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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
by
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.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveil ...more
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveil ...more
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Hardcover, 691 pages
Published
January 15th 2019
by PublicAffairs
(first published May 22nd 2018)
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Start your review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

I was talking to a friend at work about this book and we agreed it was both very good and very long, perhaps even too long. Sometimes, when you are at a symphony concert, the first movement will end with ‘da – da – da – daaaaaa’ and some people in the audience will clap, something that annoys all of those who know you are only meant to clap right at the end of the piece. Like I said, this book is very long and in three parts – and at the end of the first part I was getting ready to clap and thou
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An important, albeit flawed, book. Viewing the rise of Google and Facebook through the lens of sociology, this makes for some heavy reading as one swims among the book's unique vocabulary ("the will to will," "division of learning in society," "double movement," "shadow text," "extraction imperative," "prediction imperative"). Eventually the phrases begin to make their own sort of strange sense, but it definitely feels foreign. Perhaps I haven't read much sociology, so this failing may be my own
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Paints a frightening portrait of the rise of mass surveillance since the start of the Information Age. In ornate, often opaque, prose Zuboff charts the development of a new form of global capitalism that aims to surveil all facets of human existence and, using vast stores of privately held, ruthlessly gathered data, predict and modify user behavior to align with desired commercial outcomes.

I’m giving this book 2 stars, in hopes that the surveillance capitalists at Amazon will not recommend others like it to me.
In terms of research, this book deserves a higher rating. It is incredibly thorough and well sourced. But here is an example of a sentence the author, Shoshanna Zuboff, uses: “This time, we have sent them into the raw heart of a rogue capitalism that amassed its fortune and power through behavioral dispossession parlayed into behavior modification in the service of others’ ...more
In terms of research, this book deserves a higher rating. It is incredibly thorough and well sourced. But here is an example of a sentence the author, Shoshanna Zuboff, uses: “This time, we have sent them into the raw heart of a rogue capitalism that amassed its fortune and power through behavioral dispossession parlayed into behavior modification in the service of others’ ...more

This will be a long review, so let me summarise it with tweet-like succinctness: ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ is Black Mirror for people who hate fun. I definitely mean that as a compliment. It synthesises and analyses a wide range of ideas I’ve come across in leisure and work reading during the past few years, mostly in articles online. As fragments, those ideas filled me with concern and confusion. Combined into the clear and systematic structure of a book, they fill me with dread, but
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THIS is the book I have been waiting to read on the new internet era. It's a mix of Neil Postman, Marshall Mcluhan, and Huxely. If I have one complaint, it's that she gets super carried away with metaphors and flowery language--it was actually quite annoying. But Zuboff takes a long view of history and situates the new era of surveillance capitalism within parallel trends in markets, culture, and law. She makes some brilliant observations--her comparison of surveillance capitalism with totalitar
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“At its core, surveillance capitalism is parasitic and self-referential. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”
I can't stop thinking about, or recommending this book enough. Awareness is the first line of defense.
"Consider that the internet has become essential for social participation, that the internet is now saturated with commerc ...more
I can't stop thinking about, or recommending this book enough. Awareness is the first line of defense.
"Consider that the internet has become essential for social participation, that the internet is now saturated with commerc ...more

A few years ago I read Yuval Noah Harari's book Homo Deus, a whimsical look at our looming technological dystopia. Harari's book struck me as being happily resigned to the end of human freedom and indeed the end of humanity as we know it. This book could be described as the pessimistic and despairing counterpart to Harari's work. It goes over many of the same themes: the predictive power of Big Data, the loss of human freedom and the intrusion of surveillance technology into every corner of our
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[O]ur lives are scraped and sold to fund their freedom and our subjugation, their knowledge and our ignorance about what they know.
This is the kind of outrage that could be expected from a Berkeley or NYU sociology department, but seeing this from a Professor Emeritus of the Harvard Business School raises attention. Zuboff refers to "overthrow", the end of democracy as we know it, the reshaping of all human nature. She turns to a metaphor of the Taino before meeting Columbus, as they were wholly ...more
This is the kind of outrage that could be expected from a Berkeley or NYU sociology department, but seeing this from a Professor Emeritus of the Harvard Business School raises attention. Zuboff refers to "overthrow", the end of democracy as we know it, the reshaping of all human nature. She turns to a metaphor of the Taino before meeting Columbus, as they were wholly ...more

Data privacy or unauthorised (and wrongly allowed) usage of an individual’s private data by someone else are critically important topics. However, this comprehensively one-sided book does not even scratch the surface of the issues at hand.
The whole book is a repeated polemic on almost any data gathering, analytics and companies that have successful businesses running on them. The highly coloured and simplistic view of the evils of Google and Facebook (it is largely about these two and a bit abou ...more
The whole book is a repeated polemic on almost any data gathering, analytics and companies that have successful businesses running on them. The highly coloured and simplistic view of the evils of Google and Facebook (it is largely about these two and a bit abou ...more

The reviews of this book were very positive and the blurb suggested it was just the book I was looking to read. "...as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every sector of the global economy, she brings its consequences to life".
Unfortunately she doesn't. Over almost 700 pages (including 140 pages of footnotes to highlight the amount of research that has gone into this book) we do not get to see the consequences of living with the always on devices in our homes, on our wrist ...more
Unfortunately she doesn't. Over almost 700 pages (including 140 pages of footnotes to highlight the amount of research that has gone into this book) we do not get to see the consequences of living with the always on devices in our homes, on our wrist ...more

Ms Zuboff has a number of outstanding points to make in this weighty tome. Unfortunately she seems to have attempted to do it in Klingon. A 250 page book without the repetitive, dense, unnecessarily high-flown prose would have been perfectly okay. Now this book will go down as a laborious, soul destroying pile of paper. 5 stars for the content, deduct three stars for the writing style.

We read this for our online book club in the spring and summer of 2019.
Here are our discussions by chapter: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18.
My concluding thoughts?
Generally Zuboff succeeds in sketching out a dystopian business model, one predicated on turning the details of our lives into corporate profit. This is most famously or notoriously demonstrated by Facebook and Google. The structures and strategies Surveillance Capitalism lays out are very useful too ...more
Here are our discussions by chapter: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18.
My concluding thoughts?
Generally Zuboff succeeds in sketching out a dystopian business model, one predicated on turning the details of our lives into corporate profit. This is most famously or notoriously demonstrated by Facebook and Google. The structures and strategies Surveillance Capitalism lays out are very useful too ...more

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshanna Zuboff argues relentlessly that the rise of Google, Facebook, etc. has done something terribly wrong to society. She's alarmed by all the surreptitious information-gathering that goes on in the background. She's especially troubled by the way we're deluged with personalized ads, every time we go on the Internet. And she wants us to be alarmed, too.
Her book touches on some fascinating questions. Do we want a world that cherishes sanctuary, or that ...more
Her book touches on some fascinating questions. Do we want a world that cherishes sanctuary, or that ...more

I began reading The Age of Surveillance on the premise of learning a little more about the influence of social networks and the deleterious impact they have on the modern human psyche. Instead, Shoshana Zuboff opened a much broader chapter of analysis in which she managed to follow the etymology of growth through a few hypotheses and instead traced the evolution of capitalism. This work comes as an academic umbrella to many particular questions regarding our digital lives, among which social net
...more

I found the topic of this book really fascinating. I’m so anxious to better understand how the tech giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook gather and use the vast amounts of data they collect.
Unfortunately this book was a swing and a miss. The author is so passionately obsessed with vilifying these companies that the book regressed to a 700+ page vendetta. It’s obvious she did some amazing research but the portent of doom that pervades this book just got too annoying. Okay, I get it. These com ...more
Unfortunately this book was a swing and a miss. The author is so passionately obsessed with vilifying these companies that the book regressed to a 700+ page vendetta. It’s obvious she did some amazing research but the portent of doom that pervades this book just got too annoying. Okay, I get it. These com ...more

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It seems like surrendering a part of them. You know how I love secrecy. It is the only thing that can make modern life wonderful or mysterious to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
This is a book of extraordinary erudition and intelligence. She identifies the problem but also, where it is all leading, and why we are blithely going along with it. Arendt, Kafka, Rousseau ...more
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
This is a book of extraordinary erudition and intelligence. She identifies the problem but also, where it is all leading, and why we are blithely going along with it. Arendt, Kafka, Rousseau ...more

Who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?
I remember thinking a few years back, when Siri was introduced to Apple iPhones, “why exactly do we need this?”. Had it really become such an inconvenience to type a few words into our ubiquitous phones to get information? Who was clamoring for this?
Today Siri seems almost quaint. We’ve moved at the speed of light to voice recognition finding a restaurant for us to “smart homes” that play our music, regulate temperatures, adjust our mattresses, ...more
I remember thinking a few years back, when Siri was introduced to Apple iPhones, “why exactly do we need this?”. Had it really become such an inconvenience to type a few words into our ubiquitous phones to get information? Who was clamoring for this?
Today Siri seems almost quaint. We’ve moved at the speed of light to voice recognition finding a restaurant for us to “smart homes” that play our music, regulate temperatures, adjust our mattresses, ...more

Jan 17, 2019
Maru Kun
marked it as to-read
A nice quote on Facebook's business model from an article on this book in the NYT, O.K., Google: How Much Money Have I Made for You Today? - "...it’s all fun and games until the host of “The Apprentice” becomes president..."
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It is not your grand-father's internet any more. What we are living through is a brand new kind of technology, and a brand new kind of business built on and for that. It astoundingly hard to grasp the nature of a paradigm shift while it is happening. Shoshanna Zuboff puts it all together into a single book: the history, the discovery, the development, from the Google taking the responsibility to find the right place to put the ad, to predicting behavior from digital exhaust, to the surprising te
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a very welcome and overdue attempt to provide a theory and critique of the information economy. Professor Soshana Zuboff does a great job of the former but the absolute and inescapable apocalypse her theory predicts is unconvincing.
The two main concepts in Zuboff’s book are “surveillance capitalism” and “instrumentarian power” or, in less charged terms, the information economy and knowledge as power.
In the spirit of some of the most prominent social theori ...more
The two main concepts in Zuboff’s book are “surveillance capitalism” and “instrumentarian power” or, in less charged terms, the information economy and knowledge as power.
In the spirit of some of the most prominent social theori ...more

I really wanted to love this book as the subject is fascinating and horrifying and right up my alley. However it has a few things about it that i don't love. As I read it I was thinking man this is like someone's Phd thesis (ie impenetrable and a lot of "as we saw in chapter 1 blah blah" and "we will see in chapter 2 blah blah" - it's like, if you didn't do that every constantly the book would be half as long). And then I checked out the author and she is a Harvard academic. So that it explains
...more

A timely, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking book -- some related resources to consider:
• Reviews
○ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
○ https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
○ https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/re...
○ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/bo...
○ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/bo...
○ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-age-...
• Interviews
○ https://www.theguardian.com/technolog...
○ https://www.recode.net/2019/2/20/1823...
○ https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/201 ...more
• Reviews
○ https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/t...
○ https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
○ https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/re...
○ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/bo...
○ https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/18/bo...
○ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-age-...
• Interviews
○ https://www.theguardian.com/technolog...
○ https://www.recode.net/2019/2/20/1823...
○ https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/201 ...more

I could not finish the book. This book calls for a good editor. The writing in the book is really bad, wordy and watery. There are way too many romance novel cliches. There are too few facts and numbers in this book. Logic and reasoning is flawed in many places. The book reads like judgements and opinion piece.
I have managed to get through only 100 pages. I strongly recommend to wait until this get edited into readable form. This edition is a torture to read.
I have managed to get through only 100 pages. I strongly recommend to wait until this get edited into readable form. This edition is a torture to read.

I read about this book in one of the Telegram channels, my only enjoyable source of the good news feed (not feel good news, just smth a little bit different and less mainstream) at the moment.
I agree with the channel author (@hobbes_channel) that this book is as important as Capital by Thomas Piketty, and (I might add) flawed in many similar ways as well.
This is a serious study on the ever changing world that we live now. I seem to experience a certain never ending feeling of doom and gloom ( ...more
I agree with the channel author (@hobbes_channel) that this book is as important as Capital by Thomas Piketty, and (I might add) flawed in many similar ways as well.
This is a serious study on the ever changing world that we live now. I seem to experience a certain never ending feeling of doom and gloom ( ...more

So as I mentioned in my update, this was like being offered to take either the red pill or the blue pill. I decided to know what was behind the curtain and I am not sure I am happier now. This book unveils just how intrusive the big tech companies have been in our lives, mainly without our permission and without notifying us exactly what they were doing with the information. Google, Facebook, and others are directing our behavior even when we think we are choosing. Did you know know that it was
...more

With a thin argument boosted by unhinged, hysterical hyperbole and punitively repetitive verbal onslaught that goes on and on for hundreds of pages, Zuboff tries to violently shake us from the complacency concerning the horrors that Google and Facebook inflict upon us, and yet by the end of the book I'm still back to that resigned so-what shrug that Zuboff reviles.
Of course, the book is full of many interesting trivia, and learning that e.g. smart Samsung TV is continuously recording your conver ...more
Of course, the book is full of many interesting trivia, and learning that e.g. smart Samsung TV is continuously recording your conver ...more
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Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” So, this January, as we celebrate Martin Luther King...
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“Our dependency is at the heart of the commercial surveillance project, in which our felt needs for effective life vie against the inclination to resist its bold incursions. This conflict produces a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified. It disposes us to rationalize the situation in resigned cynicism, created excuses that operate like defense mechanisms (“I have nothing to hide”), or find other ways to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness. In this way, surveillance capitalism imposes a fundamentally illegitimate choice that twenty-first century individuals should not have to make, and its normalization leaves us singing in our chains.”
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“What would hold society together in the absence of the rules and rituals of clan and kin? Durkheim’s answer was the division of labor.”
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