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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Shoshana Zuboff, 2019

Shoshana Zuboff traces how Google and Facebook turned human experience into "behavioral surplus," predicting and shaping behavior at scale, and asks what a human future still requires.

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10 parts, about 33 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Defines surveillance capitalism as taking human experience as free raw material to make behavioral predictions that businesses buy and sell
  • Traces how Google discovered behavioral surplus under financial pressure, and how Facebook and others followed, through patents, settlements and company documents
  • Names instrumentarian power, a new kind of control over behavior unlike totalitarianism, and argues for the right to the future tense and to sanctuary

Who it is for

  • Readers uneasy about how apps and devices track them
  • Policymakers asking whether privacy law is enough
  • Technologists asking what their products do to users

What the summary covers

  1. What Zuboff Means by Surveillance Capitalism2 min
  2. Google's Founding, and the Discovery of Behavioral Surplus4 min
  3. Building an Unchallengeable Moat5 min
  4. Into the Real World and the Self4 min
  5. Economies of Action, and the Right to the Future Tense4 min
  6. Instrumentarian Power: A New and Different Kind of Power2 min
  7. Big Other and the Instrumentarian Society4 min
  8. Life Inside the Hive3 min
  9. Radical Indifference and a Coup From Above3 min
  10. A Closing Call to Refusal2 min

Recommended by

  • Daron AcemogluNobel laureate in economics and MIT professor
    Not just our privacy but our individuality is at stake, and this very readable and thought-provoking book alerts us to these existential dangers.
  • Naomi KleinAuthor of This Changes Everything
    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.
  • Robert B. ReichFormer US Secretary of Labor
    The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is brilliant and essential.
  • Barack ObamaFormer president of the United States

About the author

  • Shoshana ZuboffAmerican scholar and professor emerita at Harvard Business School
    • Born in New England and spent much of her childhood in Argentina
    • Earned a BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago and a PhD in social psychology from Harvard
    • Joined Harvard Business School in 1981 and was one of the first tenured women on its faculty
    • Her 1988 book In the Age of the Smart Machine studied information technology in the workplace
    • Her 2015 article Big Other won the 2016 Best Paper Award of the International Conference on Information Systems
    • Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School
    • Awarded the Axel Springer Award in 2019 and the Giovanni Buttarelli Award and the EPIC Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021

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