The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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. Shoshana Zuboff's interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and democratization?

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the twenty-first century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.

“"Zuboff's expansive, erudite, deeply-researched exploration of digital futures elucidates the norms and hidden terminal goals of information-intensive industries. Zuboff's book is the information industry's Silent Spring ." -- ChrisHoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley”

"The most ambitious attempt yet to paint the bigger picture and to explain how the effects of digitisation that we are now experiencing as individuals and citizens have come about... A continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and-dare I say it-Karl Marx... A striking and illuminating book."--THE OBSERVER "Chilling and essential."--GLOBE AND MAIL "A book that no tech industry official will want the American public to read... One of the true joys of this insanely brilliant, deeply unsettling book is how fluidly Ms. Zuboff's style incorporates jargon, analogy, research and memoir."--PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE "One of the most important criticisms of the power of Big Tech."--Rana Foroohar, FINANCIAL TIMES "An original and often brilliant work, and it arrives at a crucial moment, when the public and its elected representatives are at last grappling with the extraordinary power of digital media and the companies that control it. Like another recent masterwork of economic analysis, Thomas Piketty's 2013 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the book challenges assumptions, raises uncomfortable questions about the present and future, and stakes out ground for a necessary and overdue debate. Shoshana Zuboff has aimed an unsparing light onto the shadowy new landscape of our lives. The picture is not pretty."--Nicholas Carr, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS "The rare volume that puts a name on a problem just as it becomes critical... This book's major contribution is to give a name to what's happening, to put it in cultural and historical perspective, and to ask us to pause long enough to think about the future and how it might be different from today."--Frank Rose, WALL STREET JOURNAL "Extraordinarily intelligent... Absorbing Zuboff's methodical determination, the way she pieces together sundry examples into this comprehensive work of scholarship and synthesis, requires patience, but the rewards are considerable - a heightened sense of awareness, and a deeper appreciation of what's at stake. A business model that seeks growth by cataloging our 'every move, emotion, utterance and desire' is too radical to be taken for granted. As Zuboff repeatedly says near the end of the book, 'It is not O.K.'"--Jennifer Szalai, NEW YORK TIMES "Many adjectives could be used to describe Shoshana Zuboff's latest book: groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming, alarmist, preposterous. One will do: unmissable... As we grope around in the darkness trying to grasp the contours of our digital era, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines a searing light on how this latest revolution is transforming our economy, politics, society - and lives."--John Thornhill, FINANCIAL TIMES "An intensively researched, engagingly written chronicle of surveillance capitalism's origins and its deleterious prospects for our society... [Zuboff's] after something bigger, providing a scaffolding of critical thinking from which to examine the great crises of the digital age... This is the rare book that we should trust to lead us down the long hard road of understanding."--Jacob Silverman, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, Zuboff demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the process. The hour is late and much has been lost already-but as we learn in these indispensable pages, there is still hope for emancipation."--Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and No Logo, and Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University "Shoshana Zuboff has produced the most provocative compelling moral framework thus far for understanding the new realities of our digital environment and its anti-democratic threats. From now on, all serious writings on the internet and society will have to take into account with The Age of Surveillance Capitalism."--Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Chair Professor, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania "Zuboff is a strikingly original voice, simultaneously bold and wise, eloquent and passionate, learned and accessible. Read this book to understand the inner workings of today's digital capitalism, its threats to twenty-first century society, and the reforms we must make for a better tomorrow."--Frank Pasquale, University of Maryland Carey School of Law, Author of The Black Box Society "In the future, if people still read books, they will view this as the classic study of how everything changed. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a masterpiece that stunningly reveals the essence of twenty-first-century society, and offers a dire warning about technology gone awry that we ignore at our peril. Shoshana Zuboff has somehow escaped from the fishbowl in which we all now live, and introduced to us the concept of water. A work of penetrating intellect, this is also a deeply human book about what is becoming, as it relentlessly demonstrates, a dangerously inhuman time."--Kevin Werbach, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust "My mind is blown on every page by the depth of Shoshana's research, the breadth of her knowledge, the rigor of her intellect, and finally by the power of her arguments. I'm not sure we can end the age of surveillance capitalism without her help, and that's why I believe this is the most important book of our time."--Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economy, editor-in-chief, Linux Journal "A panoramic exploration of one of the most urgent issues of our times, Zuboff reinterprets contemporary capitalism through the prism of the digital revolution, producing a book of immense ambition and erudition. Zuboff is one of our most prescient and profound thinkers on the rise of the digital. In an age of inane Twitter soundbites and narcissistic Facebook posts, Zuboff's serious scholarship is great cause for celebration."--Andrew Keen, author of How to Fix the Future "Zuboff's expansive, erudite, deeply-researched exploration of digital futures elucidates the norms and hidden terminal goals of information-intensive industries. Zuboff's book is the information industry's Silent Spring."--Chris Hoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley "I will make a guarantee: Assuming we survive to tell the tale, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has a high probability of joining the likes Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Max Weber's Economy and Society as defining social-economics texts of modern times. It is not a 'quick read'; it is to be savored and re-read and discussed with colleagues and friends. No zippy one-liners from me, except to almost literally beg you to read/ingest this book."--Tom Peters, coauthor of In Search of Excellence "The defining challenge for the future of the market economy is the concentration of data, knowledge, and surveillance power. Not just our privacy but our individuality is at stake, and this very readable and thought-provoking book alerts us to these existential dangers. Highly recommended."--Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is brilliant and essential. Shoshana Zuboff reveals capitalism's most dangerous frontier with stunning clarity: The new economic order of surveillance capitalism founded on extreme inequalities of knowledge and power. Her sweeping analysis demonstrates the unprecedented challenges to human autonomy, social solidarity, and democracy perpetrated by this rogue capitalism. Zuboff's book finally empowers us to understand and fight these threats effectively--a masterpiece of rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and deeply urgent." --Robert B. Reich, author of The Common Good and Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few Selected as one of the top ten titles in Business & Economics for Spring 2018.--Publishers Weekly

Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She is the author of the critically acclaimed "In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power,"

James Maxmin was Chairman and CEO of Volvo-UK, Thorn Home Electronics, and Laura Ashley PLC. He founded the investment company Global Brand Development and is currently a director at Mast Global. Zuboff and Maxmin are married and live in Maine with their two children.

Shoshana Zuboff's interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture no less important than the early twentieth-century battle between the Progressive movement for fairer and broader economic distribution and the concentrated, narrow interests of the robber barons and the trusts. Today, we confront the vast power of the giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and democratization? Master or Slave? is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy-tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the twenty-first century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.

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