The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Description

Shoshana Zuboff names and analyzes surveillance capitalism, a business system that claims human experience as raw material for data extraction. Tracing practices associated with companies such as Google and Facebook, she explains how information beyond what a service requires becomes “behavioral surplus,” processed into predictions about what people will do next. Those predictions enter behavioral futures markets, while increasingly sophisticated systems seek not only to anticipate conduct but to shape it. Zuboff calls this emerging power instrumentarianism and argues that it concentrates knowledge inside private firms largely beyond democratic oversight. Her wide-ranging account connects digital convenience to a struggle over privacy, autonomy, and the right to decide one's own future.

Themes