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 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

The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism

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

newest fashions. But the arrival of the latest iteration of capitalism is giving those worries real substance. Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018), argues that we have seen the birth of a new form of capitalism ‘that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial

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Yoshida, Shigeru 102 Young, Michael: The Rise of the Meritocracy 144 Zaire 125 Zito, Salena 288 Zollverein customs union 69 Zuboff, Shoshana: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism 208 Zuckerberg, Mark 137, 204, 214, 216 Zweig, Stefan 281; The World of Yesterday 83 Zyklon B gas 201 THE REVOLUTIONARY CENTER Pegasus Books, Ltd

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence

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 Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism

by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias  · 19 Aug 2019  · 458pp  · 116,832 words

and Capitalism Why is it that so far we have talked simply of capitalism and not digital capitalism, informational capitalism, communicative capitalism, platform capitalism, or surveillance capitalism, to name some rival terms?131 The reason is straightforward. No convincing argument has yet been made that capitalism today is anything other than what

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of information” is growing.132 Surveillance is certainly part of this, again as we have emphasized, but not sufficiently to brand today’s capitalism as surveillance capitalism. For, within the longer history of colonialism and capitalism, surveillance has often been the accompaniment to the direct appropriation of laboring bodies for value (think

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Stop It. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2011. Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89. Zuboff, Shoshana. In the Age of the Smart

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets

by Brett Scott  · 4 Jul 2022  · 308pp  · 85,850 words

digital corporations require remote digital money. Digital money underpinned by the banking sector is laying the foundations for the next stage of both US-dominated surveillance capitalism and its Chinese counterpart (which has higher state involvement but seeks the same outward expansion of its digital tech giants). The digital payments industry, however

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your overheated car on a patch of crumbling highway, with no mobile Internet to help you. The slow absorption of rural South Africa into transnational surveillance capitalism is a process that will take some time, but will lead to the end of the Kerouac world there too. This ongoing process is the

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transform the bars of the iron cage into a fine transnational digital mesh. This is what we are currently experiencing in the creep of automated surveillance capitalism, which is given different names depending on where it creeps: in cities it is called ‘smart cities’, in our homes ‘smart homes’, in our bodies

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constant resetting of expectations we have with each technological change, and the trade-offs built into it. Primary among these trade-offs in modern digital surveillance capitalism is that the technologies we are increasingly addicted to are permanently and directly plugged into powerful corporations and governments. As the process of tying people

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to address them more closely, after which I will discuss paths we may take going forward. The contradictory bind When describing the rise of automated surveillance capitalism, it is easy to point out its various dangers, but something more subtle drives my own discomfort. It is the pervasive feeling of inauthenticity that

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any personal agency when it comes to defining how this fusion will play out, but the intuitive desire to fend off the creep of hyperconnected surveillance capitalism still drives many counter-reactions. In this vein, we should expect to see our cryptocurrency ‘protestants’ continue to imagine an exit to a non-state

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road

by Matthew B. Crawford  · 8 Jun 2020  · 386pp  · 113,709 words

behind the promised driverless revolution, we have to come to grips with something genuinely new in the world, and that is the rise of surveillance capitalism. DRIVERLESS CARS AND SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM The short version is this: when automakers started turning their cars into data vacuums, sucking up gobs of data about your movements through

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last twenty-five years, and even contributed a few of my own. But it was only upon reading Shoshana Zuboff’s masterwork The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published in 2019, that the big picture came into view. What follows is heavily indebted to her work, both the details and the larger frame

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. Let’s start with the big picture of surveillance capitalism and some definitions, and work our way to the implications for internet-mediated mobility. Zuboff is emerita professor at Harvard Business School. She writes

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: 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 service improvement,

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will have to justify their cost purely on their own merits, and meeting this market niche will be a boutique operation. Presumably the captains of surveillance capitalism will populate their own lives with such dumb stuff, just as they currently send their children to special schools from which devices with screens are

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modification pioneered by B. F. Skinner. Zuboff parses Pokémon Go! as a sort of proof-of-concept experiment for working out the next stage of surveillance capitalism, in which ubiquitous computing—the saturation of the material world with digital devices—serves not merely to gather behavioral data for the sake of predicting

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.co.uk/technology/google/5130068/Google-will-carry-on-with-camera-cars-despite-privacy-complaints-over-street-views.html. 2.Shoshanna Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2018), p. 44. 3.Zuboff, Age of

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Surveillance Capitalism, p. 48. 4.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, pp. 146–50. 5.James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 53. 6.Scott gives

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gradient—of personal knowledge—along which to conduct this labor arbitrage. See Horan, “Uber’s Path of Destruction,” pp. 109–110. 10.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 152. A GLORIOUS, COLLISIONLESS MANNER OF LIVING 1.Here I rely on an unpublished manuscript by Thomas S. Schrock, who parses the perversity of

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Work,” July 9, 2014, Arvind Narayanan—Princeton (personal website), http://randomwalker.info/publications/no-silver-bullet-de-identification.pdf, as cited in Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 245. 3.Jennifer Valentino-deVries et al., “Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They’re Not Keeping It Secret,” New York

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/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html. 4.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 8 (emphases in original). 5.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, pp. 217–218. 6.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 238. 7.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 201. 8.Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 240. 9.Monte Zweben, “Life-Pattern Marketing: Intercept People in

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Their Daily Routines,” SeeSaw Networks, March 2009, as cited in Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 243. 10.Dyani Sabin, “The Secret History of ‘Pokémon GO,’ as Told by Creator John Hanke,” Inverse, February 28, 2017, https://www.inverse.com/

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-based social graph.” See Joseph Bernstein, “You Should Probably Check Your Pokémon Go Privacy Settings,” Buzzfeed, July 11, 2016, as cited in Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p. 317. CONCLUDING REMARKS: SOVEREIGNTY ON THE ROAD 1.Further, license plate readers are being installed on those digital road signs you may have noticed

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’s Adult Soapbox Derby aerial combats, 173–176 affection for the present, 82 affective capitalism, 114 Afghanistan, 229 Agape Baptist Church, 201 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff), 302–303 air quality, 75–79 airbag deployment, 86, 88 airbags, 90–91, 95, 96–97 air-cooled Volkswagens. See also Volkswagen Beetle folk

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–5 realizing full potential of, 7–8 road infrastructure for, 43 sharing control with, 104–105 as smart device, 304 smooth-flowing mobility of, 277 surveillance capitalism and, 301–308 Volvo Concept 26, 39–40 driver-road mediation, 111 drivers. See also driving attentional capacity, 103–104 attitudes toward automobiles, 41–42

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–266 resentments provoked by, 271–272 Subaru transmissions, 156 Super Squish pistons, 146–147 superior drivers, 254 Surry, Virginia, 191 surveillance and coercion, 306–307 surveillance capitalism behavioral data and, 302 driverless cars and, 301–308 location data and, 301 prediction products and, 302–303 sustained habitation, 274 tandem drift, 167–168

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI

by Frank Pasquale  · 14 May 2020  · 1,172pp  · 114,305 words

merit of social harmony and cohesion, such frozen order is an affront to freedom and judgment. POSITIVE OPTIONS FOR ROBOTIC HELPERS If regulators can tame surveillance capitalism’s omnivorous appetite for data and control, robotic assistance could play a positive role in many classrooms. Shifting the frame from students controlled by technology

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an equilibrium that forces everyone to reveal more to avoid disadvantages. Cooperating to put together some enforceable rules, we can protect ourselves from a boundless surveillance capitalism.64 For example, some jurisdictions are beginning to pass laws against firms micro-chipping workers by subcutaneously injecting a rice-sized sensor underneath their skin

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, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/sustainable-fashion-blog/2015/feb/13/second-hand-clothes-charity-donations-africa. 72. Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism,” Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, March 5, 2016, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-digital-debate/shoshana-zuboff-secrets-of

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-surveillance-capitalism-14103616-p2.html. 73. Steven Rosenfeld, “Online Public Schools Are a Disaster, Admits Billionaire, Charter School-Promoter Walton Family Foundation,” AlterNet, February 6, 2016, http://

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%2014%20cover%20%2B%20inside%20for%20web%20%283%29.pdf. 63. Ajunwa, Crawford, and Schultz, “Limitless Workplace Surveillance.” 64. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). 65. Davis Polk, “Time to Get Serious about Microchipping

Reset

by Ronald J. Deibert  · 14 Aug 2020

to the extraordinary business innovations of Google and Facebook, and gave rise to what the political economist and business management professor Shoshana Zuboff has termed “surveillance capitalism.” Merriam-Webster defines social media narrowly as “forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online

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understand the pathologies of social media. Chapter 1 explores the economic engine that underlies social media: the personal data surveillance economy, or what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” (a phrase actually first coined in 2014 by the Canada-based sociologist Vincent Mosco). Social media platforms describe themselves in many different, seemingly benign ways

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: to monitor, archive, analyze, and market as much personal information as they can from those who use their platforms. Constituted on the basis of surveillance capitalism, social media are relentless machines that dig deeper and deeper into our personal lives, attaching more and more sensors to more and more things, in

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and help predict and weigh the benefits of alternative trajectories. However, the time has come to recognize that our communications ecosystem — as presently constituted around surveillance capitalism — has become entirely dysfunctional for those aims. It’s disrupting institutions and practices and unleashing new social forces in unexpected ways, many of which are

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“This new form of information capitalism,” Zuboff explains, “aims to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to produce revenue and market control.”33 Surveillance capitalism did not emerge out of nowhere, and it certainly did not just spring from the minds of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like Page and Brin. There

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telecommunications sector and legally insulate tech platforms from liabilities that traditional media face. All of these touchstones were essential to the causal pathways leading to surveillance capitalism. It would be an overstatement to say Google’s innovations were preordained, but it would be correct to say that they couldn’t have

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personal human experiences as the raw material for a new kind of business model — were just that spark. It is the latter that makes surveillance capitalism distinct from prior forms of capitalism, according to Zuboff. The novelty is to see our private human experiences as free raw material that can be

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chapter 4, it is entirely unsustainable, dependent as it is on toxic mining of raw materials, rising energy consumption, and non-recyclable waste. Under surveillance capitalism, social media drill into personal human experiences by whatever ingenious means may be derived from their proliferating sensors, and then turn them into what Zuboff

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, they flourish in the cracks and crevices of our digital environment, parasitically living off our daily social media experiences and providing the nutrition that feeds surveillance capitalism. * * * The scale of the economic transformation unleashed by the personal data surveillance economy is hard to overestimate. One way to gauge the importance of

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significant risks for a sizable population of unwitting users — and yet another fishing hole for signals intelligence gathering agencies. The “Internet of Things” towards which surveillance capitalism is now directed will turn the average home into a showroom for these split-personality higher/lower-level functionalities. Your dishwasher cleans the dishes, but

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the company. It is noteworthy to reflect on just how the “home” and its relationship to our private lives is being thoroughly transformed through surveillance capitalism. Once the epitome of an individual’s sanctuary and the primary metaphor for the concept of privacy (at least as it was mythologized in Western

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closed doors exposed as raw material to be mined by thousands of data analytics companies across the globe. * * * There are colossal unintended consequences of surveillance capitalism, some of which we’ll explore in later chapters. Some of them we may not fully reckon with until today’s younger generations begin to

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you had! Where is their “informed consent”? Perhaps the most profound unintended consequences will emerge around the chronic, pervasive insecurity throughout the entire infrastructure of surveillance capitalism. Social media platforms are in a race to accumulate profits, corner market share, ship products and services before their competitors, and extract data from as

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epic platform security failures. One could fill an entire library with volumes that contained nothing but lists of data breaches and privacy scandals connected to surveillance capitalism. My inbox is full of them on an almost daily basis. Allow me to describe just three: A security researcher discovered that the popular

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(problems seem so overwhelming that the only viable option is just to shrug and move on), it seems that no revelation about the practices surrounding surveillance capitalism is outrageous enough to separate users from their precious applications.78 Indeed, a recent survey of American attitudes undertaken by Georgetown University and NYU found

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to explain it? The answer lies in a series of linked causal relationships inherent to our communications ecosystem and emanating out of the dynamics of surveillance capitalism. At the lowest level is the most basic business imperative of the personal data surveillance economy: capturing and retaining customers’ attention. As shown in

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accidents caused by distracted driving, and impaired childhood socialization, among others.146 Beyond the negative impacts on individual segments of the population, the dynamics of surveillance capitalism at the core of social media are clearly also having an impact on the quality of public discourse. Consider the most basic feature: the problem

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to the largest number of internet users in the world), the situation has reversed. China has now become an “easy” case: a demonstration of how surveillance capitalism can work hand in glove with an authoritarian regime, combining rapid technological innovation, economic growth, and consumerism with comprehensive information controls. China’s censorship and

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worth of innovations in digital technologies, the sudden rise of technologically enabled superpower policing may be among the least appreciated but most consequential. * * * As with surveillance capitalism in more consumer-oriented spheres, it’s natural (and irresistible) for companies that service law enforcement and security agencies to try to integrate various data

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, officials turned to technology to help combat the pandemic and assist in contact tracing and quarantine enforcement. The latent capabilities of social media and surveillance capitalism were too obvious to ignore as governments struggled to mitigate the spread of the virus and control the movement of populations. Many officials proposed turning

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a consensus when it comes to a cure. This lack of a clarity around solutions is certainly understandable. The challenges thrown up by social media, surveillance capitalism, and near-total state surveillance have arisen so swiftly that we have barely had time to understand how they work, let alone fix them.

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#DeleteFacebook campaign, which started as a viral protest against that particular company’s data surveillance practices but has become a rallying cry for rejection of surveillance capitalism as a whole. The hashtag trends every time Zuckerberg says something outrageous or some new Facebook-related privacy scandal is uncovered (trending, ironically, on

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the core business imperative to collect it all, all the time, remains unchanged. As long as social media are propelled forward under the regime of surveillance capitalism, pledges to “do better” to protect privacy will remain little more than window dressing — a coat of paint to make their platforms more appealing,

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reference to drones, AI, genetic engineering, digitally implanted systems, and facial recognition systems. Some believe that alternatives to social media that are not based on surveillance capitalism need to be promoted — encouraging the development of “civic media” as a “social” or “public” (instead of commercial) “good.”411 Indeed, there are several

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those who have experienced and reflected on it. Third, such a foundation helps combat fatigue, pessimism, and defeatism among critics of social media and surveillance capitalism by showing there are viable and robust alternatives. If we demonstrate the common roots of numerous disparate efforts to detach, reform, and regulate social media

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together more confidently. Here we can take a lesson from responses to the climate crisis. We are at a point in the social media / surveillance capitalism trajectory similar to the time when alarm bells were first rung about the environment. The first stage was very much about pointing out the negative

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It wasn’t long before those raising the alarms were asked, “So what do you propose instead?” The growing critical commentary on social media and surveillance capitalism is at a stage similar to the environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The works of Shoshana Zuboff, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Bruce Schneier, and others are

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as shown in chapter 3, this comes at a time when there has already been a profound great leap forward in these capabilities, thanks to surveillance capitalism and the private security and intelligence services that circulate as part of the marketplace. The combination of deregulation, securitization of health, and the introduction

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will be gathered about humanity to predict, with some reasonable reliability, what everyone on earth will do at any moment.”436 The powers of unbridled surveillance capitalism are truly awesome, and when combined with state authority are potentially totalitarian. Shaping our desires to persuade us to consume this or that product

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Uyghur. In addition to the risks of abuse of power related to fine-grained remote control technologies, there is another reason to impose restraints on surveillance capitalism. The engine at the heart of the business model — which prejudices sensational, extreme, and emotional content — amplifies our baser instincts, creates irresistible opportunities for

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fossil-fuelled power energy, and contributes to (rather than helps solve) one of humanity’s most pressing existential risks. Introducing friction and other restraints on surveillance capitalism can help improve the quality of our public discourse while tempering the insatiable hunger for more data, faster networks, and disposable gadgets. New privacy laws

…

prompting a fundamental behavioural shift as they are further trivializing informed consent. The privacy laws have also done little to decelerate the jet engine of surveillance capitalism. Companies deal with fines in the same way users deal with consent banners: as minor irritants (or, for them, mere “rounding errors”). Deeper and

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alone may be only a partial and perhaps even ineffective solution. Forcing Google, Facebook, and Amazon to break up without addressing the underlying pathologies of surveillance capitalism may perversely leave us with dozens of swarming little Googles, Facebooks, and Amazons — like breaking open a spider’s nest (which is why a

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healthy public sphere are noticeably absent in social media spaces. While there are no doubt many reasons for this decline in civility, the engine of surveillance capitalism, with its bias towards extreme, emotionally charged content at the expense of reasoned discourse, is at least partially to blame. While a codified antisurveillance

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both energy and data, and a strong distaste for planned obsolescence and other forms of waste. It is worth underscoring how efforts to tame unbridled surveillance capitalism and encourage civic virtue and self-restraint mutually reinforce each other in ways that also support environmental rescue. Environmentalism’s ideals — getting “back to

…

” cities are being rolled out with surveillance-by-design built in. As part of a recovery of their digital locales, citizens can militate against runaway surveillance capitalism, mandated “back doors,” warrantless monitoring, and superpower policing in their own backyards. They can require companies located in their jurisdictions to follow best practices

…

ignorance and prejudice we have witnessed in recent years, is at least in part because the social media environment (presently constituted under the regime of surveillance capitalism) created conditions that allowed such practices to thrive and flourish. Personal data surveillance and authoritarian state controls present a “perfect fit”: seemingly endless lucrative

…

come to move beyond diagnosis and start the hard work on solutions. We must squarely and comprehensively address the intertwined pathologies of social media and surveillance capitalism, starting with that device you hold in your hand. Fortunately, we have a recipe — a set of principles — that can help guide us in

…

In the plex: How Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives. Simon and Schuster. “This new form of information capitalism”: Zuboff, S. (2015). Big other: Surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization. Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), 75–89. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5, 75. The

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apps for your privacy. Retrieved from https://nordvpn.com/blog/worst-privacy-apps/ The illuminating example of Pokémon Go: Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs. See also Braghin, C., & Del Vecchio, M. (2017, July). Is Pokémon

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point — call it the Skinnerlarity”: Wu, T. (2020, April 9). Bigger Brother. Retrieved from https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/04/09/bigger-brother-surveillance-capitalism/ The EU’s General Data Protection Regime … and California’s Consumer Privacy Act are by far the most well known: On GDPR, see Bennett, C

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–309, 323–324 need for, 275–276 in political context, 278–279, 295–296 recessed, 312–313 republicanism and, 281–283, 303–304, 325 and surveillance capitalism, 297–300, 306, 312, 315 reverse engineering, 321–322 by Citizen Lab, 25, 86, 152, 162, 195 Rid, Thomas, 121 The Rise of Big

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and psychological warfare, 117–118 and public discourse, 106–109, 112–113, 140 reform/regulation of, 265–272, 301–302 retreat from, 260–265, 318 surveillance capitalism in, 27–28, 29, 48–49, 50–52 Sony Corp., 225 Soros, George, 123 Southwest Airlines, 59 Der Spiegel, 45 spyware, 140, 142–143,

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industry; specific technologies SS7 (Signalling System No. 7), 18 Standard Oil, 306–307 Stingrays (cell site simulators), 190–191 Strategic Communication Laboratories/scl Group, 119 surveillance capitalism, 13–14, 52–53, 91–92, 274–275. See also social media data use in, 55–60, 70–72, 73–74 evolution of, 49–

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future

by Noreena Hertz  · 13 May 2020  · 506pp  · 133,134 words

as increased emphasis on productivity, worker surveillance has significantly ramped up. We are living in an age that Shoshana Zuboff has called the ‘Age of Surveillance Capitalism’.25 An age in which for increasing numbers of people your employer is not only constantly watching you, but constantly using AI, Big Data and

…

the Rest of Us (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017). Yang, Keming. Loneliness: A Social Problem (London; New York: Routledge, 2019). Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). Notes CHAPTER ONE: This is the Lonely Century

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’. Statista, 5 November 2018, https://www.statista.com/statistics/800650/group-chat-functions-age-use-text-online-messaging-apps/. 94 Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs, 2019); see also John Harris, ‘Death of the private self: how fifteen years of Facebook changed the human condition’, Guardian, 31 January 2019

…

the Digitalization of Employees’, Monthly Review, 1 February 2019, https://monthlyreview.org/2019/02/01/new-means-of-workplace-surveillance/. 25 Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. 26 Olivia Solon, ‘Big Brother isn’t just watching: workplace surveillance can track your every move’, Guardian, 6 November 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world

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