surveillance capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff  · 15 Jan 2019  · 918pp  · 257,605 words

their content) that are not owned by the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zuboff, Shoshana, 1951- author. Title: The age of surveillance capitalism : the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power / Shoshana Zuboff. Description: First edition. | New York : PublicAffairs, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references

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It is about the darkening of the digital dream and its rapid mutation into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism. III. What Is Surveillance Capitalism? Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or

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our societies, our democracies, and our emerging information civilization are examined in detail in the coming chapters. The evidence and reasoning employed here suggest that surveillance capitalism is a rogue force driven by novel economic imperatives that disregard social norms and nullify the elemental rights associated with individual autonomy that are essential

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key battleground upon which the possibility of a human future at the new frontier of power will be contested. IV. The Unprecedented One explanation for surveillance capitalism’s many triumphs floats above them all: it is unprecedented. The unprecedented is necessarily unrecognizable. When we encounter something unprecedented, we automatically interpret it

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society, and imposing a totalizing collectivist vision of life in the hive, with surveillance capitalists and their data priesthood in charge of oversight and control. Surveillance capitalism and its rapidly accumulating instrumentarian power exceed the historical norms of capitalist ambitions, claiming dominion over human, societal, and political territories that range far beyond

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years of experience in high-technology corporations and startups, primarily in Silicon Valley. These interviews were conducted as I developed my “ground truth” understanding of surveillance capitalism and its material infrastructure. Early on I approached a small number of highly respected data scientists, senior software developers, and specialists in the “internet

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predictions that were sometimes right; His lucky guesses were rewarded well. —W. H. AUDEN SONNETS FROM CHINA, VI I. Google: The Pioneer of Surveillance Capitalism Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism. New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered

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“Data extraction and analysis,” Varian writes, “is what everyone is talking about when they talk about big data.” “Data” are the raw material necessary for surveillance capitalism’s novel manufacturing processes. “Extraction” describes the social relations and material infrastructure with which the firm asserts authority over those raw materials to achieve economies

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logic of accumulation that also introduces its own distinctive laws of motion. Here and in following chapters, we will examine these foundational dynamics, including surveillance capitalism’s idiosyncratic economic imperatives defined by extraction and prediction, its unique approach to economies of scale and scope in raw-material supply, its necessary construction

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differences for capitalism in these two moments of originality at Ford and Google. Ford’s inventions revolutionized production. Google’s inventions revolutionized extraction and established surveillance capitalism’s first economic imperative: the extraction imperative. The extraction imperative meant that raw-material supplies must be procured at an ever-expanding scale. Industrial capitalism

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fabric of Facebook’s online culture, where they could “invite” users into a “conversation.”88 VIII. Summarizing the Logic and Operations of Surveillance Capitalism With Google in the lead, surveillance capitalism rapidly became the default model of information capitalism on the web and, as we shall see in coming chapters, gradually drew competitors from

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shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks. CHAPTER FIVE THE ELABORATION OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM: KIDNAP, CORNER, COMPETE All words like Peace and Love, all sane affirmative speech, had been soiled, profaned, debased to a horrid mechanical screech. —W.

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are threatened as the division of learning drifts into pathology and injustice at the hands of the unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism has achieved. Surveillance capitalism’s command of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of the two texts. The specific mechanisms of

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predicting, regulating, or prohibiting the activities of surveillance capitalists will fall short. The primary frameworks through which our societies have sought to assert control over surveillance capitalism’s audacity are those of “privacy rights” and “monopoly.” Neither the pursuit of privacy regulations nor the imposition of constraints on traditional monopoly practices has

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the prediction imperative insists on surplus culled from these new flows and surveillance capitalists fill the front seats of the classroom of digital omniscience. IV. Surveillance Capitalism’s Realpolitik Waning levels of government leadership and funding for “ubiquitous computing” leave the technology companies to lead in basic research and applications, each

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conducive to a democracy. And fundamentally, information warfare is not conducive to democracy.85 This “warfare” and its structure of invasion and conquest represent surveillance capitalism’s standard operating procedures to which billions of innocents are subjected each day, as rendition operations violate all boundaries and modification operations claim dominion over

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are for them and how profitable certain behaviors are for us. Although it is still possible to imagine automated behavioral modification without surveillance capitalism, it is not possible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the marriage of behavior modification and the technological means to automate its application. This marriage is essential to economies of action

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therefore, it was espoused, could design highly effective plans.14 Varian deftly swaps out socialism’s “new man” and installs instead a market defined by surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives, expressed through a ubiquitous computational architecture, the machine intelligence capabilities to which data are continuously supplied, the analytics that discern patterns,

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that keep us ignorant of its practices, and to insist on the conditions of lawlessness required for these operations. These declarations institutionalized surveillance capitalism as a market form. 3. Historical context: Surveillance capitalism found shelter in the neoliberal zeitgeist that equated government regulation of business with tyranny. This “paranoid style” favored self-management regimes

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the latent needs of second-modernity individuals seeking resources for effective life in an increasingly hostile institutional environment. Once bitten, the apple was irresistible. As surveillance capitalism spread across the internet, the means of social participation become coextensive with the means of behavioral modification. The exploitation of second-modernity needs that enabled

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computer mediation—devices, apps, connection—enters the scene in a relentless deluge of inevitabilist rhetoric, successfully distracting us from the highly intentional and historically contingent surveillance capitalism within. New institutional facts proliferate and stabilize the new practices. We fall into resignation and a sense of helplessness. 14. The ideology of human frailty

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monitors, computes, and modifies human behavior. Big Other combines these functions of knowing and doing to achieve a pervasive and unprecedented means of behavioral modification. Surveillance capitalism’s economic logic is directed through Big Other’s vast capabilities to produce instrumentarian power, replacing the engineering of souls with the engineering of behavior

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a full-blown instrumentarian society based on the pervasive outfitting and measurement of human behavior for the purposes of modification, control, and—in light of surveillance capitalism’s commercial dominance of the networked sphere—profit. Pentland insists that “social phenomena are really just aggregations of billions of small transactions between individuals.…”

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tighten their grasp, and the system flourishes. Industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognize. Surveillance capitalism, I have suggested, depends instead upon the exploitation and control of human nature. The market reduces us to our behavior, transformed into another fictional

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toward certainty and the promise of guaranteed outcomes. These operations mean that the supply and demand of behavioral futures markets are rendered in infinite detail. Surveillance capitalism thus replaces mystery with certainty as it substitutes rendition, behavioral modification, and prediction for the old “unsurveyable pattern.” This is a fundamental reversal of

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-value movement and globalization went a long way toward destroying this centuries-old social contract between capitalism and its communities, substituting formal indifference for reciprocity. Surveillance capitalism goes further. It not only jettisons Smith, but it also formally rescinds any remaining reciprocities with its societies. First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely

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a few examples—social relations are no longer founded on mutual exchange. In these and many other instances, products and services are merely hosts for surveillance capitalism’s parasitic operations. Second, by historical standards the large surveillance capitalists employ relatively few people compared to their unprecedented computational resources. This pattern, in

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professional journalism on the internet. Both corporations inserted themselves between publishers and their populations, subjecting journalistic “content” to the same categories of equivalence that dominate surveillance capitalism’s other landscapes. In a formal sense, professional journalism is the precise opposite of radical indifference. The journalist’s job is to produce news and

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as those forces learn to exploit the blind eye of radical indifference and escalate the perversion of learning in an open society. IV. What Is Surveillance Capitalism? Surveillance capitalism’s successful claims to freedom and knowledge, its structural independence from people, its collectivist ambitions, and the radical indifference that is necessitated, enabled, and

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a special issue of the Journal of Information Technology devoted to the theme of “big data,” they enthusiastically embraced my first academic paper on surveillance capitalism, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” and helped speed its way to publication. Special thanks to the Senior Scholars of the International Conference

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BusinessWeek.com and Fast Company. strategy+business magazine named Zuboff one of the eleven most original business thinkers in the world. Her 2015 article on surveillance capitalism, “Big Other,” received the Best Paper Award from the International Conference on Information Systems. For more information, see shoshanazuboff.com. @shoshanazuboff Praise for The

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I. Human Natural Resources II. The Cry Freedom Strategy III. Shelter: The Neoliberal Legacy IV. Shelter: Surveillance Exceptionalism V. Fortifications CHAPTER FIVE The Elaboration of Surveillance Capitalism: Kidnap, Corner, Compete I. The Extraction Imperative II. Cornered III. The Dispossession Cycle Stage One: Incursion Stage Two: Habituation Stage Three: Adaptation Stage Four:

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EIGHTEEN A Coup from Above I. Freedom and Knowledge II. After Reciprocity III. The New Collectivism and Its Masters of Radical Indifference IV. What Is Surveillance Capitalism? V. Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy VI. Be the Friction NOTES CHAPTER ONE 1. Martin Hilbert, “Technological Information Inequality as an Incessantly Moving Target: The Redistribution of Information

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modernity; second modernity; third modernity Mohammed, Jahangir, 227 Monarchical Edict of 1513 (Requirimiento), 178 Monitor, 325 monopoly (antitrust): as category that falls short in contesting surveillance capitalism, 14, 23, 194, 344, 486; as means of cornering behavioral surplus supply routes, 132–138 moral life of civilization: shaped by practices of capitalism,

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and industrial capitalism, 94, 345–346, 470, 515 Nazism, 355 neofeudalism, 44 neoliberalism: as shelter for rise of surveillance capitalism, 101, 107–112, 341; surveillance capitalism’s origins in, 504–505 neoliberal market economics, 37–41; helps surveillance capitalism flourish, 54; increase in inequalities under, 42–45; vs individualization, 18, 37. See also Friedman, Milton; Hayek

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with social media, 462, 466–467; mental health consequences of, 463–465, 466–467; operating through privatized digital spaces, 456 social connection: dependent upon surveillance capitalism, 383, 455–456; surveillance capitalism offers, 383 “social credit” system, China’s, 388–394 social Darwinism, 106 social efficiency (Pentland), 429, 438 social graphs: Facebook’s, 92,

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387–388; Microsoft patent for preempting human behavior, 412; and Pentland’s work on sociometrics, 425; use of social media, 173–174, 386, 388, 393 surveillance capital, 94 surveillance capitalism: awareness as threat to, 307–308; dressed up in rhetoric of empowerment, 10; emergence of, 52–55; expansion into offline world, 10, 19–20

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Taínos (indigenous people), 12, 177–178, 193 targeted applications, 217, 250 Tea Act (1773), 503 TechCrunch, 317, 318, 458–459 technological “drift,” 226 technologies, surveillance capitalism confused with (“puppet master vs puppet”), 14–17, 238, 352, 376 technology addiction, hand-and-glove relationship of, 449–453 technology of human behavior, 369

The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence

by Kate Crawford  · 5 Apr 2021  · 355pp  · 89,587 words

infrastructure, the specific meaning or context of an image or a video is assumed to be irrelevant. Beyond the serious issues of privacy and ongoing surveillance capitalism, the current practices of working with data in AI raise profound ethical, methodological, and epistemological concerns.33 And how is all this data used? In

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their work critiquing surveillance and facial recognition itself, including documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras; digital rights activist Jillian York; critic Evgeny Morozov; and the author of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff.46 Even when datasets are scrubbed of personal information and released with great caution, people have been reidentified or highly sensitive details about

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. For more on crowdworkers, see Gray and Suri, Ghost Work; and Roberts, Behind the Screen. 32. Canales, Tenth of a Second. 33. Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 34. Cetina, Epistemic Cultures, 3. 35. “Emotion Detection and Recognition (EDR) Market Size.” 36. Nelson, Tu, and Hines, “Introduction,” 5. 37. Danowski and de Castro

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[cs.CV], December 27, 2017. https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.09531. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019. ———. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75

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Shipping Council, 47 x.ai (digital personal assistant firm), 65 XRVision Sentinel AI, 177 York, Jillian, 110 YouTube, 119 ytterbium, 33 yttrium, 33 Zuboff, Shoshana: Surveillance Capitalism, 110

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel  · 24 Mar 2026  · 348pp  · 103,246 words

by the Federal Trade Commission, to regulate the Internet and protect users’ privacy. It ended abruptly with 9/11. In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, MIT professor Shoshana Zuboff describes how “the elective affinity between public intelligence agencies and the fledgling surveillance capitalist Google blossomed in the heat of emergency

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-Baptiste Colbert, who pioneered the techniques of the information state, collected only those records he considered relevant to the government. By contrast, the logic of surveillance capitalism driving companies such as Google and Facebook followed the National Security Agency’s drive to “collect it all.” That reflected an economic property of data

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, November 6, 2007, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2007/11/07/bfc81b13-cbeb-4757-bc03-3a81f81efbae/. “the elective affinity” Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2019), 115. “new state-society partnerships” Nathan Pinkoski, “Actually Existing Postliberalism

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German commission A fuller account of Google’s mapping process and its implications for privacy and social engineering can be found in Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, chapter 5. “long history of mapmaking” Matthew B. Crawford, “Seeing Like Google: Mapmaking as an Instrument of Empire,” Archedelia (Substack), May 18, 2023, https://mcrawford

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) Ada (algorithm) Adams, John Quincy administration, use of the term Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) Afghanistan US withdrawal from war in Agent Orange Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The (Zuboff) Aldridge, Edward Alexander, Keith algorithms Ali, Muhammad Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) Alien Enemies Act (1798) Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) “All Watched

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist

by Liz Pelly  · 7 Jan 2025  · 293pp  · 104,461 words

you have within the Spotify app is going to be recorded.” As a twenty-first-century social media user, familiar with the basic concepts of surveillance capitalism—what the author Shoshana Zuboff calls “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction

The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (And Who Benefits)

by Maximilian Kasy  · 15 Jan 2025  · 209pp  · 63,332 words

has motivated the Harvard Business School social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff to describe the way that the tech industry operates as a new form of capitalism: surveillance capitalism. Data in the public domain—created for public benefit by countless writers, researchers, coders, and artists—are a second source. Public domain data are available

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. Oxford University Press, 1995. Wright, E. O. How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century. Verso, 2019. Zuboff, S. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile, 2019. Part IV: Regulating Algorithms Acemoglu, D., and D. Autor. “Skills, Tasks

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, 26–27 stochastic gradient descent, 49 stock options, 126 stratified sampling, 198 supervised learning, 10, 29–36. See also deep learning; prediction; self-supervised learning surveillance capitalism, 85 survey responses, 136–38 Sweden, 158–60 Swedish Trade Union Confederation, 159 symbolic paradigm, 44 taste-based discrimination, 166–69 TD-Gammon, 61, 63

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

. What once sounded paranoid—the idea that every online action could be tracked and weaponized—suddenly became undeniable. By 2018, Shoshana Zuboff coined the term surveillance capitalism to describe these practices, framing targeted advertising as an “assault on human autonomy” and a “coup from above.” In light of these new developments, the

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TEXT “logical end of this”: Morozov, “Two Decades of the Web.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “assault on human autonomy”: Joanna Kavenna, “Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Surveillance Capitalism Is an Assault on Human Autonomy,’ ” Guardian, October 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/shoshana-zuboff

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-surveillance-capitalism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “catalysed awareness”: “AI and Problems of Scale,” Benedict Evans, April 29, 2024, https://www.

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., 84 Sun Yitian, 252 Super Bowl, 46, 185, 241–42, 271 “Superthug” (song), 28 Supreme, 31, 130, 247, 249–50, 251 Surowiecki, James, 84–85 surveillance capitalism, 163 Survivor (TV series), 74–76, 180 Sweeney, Sydney, 215 Sweetie Pie (film), 44 Swifties, 172–73, 176, 178 Swift, Scott, 217–18 Swift, Taylor

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by Sebastian Mallaby;  · 30 Mar 2026  · 607pp  · 161,998 words

foreign tech behemoth like Google was especially neuralgic. A new kind of technophobia was stirring, centered not on folk politics but on an opposition to surveillance capitalism. “Don’t you realize you have miscalculated?” somebody asked Suleyman. “We British are very patriotic about the NHS.” “I am British and I am very

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

by Tim Wu  · 4 Nov 2025  · 246pp  · 65,143 words

convincing people to click on ads. The most striking version of this theory comes from the work of Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. That book, published in 2019, draws on Zuboff’s experience as a graduate student working with B. F. Skinner, the most famous behavioral theorist of

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(2013–2027),” Oberlo, accessed November 22, 2024, https://www.oberlo.com/​statistics/​google-ad-revenue. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Cecilia Rikap, Capitalism, Power and Innovation: Intellectual Monopoly Capitalism Uncovered (New York: Routledge, 2021). BACK TO

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, 45, 85–87, 169 revenue, 8, 52–53, 85 vs. users, competing interests between, 45, 52–53, 67–68 aerospace industry, 35 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff), 87 AI. See artificial intelligence Akerlof, George, 16 Alcoa, 28 AlexNet, 93 allegiance to brand, 72, 100–102 Altman, Sam, 6, 94, 142–43

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now associated with the current web2 environment, and the immersive properties of the Metaverse could raise significant threats to human agency and human rights as ‘surveillance capitalism’ expands and authoritarian governments take advantage of these new technologies. We take both of these starting points very seriously, and in this book we will

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

by Anu Bradford  · 25 Sep 2023  · 898pp  · 236,779 words

democracy, and nurturing an egalitarian and inclusive communitarian culture, the internet has also been used repeatedly to diminish these values, creating an ecosystem in which surveillance capitalism can thrive and societal divides deepen.2 Mitigating the individual and societal harms that arise from the internet is just one piece of the broader

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companies relates to their collection of user data as part of their business model and the impact of that data collection on user privacy. This “surveillance capitalism” describes how tech companies extract vast data on their users’ private lives and commercialize that information through targeted advertising, which threatens those people’s rights

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, the battle has primarily focused on safeguarding the fundamental rights of European citizens in a globalized world.48 The EU is seeking to rein in surveillance capitalism and protect European citizens from being exploited by US tech giants. But the EU is also seeking to protect Europeans from American and Chinese government

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privacy and individual autonomy on a daily basis. These platforms engage in what Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism,” extracting users’ data for commercial gain and compromising their “decisional privacy” in the process.186 This surveillance capitalism enables behavioral advertising and other forms of manipulation, which then subvert individual choice, liberty, and self-governance

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about achieving greater strategic autonomy. For example, it is not clear Europeans actually want a “European Google” if that requires submitting to the company’s “surveillance capitalism” in ways that compromises individuals’ fundamental rights to data privacy. Europeans are also not prepared to adopt the Chinese model of surveillance even if that

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necessary in today’s society, lending further support to the EU model. The European regulatory model also protects internet users’ privacy more than the extensive “surveillance capitalism” enabled by the American market-driven model, where tech companies track internet users’ every move online and acquire a trove of personal data that they

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for years and decades to come, including whether we, as humans, control technology or whether technology and its providers control and exploit us—and whether surveillance capitalism, digital authoritarianism, or liberal democratic values will prevail as a foundation for human engagement and for our society as we advance further into the digital

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Media Good or Bad for Democracy?, Sur: Int’l J. on Hum. Rts. 83, 84–87 (2018). 2.See generally Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019). 3.Alison Beard, Can Big Tech Be Disrupted?, Harv. Bus. Rev., Jan

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Scandal Omits Why It Delayed Investigating, TechCrunch (Mar. 21, 2018), https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/21/zuckerberg-cambridge-analytica/. 186.Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the Frontier of a New Power 17 (2019). 187.Karl Manheim & Lyric Kaplan, Artificial Intelligence: Risks to Privacy

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-revitalize-european-democracy-pub-77806. 76.David Kaye, Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet 13 (2019). 77.Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). 78.Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions on

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Media Good or Bad for Democracy?, 15 Sur: Int’l J. on Hum. Rts. 83, 84–87 (2018). 21.See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power 8–12 (2019). 22.See Sheera Frenkel, Whistleblower Discusses How Instagram May Lead

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, 134–35 Sudan, 297–98 Sugon, 161–62 Sullivan, Jake, 209, 251–52, 351 Summit of Democracy, 390 Sun Jiandong, 80 Sunstein, Cass, 64–65 surveillance capitalism, 4, 66, 135–36, 368–69 surveillance imperialism, 17 surveillance technology(-ies) AI-driven, 85, 293 Chinese, 77–91, 297–98, 314–20 citizen response

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Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again

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The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes  · 28 Jan 2025  · 359pp  · 100,761 words

Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age

by Vauhini Vara  · 8 Apr 2025  · 301pp  · 105,209 words

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire

by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson  · 14 Apr 2020  · 491pp  · 141,690 words

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot

by Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy  · 14 Apr 2020

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines

by William Davidow and Michael Malone  · 18 Feb 2020  · 304pp  · 80,143 words

The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism

by Adrian Wooldridge  · 7 Apr 2026  · 342pp  · 129,097 words

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

by Evgeny Morozov  · 15 Nov 2013  · 606pp  · 157,120 words

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)

by Benjamin Peters  · 2 Jun 2016  · 518pp  · 107,836 words

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

by Maria Ressa  · 19 Oct 2022

Badvertising

by Andrew Simms  · 314pp  · 81,529 words

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain

by William Davies  · 28 Sep 2020  · 210pp  · 65,833 words

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children

by Susan Linn  · 12 Sep 2022  · 415pp  · 102,982 words

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

by Stuart Russell  · 7 Oct 2019  · 416pp  · 112,268 words

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider  · 10 Sep 2018  · 326pp  · 91,559 words

The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians

by Denise Hearn and Vass Bednar  · 14 Oct 2024  · 175pp  · 46,192 words

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

by Kyle Chayka  · 15 Jan 2024  · 321pp  · 105,480 words

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

by James Bridle  · 6 Apr 2022  · 502pp  · 132,062 words

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)

by Jamie Bartlett  · 4 Apr 2018  · 170pp  · 49,193 words

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

by Christopher Wylie  · 8 Oct 2019

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?

by Brett Christophers  · 17 Nov 2020  · 614pp  · 168,545 words

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car

by Anthony M. Townsend  · 15 Jun 2020  · 362pp  · 97,288 words

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance

by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge  · 29 Mar 2020  · 159pp  · 42,401 words

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News

by Eric Berkowitz  · 3 May 2021  · 412pp  · 115,048 words

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street

by Jackson Lears

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination

by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang  · 12 Jul 2021  · 372pp  · 100,947 words

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World

by David Sax  · 15 Jan 2022  · 282pp  · 93,783 words

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans

by Eben Kirksey  · 10 Nov 2020  · 599pp  · 98,564 words

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State

by Jill Lepore  · 24 Aug 2026  · 363pp  · 122,400 words

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

by Peter Geoghegan  · 2 Jan 2020  · 388pp  · 111,099 words

The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here

by Nicole Kobie  · 3 Jul 2024  · 348pp  · 119,358 words

Humankind: A Hopeful History

by Rutger Bregman  · 1 Jun 2020  · 578pp  · 131,346 words

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation

by Kevin Roose  · 9 Mar 2021  · 208pp  · 57,602 words

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs

by Kerry Howley  · 21 Mar 2023

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy

by Andrew Yang  · 15 Nov 2021

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

by Mark O'Connell  · 13 Apr 2020  · 213pp  · 70,742 words

Uncharted: How to Map the Future

by Margaret Heffernan  · 20 Feb 2020  · 335pp  · 97,468 words

AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications

by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt  · 31 Dec 2023  · 321pp  · 113,564 words

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It

by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge  · 1 Sep 2020  · 134pp  · 41,085 words

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent

by Joseph E. Stiglitz  · 22 Apr 2019  · 462pp  · 129,022 words

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business

by Ken Auletta  · 4 Jun 2018  · 379pp  · 109,223 words

Facebook: The Inside Story

by Steven Levy  · 25 Feb 2020  · 706pp  · 202,591 words

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future

by Orly Lobel  · 17 Oct 2022  · 370pp  · 112,809 words

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals

by Oliver Bullough  · 10 Mar 2022  · 257pp  · 80,698 words

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

by Kathryn Paige Harden  · 20 Sep 2021  · 375pp  · 102,166 words

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World

by Dambisa Moyo  · 3 May 2021  · 272pp  · 76,154 words

Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives

by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman  · 2 Mar 2021  · 332pp  · 100,245 words

Don't Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape From Big Tech

by Claire Stapleton  · 3 Aug 2026  · 299pp  · 89,604 words

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back

by Bruce Schneier  · 7 Feb 2023  · 306pp  · 82,909 words

Equality

by Darrin M. McMahon  · 14 Nov 2023  · 534pp  · 166,876 words

The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto

by Benjamin Wallace  · 18 Mar 2025  · 431pp  · 116,274 words

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart

by Nicholas Carr  · 28 Jan 2025  · 231pp  · 85,135 words

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

by Adam Aleksic  · 15 Jul 2025  · 278pp  · 71,701 words

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City

by Richard Sennett  · 9 Apr 2018

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It

by Stuart Maconie  · 5 Mar 2020  · 300pp  · 106,520 words

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

by Martin Kleppmann  · 16 Mar 2017  · 1,237pp  · 227,370 words

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno

by Nancy Jo Sales  · 17 May 2021  · 445pp  · 135,648 words

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

by Martin Kleppmann  · 17 Apr 2017

Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now

by Vincent Ialenti  · 22 Sep 2020  · 224pp  · 69,593 words

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives

by Chris Stedman  · 19 Oct 2020  · 307pp  · 101,998 words

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple  · 9 Sep 2019  · 812pp  · 205,147 words

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World

by Adrian Wooldridge  · 2 Jun 2021  · 693pp  · 169,849 words

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

by J. Bradford Delong  · 6 Apr 2020  · 593pp  · 183,240 words

Greater: Britain After the Storm

by Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis  · 19 May 2021  · 516pp  · 116,875 words

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

by Mark Bergen  · 5 Sep 2022  · 642pp  · 141,888 words

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century

by Rodrigo Aguilera  · 10 Mar 2020  · 356pp  · 106,161 words