The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

This book tells the tech-business story of algorithms and data exhaust and the companies who have implemented the dystopian future prophesized by Boorstin, Toffler, Postman, and others. While the book is large, Zuboff’s writing draws you into a world you know and, paradoxically, don’t know.

The work is the final stop of our story about information and knowledge, its chaotic meandering through amusing images and the shock of the future. 

Before reading Zuboff, I tended to think of surveillance only in terms of government surveillance. Zuboff showed me how wrong that was. I learned that corporations conduct as much, if not more, surveillance than governments. What’s more, corporations also collaborate with governments, which expands the overall surveillance apparatus to frightening degrees. 

Zuboff convincingly shows how seemingly unrelated phenomena came together to change capitalism. I learned that Google and Facebook created the framework for surveillance capitalism by combining behavioral psychology with data collection and advertising practices.

These tech giants are not interested in serving free citizens; they are interested in creating… show more.

This book is very long, and somewhat redundant at times. But it’s extremely interesting…and chilling. 

Zuboff cites a wide variety of examples of how companies, Google foremost among them, gather information about us (legally or illegally) and then use it not only to predict our behavior, but to control it as well. That’s the really scary part.

The writing can be a bit too poetic at times, but Zuboff displays an incredible breadth and depth of knowledge on this subject. I’m a slow reader, so this one took me a while to get through, but it was time well spent.

Social media platforms connect us to each other with unprecedented global reach. They function as our new public square, but they are owned and managed by private multinational corporations!

Those corporations make money by tracking what gets our attention – and feeding us more of that! Zuboff’s book will open your eyes to the effects of this new economic engine and how it works – on us, if not always for us. 

This book diagnoses the source of the problems we have in our relationship with technology digging deep into the business models of big tech. 

Zuboff coined the term “surveillance capitalism” to explain the ways in which people became the product, our data becoming increasingly valuable as new technologies find new ways to read us. A weighty book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism will tell you everything you need to know about how your life is exploited and affected by the technology all around us.

Zuboff succinctly sets out, how AI technology is complicit in a surveillance regime that is at the same time opaque and oppressive.

She reinscribes a particularly threatening momentum into the ever-expanding culture of capitalism linking it to a new dawn of Orwellian control over our everyday life, which threatens our very subjectivity and the future of society as a whole. 

Surveillance capitalism is a social commentary about today.

The title refers to the Big Tech "social media" companies and how they use bug data to track and predict our thinking. They use this to predict out thinking and manipulate us into buying advertised products. This amazing piece of writing is reminiscent of the great social commentary of Alvin and Heidi Toffler.

There is no simple way to summarise it except to say that it is riveting first-class writing, on a subject that is surely close to all our hearts. Although this is a book very much about the present (as… show more.

Shoshana Zuboff’s book not only traces the fusion of financial industry with information technology and, thereby, the emergence of powerful platform companies with monopolistic tendencies like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon.

Rather, it focuses on processes in which the business of digital expropriation merges with the erosion of democratic structures and the development of authoritarian capitalism.

If you’re trying to understand how all of your data—and how digital surveillance more broadly—inform the spread of targeted disinformation and propaganda, this book is for you. We’ve heard a lot over the years about individually- and/or micro-targeted ads, especially with the 2016 US elections and Cambridge Analytica, but it’s often hard to make sense of what’s actually happening out there. How much of it is hype, and what should we really be concerned with in this space? Zuboff’s text is my go-to when exploring these questions. She makes it clear that data privacy should be on everyone’s radar, and… show more.

An important book. Zuboff captures in great detail the ways in which the erosion of our privacy has become embedded in our modern economy. Most people know that “information is power.” This is a book for anyone interested in how the bulk collection of information can be turned into money. This book is about the new normal.