The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy 7. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth 6. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy 5. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history 4. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification 3. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales 2. 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. 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.

Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. 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.

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.”

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. 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