Unprecedented

Last night, I finished reading Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead, a memoir written by former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. It's a great read and if you have any interest in leadership of any kind, I wholeheartedly recommend you devour it. I reviewed it at Goodreads.com and Amazon.

Later last night, I also started reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff.

Zuboff's book has already blown my mind. Surveillance Capitalism goes far beyond simply providing targeted ads based on your interests. The professor emerita at Harvard Business School defines the term as,

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (p. 2). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition. 

Further,

Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the “hooks” that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends.
ibid. (p. 10)

Zuboff then argues (pursuasively) that it is unprecedented.

When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it through the lenses of familiar categories, thereby rendering invisible precisely that which is unprecedented. A classic example is the notion of the “horseless carriage” to which people reverted when confronted with the unprecedented facts of the automobile. A tragic illustration is the encounter between indigenous people and the first Spanish conquerors. When the Taínos of the pre-Columbian Caribbean islands first laid eyes on the sweating, bearded Spanish soldiers trudging across the sand in their brocade and armor, how could they possibly have recognized the meaning and portent of that moment? Unable to imagine their own destruction, they reckoned that those strange creatures were gods and welcomed them with intricate rituals of hospitality. This is how the unprecedented reliably confounds understanding; existing lenses illuminate the familiar, thus obscuring the original by turning the unprecedented into an extension of the past. This contributes to the normalization of the abnormal, which makes fighting the unprecedented even more of an uphill climb.

On a stormy night some years ago, our home was struck by lightning, and I learned a powerful lesson in the comprehension-defying power of the unprecedented. Within moments of the strike, thick black smoke drifted up the staircase from the lower level of the house and toward the living room. As we mobilized and called the fire department, I believed that I had just a minute or two to do something useful before rushing out to join my family. First, I ran upstairs and closed all the bedroom doors to protect them from smoke damage. Next, I tore back downstairs to the living room, where I gathered up as many of our family photo albums as I could carry and set them outside on a covered porch for safety. The smoke was just about to reach me when the fire marshal arrived to grab me by the shoulder and yank me out the door. We stood in the driving rain, where, to our astonishment, we watched the house explode in flames.

I learned many things from the fire, but among the most important was the unrecognizability of the unprecedented.

ibid (pgs. 12-13)

Perhaps until we come to grips with the fact that we've been inundated by a new force and environment that we previously had no way of understanding, we might not be able to figure out what to do or how to do it to shed the scourge.

You can listen to Professor Zuboff explain it in her own voice on a 50 minute podcast embedded in a Recode (on Vox.com) interview from February 2019. And in a column on the Project Syndicate website dated January 3, 2020.

I am indebted to Zuboff for her poignant examples of being unable to recognize the significance of the unprecedented.

Further, as the Senate Impeachment Trial of the current occupant of the White House gets underway tomorrow (January 21, 2020), I believe there are massive aspects of the last three years for which we have been unable to imagine an adequate framework because it has been so freakin' unprecedented.

If I tried to expound on it, other than citing the overwhelming number of intentional misrepresentations that he has uttered (>16,000 and counting) and the unbelievably absurd case that he and his team have thus far articulated, it would take me days and nights to do. So I won't.

Suffice it at this moment to say that I do not believe we have an adequate framework through which to imagine the significance of what we are about to live through even over the next two to three weeks.

That is, even though nobody and her brother expects the Senate to convict Trump.