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  • 2019
  • Book

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

By: Shoshana Zuboff
  • Format:Print
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Abstract

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

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. 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. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. 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.

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.

Keywords

Consumer Profiling; Consumer Behavior; Forecasting and Prediction; Information Technology; Power and Influence; Ethics; Society; Transformation

Citation

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.
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About The Author

Shoshana Zuboff

→More Publications

More from the Author

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    Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization

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    • March 23, 2015
    • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

    Disruption's Tragic Flaw

    By: Shoshana Zuboff
    • McKinsey Quarterly

    Creating Value in the Age of Distributed Capitalism

    By: Shoshana Zuboff
More from the Author
  • Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization By: Shoshana Zuboff
  • Disruption's Tragic Flaw By: Shoshana Zuboff
  • Creating Value in the Age of Distributed Capitalism By: Shoshana Zuboff
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