The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

📘 About This Book

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S TOP BOOKS OF THE YEAR Shortlisted for The Orwell Prize 2020 Shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year Award 2019 'Easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasn't at least familarised themselves with Zuboff's central ideas.' - Zadie Smith, The Guardian The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control us. The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future? Shoshana Zuboff shows that we are at a crossroads. We still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in, and what we decide now will shape the rest of the century. Our choices: allow technology to enrich the few and impoverish the many, or harness it and distribute its benefits. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. Most critically, it shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities and ensure we are the masters of the digital rather than its slaves.

📖 Summary

In 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism', Harvard professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff delivers a groundbreaking and chilling analysis of a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales. Zuboff meticulously traces how tech giants like Google and Facebook pioneered a novel mutation of capitalism—surveillance capitalism—which bypasses traditional market exchanges to harvest behavioral data from everyday life. This captured data is then used to construct predictive models designed to anticipate and modify human behavior for guaranteed economic profit. The book explores the evolution of this regime from its origins in the aftermath of the dot-com crash to its current omnipresence across digital devices, smart homes, and civic spaces. Zuboff introduces a rich lexicon to describe this phenomenon, including 'behavioral surplus,' 'surveillance revenues,' and 'instrumentarian power,' contrasting it with traditional industrial capitalism. She reveals how these corporations systematically erode individual autonomy, privacy, and democratic norms by manufacturing a one-sided surveillance economy where users are no longer the consumers, but the mined resource. Furthermore, Zuboff warns of the societal implications of this unprecedented asymmetry of knowledge and power, comparing the rise of surveillance capitalism to the historical rise of industrial capitalism, but highlighting its uniquely psychological threat. She calls for a collective awakening and political resistance against this digital coup, urging society to reclaim the digital future from unaccountable corporate entities and reassert human dignity, privacy, and self-determination over algorithmic control.

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Shoshana ZuboffView all books →

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