Zuboff, a professor emerita of Harvard Business School and the author of “In the Age of the Smart Machine” (1988), has a dramatic streak that could come off as simply grandiose if she didn’t so painstakingly make her case. It’s a testament to how extraordinarily intelligent her book is that by the time I was compared to an elephant carcass, I resisted the urge to toss it across the room. She likens the big tech platforms to elephant poachers, and our personal data to ivory tusks. In “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” she warns against mistaking the soothing voice of a personal digital assistant for “anything other than the exploitation of your needs.” The cliché that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” isn’t alarming enough for her.
Shoshana Zuboff would undoubtedly get the joke, but she probably wouldn’t laugh. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future-if we let it.A friend of mine says that whenever he walks into someone’s home he’s tempted to yell out, “Hey, Alexa,” or “O.K., Google,” and order 50 pizzas, just to see if there’s a device listening in on whatever gossip he planned to dish out next. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to 21st century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit-at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.” Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the 21st century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the 20th. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism.
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