the age of surveillance capitalism summary

In the latter chapter she asserts that the ‘surveillance capitalist leaders are sui generis utopianists’. In the former chapter, the title of which seems to reference George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Zuboff argues that there now exists a ‘ubiquitous digital apparatus’ that ‘renders, monitors, computes and modifies human behaviour’. In fact, Zuboff’s book has consecutive chapters titled ‘Big Other and the Rise of Instrumentalist Power’ and ‘A Utopia of Certainty’. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first 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.Shoshana Zuboff’s international bestseller, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019), was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal as a book that asks us ‘to pause long enough to think about the future and how it might be different from today.’ That description could work as the definition of the literary utopia or dystopia. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. 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.' 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. 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 twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism.

Summary: The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called 'surveillance capitalism,' and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

The age of surveillance capitalism summary