The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
About the book
Shoshana Zuboff examines how digital companies such as Google and Meta built a new form of capitalist accumulation, which she names surveillance capitalism. In her account, these firms claim human experience as free raw material, turn it into behavioral data, and use machine intelligence to make prediction products traded in what she calls behavioral futures markets. Industrial capitalism exploited nature; surveillance capitalism, she argues, exploits human nature, and the threat has shifted from a Big Brother state to a Big Other, an architecture of sensors that concentrates knowledge in private companies beyond democratic oversight. Her examples include Pokémon Go, which she treats as a test of moving targeted ads into physical space. It was published in 2018.
Naomi Klein said that from the first page she felt everyone should read it as a form of digital self-defense. Nicholas Carr granted it has imperfections but called it original and often brilliant, setting it beside Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
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This book has 2 recommendations
Naomi Klein (Author)
From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, Zuboff demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the process. The hour is late and much has been lost already—but as we learn in these indispensable pages, there is still hope for emancipation.
Nicholas Carr (Author)
Whatever its imperfections, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is an original and often brilliant work, and it arrives at a crucial moment, when the public and its elected representatives are at last grappling with the extraordinary power of digital media and the companies that control it. Like another recent masterwork of economic analysis, Thomas Piketty’s 2013 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the book challenges assumptions, raises uncomfortable questions about the present and future, and stakes out ground for a necessary and overdue debate. Shoshana Zuboff has aimed an unsparing light onto the shadowy new landscape of our lives. The picture is not pretty.
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