An International Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A Sunday Times (UK) Best Business Book of the Year Selected by Barack Obama, Zadie Smith (in the Wall Street Journal), Jia Tolentino (in the New Yorker), Elif Shafak (in the Guardian), and Ana Botin (in Bloomberg) as one of the best books of 2019 Finalist for the Financial Times /McKinsey Best Book of the Year Award it's easily the most important book to be published this century ... Zuboff is concerned with the largest act of capitalist colonisation ever attempted, but the colonisation is of our minds, our behaviour, our free will, our very selves. Yet it's not an anti-tech book. It's anti unregulated capitalism, red in tooth and claw. It's really this generation's Das Kapital . "Zadie Smith 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."—NicholasCarr, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS 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 ThisChanges Everything and No Logo,and Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at RutgersUniversity 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 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.'"—JenniferSzalai, NEW YORK TIMES 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, WALLSTREET JOURNAL This is the rare book that we should trust to lead us down the long hard road of understanding ."—Jacob Silverman, NEWYORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is already drawing comparisons to seminal socioeconomic investigations like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Karl Marx's "Capital." Zuboff's book deserves these comparisons and more: Like the former, it's an alarming exposé about how business interests have poisoned our world, and like the latter, it provides a framework to understand and combat that poison. But The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, named for the now-popular term Zuboff herself coined five years ago, is also a masterwork of horror. It's hard to recall a book that left me as haunted as Zuboff's, with its descriptions of the gothic algorithmic daemons that follow us at nearly every instant of every hour of every day to suck us dry of metadata. Even those who've made an effort to track the technology that tracks us over the last decade or so will be chilled to their core by Zuboff, unable to look at their surroundings the same way."—Sam Biddle, THE INTERCEPT "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." —RobertB. Reich, author of The Common Goodand Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Notthe Few Zuboff's book is the information industry's Silent Spring ." ChrisHoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley 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 the classic study of how everything changed. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a 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, TheWharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust " 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."—AndrewKeen, author of How to Fix the Future 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 "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 ChairProfessor, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania very readable and thought-provoking book alerts us to these existential dangers. Highly recommended."—DaronAcemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail , 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."—TomPeters, coauthor of In Search of Excellence Rana Foroohar,FINANCIAL TIMES GLOBE AND MAIL PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE THE OBSERVER SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS WINNIPEG FREE PRESS THE NATIONAL (UAE) CHOICE
A Harvard Business School professor emerita with decades of experience studying issues of labor and power in the digital economy, Zuboff in 2015 published a paper, "Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization," which has since become an essential source for anyone looking to reckon seriously with what she described as a distinct, emerging economic logic. Now she has followed up that paper with a doorstop of a book, an intensively researched, engagingly written chronicle of surveillance capitalism's origins and its deleterious prospects for our society…The Age of Surveillance Capitalism may lack a straightforward political program—Zuboff comes across as a liberal, albeit not one who slots neatly on the left-right axis—but it is loaded with useful economic, technological and anthropological analysis…This is the rare book that we should trust to lead us down the long hard road of understanding.
The New York Times Book Review - Jacob Silverman
It's a testament to how extraordinarily intelligent [this] book is that by the time I was compared to an elephant carcass, I resisted the urge to toss it across the room. Zuboff… has a dramatic streak that could come off as simply grandiose if she didn't so painstakingly make her case…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."
The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
Shoshana Zuboff offers a well-researched and detailed examination of a global framework that, in her view, threatens everyone who employs even a trace of Internet-based technology. The highly accomplished and experienced Nicol Zanzarella applies her impressive skills; her narration is, at once, sincere, powerful, intense, and deeply personal. Zuboff coins the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe the business model that catalogues and uses our every move, action, and desire; she argues through Zanzarella that we each must do our utmost to battle against it with full awareness of the way it surrounds us. The author’s strong feelings are well served by Zanzarella’s clear narration, with its tone of intrigue and intention. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Shoshana Zuboff offers a well-researched and detailed examination of a global framework that, in her view, threatens everyone who employs even a trace of Internet-based technology. The highly accomplished and experienced Nicol Zanzarella applies her impressive skills; her narration is, at once, sincere, powerful, intense, and deeply personal. Zuboff coins the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe the business model that catalogues and uses our every move, action, and desire; she argues through Zanzarella that we each must do our utmost to battle against it with full awareness of the way it surrounds us. The author’s strong feelings are well served by Zanzarella’s clear narration, with its tone of intrigue and intention. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
2018-10-08
An argument that Google and other internet-based firms are creating a new form of capitalism based on the monetizing of human experience.
"Digital connection is now a means to others' commercial ends," writes Zuboff (Business Administration/Harvard Business School; In The Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power , 1988). In a 2014 essay, the author first described the "profoundly undemocratic social force" she calls surveillance capitalism. In this exhaustive, often repetitive elaboration, the author defines the concept as "a new market form that claims human experience as a free source of raw material for hidden commercial practices." Later in the book, she elaborates: "Every casual search, like, and click [becomes] an asset to be tracked, parsed, and monetized by some company." This relentless search for and use of personal data is not happenstance or an inevitable result of digital technology. Rather, it is a "calculated," little-noticed pursuit by commercial interests—acting under the guise of a utopian vision for the internet—to create "prediction products" that "anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later" and are traded in the marketplace. Invented by Google, adopted by Facebook and Microsoft, and with evidence that Amazon engages in it, the "unprecedented" market form is poised to become the "dominant" shape of capitalism, abrogating "the peoples' right to a human future." The shift from "serving users to surveilling them" occurred at a time of diminished government oversight and regulation and the post-9/11 emphasis on security over privacy. Based on research and interviews, the author thoughtfully examines the economic and philosophical implications of surveillance capitalism; warns that our children, in their ceaseless quest for connectivity, are harbingers of what lies ahead; and urges public outrage over the theft of our humanity. Other topics include Pokémon Go and behaviorist B.F. Skinner and his acolytes.
A big, sprawling, and alarming case for "the darkening of the digital dream." This will appeal to specialists; general readers will wish it were much shorter.
