The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The first detailed examination of an unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism", the quest of powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

"The Capital of the Digital Age" The Times

"Like another recent masterpiece of economic analysis, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, this book questions accepted ideas, raises uncomfortable questions about the present and the future, and defines the ground for a much-needed and long-overdue debate."

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, Los Angeles Review of Books

In this masterful work, characterized by the originality of its ideas and research, Shoshana Zuboff reveals the alarming phenomenon she has termed "surveillance capitalism." Something of utmost importance is at stake: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens to transfigure human nature itself in the 21st century, just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the 20th century.

Thanks to Zuboff's analysis, the consequences of the advance of surveillance capitalism from its origin in Silicon Valley to all sectors of the economy graphically come to life for us. Today, a huge volume of wealth and power accumulates in so-called "behavioral futures markets" where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and even the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "medium of behavior modification."

The threat looming over us is no longer that of a totalitarian "Big Brother" state, but that of an omnipresent digital architecture: a "Big Other" that operates according to the interests of surveillance capital. Zuboff's exhaustive and disturbing analysis uncovers the threats facing 21st-century society: a controlled and fully interconnected "hive" that seduces us with the promise of achieving absolute certainties in exchange for the maximum possible profit for its promoters, and all at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our future as human beings.

With little resistance from legislation or society, surveillance capitalism is on its way to dominating the social order and determining the digital future... unless we stop it first.