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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
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.
Shoshana Zuboff’s interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and democratization?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the twenty-first century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
Shoshana Zuboff’s interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and democratization?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the twenty-first century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
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Reader Reviews
Praise
"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
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"From the very first page I was consumed
with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book as 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
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"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
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"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
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"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 a masterpiece
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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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"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
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Selected as one of the top ten titles in Business & Economics for Spring 2018.—Publishers Weekly
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