, 2019). Nor should one forget Asia and, in particular, the extremely interesting case of the People’s Republic of China (Andornino & Wang, 2021). In the latter, the general tendency to give to charity has always been deeply rooted, and after a phase of state repression followed by some years of substantial disinterest, the political authorities have tried, with some success, to regulate the phenomenon by combating possible abuses while safeguarding the freedom and the right to donate.

In general, while trying to do good to others seems to be a universal impulse and in itself not blameworthy (Wiepking, 2021), gifts are less free than they seem when generosity is organized from the point of view of financial return. The new institutionalized charity is not simply a way to obtain substantial tax advantages or even lucrative tax avoidance but also and above all a method of making huge economic, symbolic, and political profits. Practiced according to a market logic but also relying on the rhetoric of altruism (Arrigoni, Bifulco, & Caselli, 2020), philanthropic activity acts as an extension of entrepreneurial action and ensures, along with often significant profits, public acclaim and consent. Nor is it surprising that this symbolic return benefits those figures who have become extremely wealthy through surveillance since they are generally also those most engaged in this current type of charity. After all, by putting their wealth at the service of global good causes, and of course duly publicizing their goodness, the new tycoons of the digital society are not just testimonials to enrichment and free enterprise. They make us all see the best face of surveillance, that of a project or a reality that seems basically good and, in any case, seems capable of showing the way and providing smart answers at a time when traditional politics appears impotent and obtuse.

This is a crucial point. Whether one calls it new altruism or philanthrocapitalism, the new philanthropic activity has some politically relevant effects, the first of which is well illustrated by the case of US private education. Private educational institutions have been targeted by a huge mass of philanthropic investment (Baltodano, 2017), with consequences that make it far from desirable for a similar situation to happen in Europe (Susca, 2021a). The sudden and disproportionate enrichment of the private supply has inevitably led to an impoverishment of the public sector from both a material and a symbolic point of view. If what a state can offer is or seems to be paltry and increasingly unattractive, it is not surprising that public opinion does not tend to call for an increase in public spending. Why should one demand more taxes for the rich or the middle class if the super-rich can spontaneously do better than both politics and democracy (Reich, 2018), moreover almost for free or else in exchange for some of our data?

Second, and as a further factor in the crisis of democracy itself or in the drive toward “post-democracy” (Crouch, 2000, 2005), the ability of citizens to direct and control has been weakened. While voters can influence the decisions of their governments and representatives, the new billionaires and mega-charitable foundations are exempt from any accountability. They are actors who operate on an altruistic impulse, i.e., on something that is and should remain inherently free, which puts them in a position to exercise enormous and unquestionable power.

Third, one must take into account the relationship between the ruling classes and the leading philanthropists, which is so close and particular that it seems to extend far beyond the impotence taken for granted by Bauman or the obtuse delegation of surveillance envisaged by Zuboff. The public sphere declines to regulate the activities of the private sector, if only because the latter are so valuable in a context of cuts in the welfare state and budget austerity. Moreover, however undesirable or regrettable it may be, it is more than understandable that members of the political classes as well as those of the bureaucratic apparatus tend to be subjugated on what can be called a psychological level. Whether they are right-wing or left-wing, and however seriously they may take their jobs, they are likely to be in a state of inferiority in comparison to figures who embody the characteristics and values of winners: “smartness,” self-fulfillment, creativity, and, above all, the propensity to do good to the less fortunate.

Finally, at least one other aspect must be taken into account, namely, the danger, far from remote and indeed already present, of a further weakening of democracy in the world. The protagonists of the new philanthropy are increasingly dealing on an equal footing with global powers such as the UN, IMF, or WTO. This means that any effort to reduce inequality between countries must contend not only with the selfishness or arrogance of the richest countries but also with the interference of new players who are in a position to act arbitrarily.

There is enough evidence to rethink, at least partially, the new surveillance. Questionable gratuitousness and altruism are extraordinary means of lowering the users’ defenses and gaining their trust. If the mission of giving becomes an inseparable part of both entrepreneurial action and the public image of the digital masters, how can one exactly establish the borderline between what is given for free and what is paid for in a more or less hidden way and perhaps even at a very high price? It is probably not sufficient to issue a warning with the adage “If you don’t pay for it, you are the product.” Even partially selling oneself may seem acceptable if, in addition to supporting us in doing things and having company, those who actually buy (or manufacture) our lives do so with an overall benevolent and socially responsible design.

Conclusions

Obviously, the above considerations are not meant to deny that awareness of the dangers of surveillance needs to be raised. A better understanding of the extent to which both the independence of individuals and democratic coexistence are threatened can encourage appropriate responses, not only in terms of individual strategies but also in the sphere of collective action. As Zuboff also points out, states and organized political parties should remain or return to being non-occasional interlocutors for certain crucial demands: regulations that effectively defend privacy while imposing more transparency on the uses of personal data, more adequate taxation of the rich emperors of surveillance, and an agenda that clarifies what each politician and party is willing to do to concretely counter the abuses that have become possible. Nor should such claims neglect the supranational and global levels, which are even more important given the disproportionality between the megacompanies and most of the world’s states. Before us, in short, is a political challenge in the broadest sense of the term. To understand why it is so difficult to respond adequately, it is not enough to refer generically to depoliticization or to the strength of neoliberalism. After all, as I have tried to show, surveillance can be accepted and embraced not only for what it promises to the individual but also for what it gives or promises to give to our society.

Ultimately, the very image of consumers/users is also at stake. Perhaps we should stop thinking of them as selfish idiots who agree to become commodities to appease their insecurities or out of indifference. The subjects who allow themselves to be captured by leaving traces are neither totally unaware nor necessarily disinterested in their surroundings. Rather, they might even reasonably expect to surrender autonomy in exchange for a better world that, while continuing to reward individual success, is finally able to become more organized and equitable. If this is the case, the emphasis and warnings of critics should be directed not against individualism or the alleged new slavery but toward the ways in which real change for the benefit of the majority can be engineered.

From this perspective, analyzing philanthropy can also be of some use. It is a question of building on a tradition of studies already well established in the social sciences, although newer in sociology in a strict sense (Barman, 2017). This may not be the easiest task since it requires going beyond the usual distinction between public and private, and above all beyond an idea of “gift” that is now perceived as classic (Mauss, 1924) and moreover has been revisited by a perspective that has become a point of reference for many scholars (Caillé & Grésy, 2014; Godbout & Caillé, 1992). However, it may be worthwhile to contribute to counter the surveillance or, rather, the capitalist uses of surveillance itself.

I conclude with one final brief remark. The hypotheses that I have put forward about the almost irresistible fascination of generosity are waiting to be put to the test with new research focused on common sense and the prevailing representations of users. To move beyond seductive reconstructions such as Bauman’s and richly documented analyses such as Zuboff’s, perhaps we still need to try to better understand how and why individuals bring technology into their daily lives in infinite ways. Whether they are aware of it or not, they sign or renew a contract every time they press a button. It would not be strange if, after all, they entered into those contracts with people they trust.