Shoshana Zuboff, The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power

Excerpt

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a big tome of more than 700 pages in the hardcover edition. My review copy, however, is on my Kindle account, and it must take quite a lot of space on my tablet too. In these densely argued and richly detailed pages, Shoshana Zuboff, an emerita professor of business at Harvard Business School, shows that there is a new, insidious kind of control. While the traditional media try to ‘control’ or ‘influence’ us through their words and images alone, this new form goes much deeper, and it exploits the very constitution of the people’s mental makeup. With the information left behind by the user when they surf the Internet, software giants such as Google are able to produce a very accurate model of who we are—sometimes in such high detail that we do not even know that those details are parts of ourselves—and use it to predict our preferences in myriad ways. The information is sold to advertisers, who pay Google a huge sum of money and feed us with targeted advertisements, which are almost guaranteed that they will work since the commercials are based on exactly who we are and where our thoughts and desires are located. According to Zuboff, this ushered in a new kind of capitalism, surveillance capitalism, where the currency is no longer the diesel engine, manufacturing prowess, or even electronic data itself, but personal information. In this case, the users are no longer consumers. The consumers are the advertisers who buy up information from Google; we the users then are the product. …