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 our behavior.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.
But surveillance capitalism isn’t a totalizing system: consumers do have choices here, at least when it comes to consumer apps.... There are companies that have even made privacy their distinguishing feature. And consumers respond pretty consistently: I will take free with surveillance over paid with privacy.
“Surveillance capitalism has taken human experience, specifically private human experience, and unilaterally claimed it as something to be bought and sold in the marketplace,” Dr. Zuboff told me during a visit to The Times’s office.
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.
"Many adjectives
could be used to describe Shoshana Zuboff's latest book: groundbreaking,
magisterial, alarming, alarmist, preposterous. One will do: unmissable... As we
grope around in the darkness trying to grasp the contours of our digital era, The
Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines a searing light on how this latest
revolution is transforming our economy, politics, society - and lives."—John Thornhill,FINANCIAL TIMES
"Extraordinarily
intelligent... Absorbing Zuboff's methodical determination, the way she pieces
together sundry examples into this comprehensive work of scholarship and
synthesis, requires patience, but the rewards are considerable - a heightened
sense of awareness, and a deeper appreciation of what's at stake. A business
model that seeks growth by cataloging our 'every move, emotion, utterance and
desire' is too radical to be taken for granted. As Zuboff repeatedly says near
the end of the book, 'It is not O.K.'"—Jennifer
Szalai, NEW YORK TIMES
"The rare volume that puts a name on a problem just as it becomes critical... This book's major contribution is to give a name to what's happening, to put it in cultural and historical perspective, and to ask us to pause long enough to think about the future and how it might be different from today."—Frank Rose, WALL
STREET JOURNAL
"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."—Nicholas
Carr, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
"An intensively
researched, engagingly written chronicle of surveillance capitalism's origins
and its deleterious prospects for our society... [Zuboff's] after something
bigger, providing a scaffolding of critical thinking from which to examine the
great crises of the digital age... This is the rare book that we should trust to
lead us down the long hard road of understanding."—Jacob Silverman, NEW
YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Karl Marx's "Capital." Zuboff's book deserves these comparisons and more: Like the former, it's an alarming exposé about how business interests have poisoned our world, and like the latter, it provides a framework to understand and combat that poison. But The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, named for the now-popular term Zuboff herself coined five years ago, is also a masterwork of horror. It's hard to recall a book that left me as haunted as Zuboff's, with its descriptions of the gothic algorithmic daemons that follow us at nearly every instant of every hour of every day to suck us dry of metadata. Even those who've made an effort to track the technology that tracks us over the last decade or so will be chilled to their core by Zuboff, unable to look at their surroundings the same way."—Sam Biddle, THE INTERCEPT
"The
Age of Surveillance Capitalism is brilliant and essential. Shoshana Zuboff
reveals capitalism's most dangerous frontier with stunning clarity: The new
economic order of surveillance capitalism founded on extreme inequalities
of knowledge and power. Her sweeping analysis demonstrates the unprecedented
challenges to human autonomy, social solidarity, and democracy perpetrated by
this rogue capitalism. Zuboff's book finally empowers us to understand and
fight these threats effectively--a
masterpiece of rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and deeply
urgent." —Robert
B. Reich, author of The Common Good
and Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not
the Few
"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."—Naomi Klein, author of This
Changes Everything and No Logo,
and Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers
University
"Zuboff's
expansive, erudite, deeply-researched exploration of digital futures elucidates
the norms and hidden terminal goals of information-intensive industries. Zuboff's book is the information industry's
Silent Spring."—Chris
Hoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley
"My mind is blown on every page by the depth of Shoshana's research, the breadth of her knowledge, the rigor of her intellect, and finally by the power of her arguments. I'm not sure we can end the age of surveillance capitalism without her help, and that's why I believe this is the most important book of our time."—Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economy, editor-in-chief, Linux Journal
"In
the future, if people still read books, they will view this as the classic study of how everything
changed. The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism is amasterpiece
that stunningly reveals the essence of twenty-first-century society, and offers
a dire warning about technology gone awry that we ignore at our peril. Shoshana
Zuboff has somehow escaped from the fishbowl in which we all now live, and
introduced to us the concept of water. A work of penetrating intellect, this is
also a deeply human book about what is becoming, as it relentlessly
demonstrates, a dangerously inhuman time."—Kevin Werbach, The
Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust
"A panoramic exploration of one of the most urgent
issues of our times,
Zuboff reinterprets contemporary capitalism through the prism of the digital
revolution, producing a book of immense ambition and erudition. Zuboff is one
of our most prescient and profound thinkers on the rise of the digital. In an
age of inane Twitter soundbites and narcissistic Facebook posts, Zuboff's
serious scholarship is great cause for celebration."—Andrew
Keen, author of How to Fix the Future
"Zuboff is a strikingly original voice, simultaneously bold and wise, eloquent and passionate, learned and accessible. Read this book to understand the inner workings of today's digital capitalism, its threats to twenty-first century society, and the reforms we must make for a better tomorrow."—Frank Pasquale, University of Maryland Carey School of Law, Author of The Black Box Society
"Shoshana Zuboff has
produced the most provocative compelling moral framework thus far for
understanding the new realities of our digital environment and its
anti-democratic threats. From now on, all serious writings on the internet
and society will have to take into account with The Age of Surveillance
Capitalism."—Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Chair
Professor, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania
"The defining challenge for the future of the market
economy is the concentration of data, knowledge, and surveillance power. Not
just our privacy but our individuality is at stake, and this very readable and thought-provoking
book alerts us to these existential dangers. Highly recommended."—Daron
Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail
"I
will make a guarantee: Assuming we survive to tell the tale, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has a high probability of
joining the likes Adam Smith's The Wealth
of Nations and Max Weber's Economy
and Society as defining social-economics texts of modern times. It is
not a 'quick read'; it is to be savored and re-read and discussed with
colleagues and friends. No zippy one-liners from me, except to almost literally
beg you to read/ingest this book."—Tom
Peters, coauthor of In Search of Excellence
"A book that no tech
industry official will want the American public to read... One of the true joys
of this insanely brilliant, deeply unsettling book is how fluidly Ms. Zuboff's
style incorporates jargon, analogy, research and memoir."—PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE
"The most ambitious
attempt yet to paint the bigger picture and to explain how the effects of
digitisation that we are now experiencing as individuals and citizens have come
about... A continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl
Polanyi and-dare I say it-Karl Marx... A striking and illuminating book."—THE OBSERVER
"Eye-opening...she raises questions about businesses that mine personal data, manipulate our desires for instantaneous information, and encourage us to narcissistically display our egos and foibles on social media platforms."—SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
