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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Shoshana Zuboff

4.07 · Rating details · 8,097 ratings · 1,351 reviews

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

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Hardcover, 691 pages

Published January 15th 2019 by PublicAffairs (first published May 22nd 2018)

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May 16, 2019 Trevor (I sometimes get notified of comments) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: economics, social-theory, behavioural-economics, psychology

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 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 thought, hang on, there seems to be an awful lot of this left.

This book is disturbing – and not just a little disturbing, I’ve been thinking of ways to do without Facebook and Google – that level of disturbing.

I think a large part of the problem people might have with this book is the same problem a lot of people have with advertising. I think most people think advertising might work on other people, other people being, by definition, a bit thick – but to suggest it might work on them is close to the biggest insult you can offer them. Sure they drink Coke – but not because they want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, but because, you know, it tastes good. People are so convinced they operate as free agents and that they know this because they base their decisions on a rational appraisal of the evidence before them, that the notion they might be ‘influenced’ by advertising has to be rejected outright because it would undermine their self-opinion and their notions of self-worth. All of which is particularly good news for the advertisers.

The author starts this book with a story about her house catching fire and while she was waiting for someone to come put it out, she rushed about ‘saving’ things. The problem was that once the fire brigade arrived she was the thing they felt they most needed to save. She had never been in a house fire before and so this unprecedented situation seemed much safer to her than it actually was. This is the situation she says we are in with surveillance capitalism. We have never had this level of surveillance before, we believe we are getting stuff for nothing (google, facebook and so on) but actually our lives are being used as the raw behavioural material that is being used to manipulate us in ways we can barely understand. And it will only get worse.

And this influence isn’t happening in ways we might think it is. That is, this isn’t about you writing to your mum that you have been thinking about buying a drone and then you getting lots of ads on your feed for places to buy drones. Yeah, I’m sure that shit happens, but it is nothing at all compared to what is really happening. There is a lovely bit in this where she discusses poker machines and how they have been designed by psychologists to provide the perfect environment of reward so that it stops being about winning and losing, but about getting you to continue to play. The longer you play, the more you lose. But the environment has been constructed so as to ensure that even looking away for a second feels like a kind of loss.

And this is about as good a description of facebook (or as someone I know calls it face-crack) as I can think of. Except with facebook the rewards are to do with your own self-esteem, so looking away is even harder.

And this isn’t even the worst of it. I’ve read quite a few books on behavioural economics – essentially it says that you can provide nudges to people and they will behave in ways that you want them to. This is generally presented as something good – like in Nudge itself, where people save more for their retirement if you construct a form in one way rather than in another. Or the example changing the form for organ donation from opt in to opt out and the rates of donation increase accordingly. You know, who is going to argue with that? Saving for your retirement is a good thing, donating your organs is a good thing. Except, the people who run facebook and google actually don’t make their money from you donating your organs – they make it from selling your behavioural data to people who want you to buy shit you don’t need or who want to work out what frightens the shit out of you so they can get you to vote for Trump or for Brexit. And they did. And it works. Even if you didn’t vote for either of these, it still works. Democracy doesn’t work by shifting those at the ends of the distribution – it works by shifting those in the middle. But we are all left with the consequences. 48% of the people of Britain are living with the consequences of what looks from the outside like - holy Jesus...

What the gathering and analysis of the dross of our lives (aka data) allows is the most disturbing and powerful means imaginable for influencing us – and the worst of it is that we will not even know we are being influenced. In fact, this I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself is often presented as a feature of the new system – you’ll walk into a bar and the bartender will already know your favourite drink and might even have it ready for you. Yeah, thanks for that...

A lot of this book discusses notions of operant conditioning and therefore it is a reprise of something like Plato’s republic – except his republic was to be run by the disinterested philosopher kings, people uninterested in money and worldly goods, who were judged (by whom?) to be the best and brightest and to be those worthy of organising society for the rest of us -even of telling us lies to make our little lives feel more comfortable. The republic we are entering with our eyes tightly closed is one where the philosopher kings have been replaced by the selfish and the greedy and we have given them the means to influence us in worlds they create and construct so that those worlds meet their own desires for us. I’ve always seen Plato’s republic as a dystopia – but what we are living in has no comparison. It is terrifying beyond words.

I wish this book wasn’t nearly so long – I would recommend it wholeheartedly then. You still do need to read it, though. Sorry.
...more

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Oct 12, 2018 Dominik rated it liked it

Shelves: to-read-2, to-read-3, i-own, to-read-4, kindle, via-g, via-wr, g-politics

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 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. I do wish the book were written in simpler, less highfalutin prose.

Surprisingly, there are no data at all in this book. None. I went in expecting analyses of the economic gains from Google and Facebook contrasted to some approximation of the social costs imposed by them. Or of small businesses enabled by these platforms. Or any economic analysis at all. There's none. This isn't that sort of book. Google and Facebook's "dispossession" of "people's lives" are presented as obvious. Showing a targeted ad based on a search or a user profile is apparently, to the author, something tantamount to stealing their very soul.

The book's arguments are weakened by its purple prose. "Rivers of blood" are not, in fact, flowing because of surveillance capitalism. We digital natives are not, in actuality, being mercilessly slaughtered by Conquistadors Page, Zuckerberg, and Nadella (the author explicitly makes this analogy over several pages). I understand the author's desire to provoke "astonishment and indignation" but I found these hyperbolic passages less than persuasive.

Despite the book's heft, there's much it doesn't cover. There's no discussion of pre-internet data brokers (credit card companies and credit bureaus, anyone?) There's no consideration of the privacy controls that Google and Facebook offer (much of the "extraction imperative" can be entirely turned off in each's privacy settings), nor that many valuable services are provided for free that do directly improve folks' lives. Nor any examination of other, far darker players in ad tech and social media. There's no discussion of k-anonymity, sparingly little of encryption, one fleeting mention of blockchain (expressing disapproval that smart contracts subvert the fundamental human values imbued in the ancient practice of contracts). The treatment of ML is decidedly non-technical and more akin to seeing ML as magic fairy dust than wrangling with its very real shortcomings (surprisingly, ML fairness doesn't get a mention).

The author ends by envisioning a nightmare scenario of B.F. Skinner's wildest dreams where, like players in Pokemon Go, our entire lives become subject to the careful nudges and variable rewards promulgated by the "high priesthood" of data scientists carefully tuning the all-knowing, all-seeing machine learning system. Prediction becomes control and the machines take over "the human hive." Ooo... kay.

All that said, this book is still worth the read, if you can stomach the hyperbole and dense prose and can exercise empathy toward the author's very real fears of seeing democracy and free society swallowed up by powerful corporations that tap into and manipulate human hopes and fears. There is love poured into these pages, love of humanity in its culture and its unpredictable freedom, and that in itself makes the book worth the investment. At the same time though, there's little love for Google or Facebook or technology in general -- and quite a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Disclosure: I am an employee of a big tech company, but the review above is solely my own opinion and not that of my employer. I've also tried to review the book without bias and through neutral eyes. ...more

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Jan 30, 2019 Lucas rated it it was ok

Shelves: business-and-economics

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’ 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’ guaranteed outcomes.” All the great research she’s done is described in the most alarming wording possible. It is a book filled with hyperbolic conclusions that are often not justified by anything other than the alarming wording she uses.

I have two theories about why that is: 1) She assumes that anyone willing to read the book already agrees with her conclusion that the collection of data by Google represents nothing short of the end of individual freedom. So if everyone agrees, she doesn’t need to explain why something like Pokemon Go taking users to stores is bad, because it’s just so obvious. 2) She’s not actually writing for a contemporary audience, but an audience in the distant future when everything she warns about has come true. This might sound like I’m joking, but she talks in the introduction about her work being inspired by Marx, because he saw what capitalism would be when it was still an unprecedented phenomenon, and later says that one of her conclusions unites very well with Thomas Paine. So the stakes are very high for Zuboff.

Beyond the conclusions being what they are, the writing in general is too much for me. I usually don’t complain about writing being too dense/academic/pretentious, but here is another sentence that exists in this book: “Orwell’s chilling final passages fulfill the life of that dry seed planted at the turn of the century in Italy’s impoverished soil and nourished by war, deprivation, and humiliation to flower in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the apocalypse of Stalin’s Russia, finally to bear fruit in Orwell’s imagination: a testament for all time to what Mussolini had called the “ferocious totalitarian will” and the souls on which it feeds.” It is a generally grating read, and it doesn’t help that the book is twice as long as it needs to be.

I’m not sure that all “behavior modification” by social media or data science is bad. (I should disclose that I work in data science, so ignore this whole review if you want). For example, a lot of people on the Goodreads app probably read more often than they would without the app, because of the social sharing aspect and the recommendation systems. This makes Amazon more money when people buy books from them. Is this bad? Most people on this app would probably agree that reading is good. Targeted advertising is not inherently bad either. For instance, I will never buy a truck. I don’t have anything against people who have trucks, but I have no interest in ever owning one. I hope every AI system in the world picks that sentence up, because it is my dream to watch a football game on the weekend and never see another truck commercial for the rest of my life.

Am I saying that there is nothing to be concerned about here? Of course not. As Zuboff points out, a lot of the data that companies have on consumers now leads to an unprecedented level of information and power. Power is vulnerable to abuse. Data can be used in ways that impair freedom and I’m concerned about that. That’s why I bought this book. But data can also be used in a lot of positive ways. Self-driving cars can virtually eliminate accidents from the road. Zuboff misleadingly quotes an internal memo at Google about self-driving cars and their ability to learn from collective car data storage, and uses it as an example of surveillance capitalists “lamenting” that people aren’t more like machines. It’s a very important subject, but Zuboff’s portrayal and conclusions are just way too much for me. ...more

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Jul 29, 2019 Michael rated it liked it

Shelves: 2019

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.

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May 16, 2019 Anna rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, technology, theory, economics, favorites

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 ...more

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May 11, 2019 Mehrsa rated it it was amazing

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 ...more

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Jan 13, 2022 Henk rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Sweeping and interesting, but also repetitive and alarmist. Definitely thought provoking but more concrete examples and less comparisons to totalitarianism would have aided my appreciation of this book
Assistance and personalization being the poetry of being able to sell more to you.

First of all, definitely check the privacy settings tab on social media and Google (as I did, so kudos for spurring the reader into action) and you’ll be shocked! Facebook in my example received information from 469 e ...more

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Feb 18, 2021 Emily B rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks-listened-to

‘Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data’

This was definitely an informing and illuminating and yet unsettling read. I feel everyone could benefit from reading this thought provoking book. However It was also a very long read and I feel it could have been condensed somewhat.

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Jun 19, 2019 Laura Noggle rated it it was amazing

Shelves: must-reads, 2019, nonfiction

“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

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Apr 08, 2019 Murtaza rated it liked it

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 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 lives. These things are all genuinely bad and troubling.

Having said that I found the authors analysis to be somehow overly bleak. There is a fundamental trade-off in having a free service like Google Maps. We get powerful, unprecedented assistance in navigation. In turn, they get our data which they use to refine their models of predictive human behavior. This probably isn't fair once you understand the full scope of what you are losing and maybe we should all demand a new modus vivendi. The book fails to describe it as a trade-off however. Instead it is depicted as us being literally conquered and enslaved by a foreign force, repeatedly analogized to the conquest of the Tainos by the Spanish conquistadors. This hyperbole is woven throughout the generally dense prose of the book. There is tons of information here. It doesn't necessarily say much that will be new to a relatively informed audience. I found this a bit disappointing given the breathless reception that the book has received. The repeated invocations of philosophers and renaissance poetry also felt a bit overwrought.

Having said that, I am in sympathy with much of the book's argument. We definitely have regressed to some sort of feudal economic arrangement, even while retaining the minds and desires of modern people. No wonder so many feel unhappy, despite their relative material wealth. The ubiquitous presence of sensory and data tracking equipment is setting human beings up for something unimaginable. Every movement, thought and impulse is on the way to being tracked and recorded in a powerful predictive text that can only be read by our new tech industry overseers. We are on the way to becoming laboratory rats in a maze designed to fine-tune our behavior, mainly for the purpose of controlling us and extracting our wealth. Every new gadget and app, often given for free or sold at cost price, is a new spy intended to capture as much behavioral data as possible. You don't need to enjoy the author's lurid prose to see that her words contain some truth.

Are there any solutions here? Only a vague gesture towards the need for more democracy. While that may be true I found it to be a predictable and somewhat lazy way to conclude the book. I feel it is not right to hammer out hundreds of pages of dire information without even formulating a plausible solution. Yes, the problems are articulated are real and critical. As the author acknowledges though, the tide is so overwhelming most have resigned themselves to drift along its course. How do we counteract this feeling of resignation? That would be a significant question to answer.

Were it possible I would give this book 2.5 stars of out of five. I would recommend any of the numerous essays about this subject out there, as well as Harari's more engaging overview. ...more

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Jan 18, 2020 Gary Barnes rated it it was ok

Shelves: english-non-fiction, to-read-in-2019, 100-philosophy, to-read-in-2020, read-in-2020, 330-economics, 040-artificial-intelligence, 990-current-affairs, 360-sociology

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.

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Mar 29, 2019 Paul rated it did not like it

Shelves: non-fiction

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 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 wrists, in our cars of our modern world. You feel a critique of Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc data gathering techniques and how they use them would be like shooting fish in a barrel, but repeatedly she misses the target. We get more a history of behavioural psychology, and endless flashbacks to comparisons to Ford's production lines.

The language is full of jargon, neologisms and is endlessly circular. There are a few interesting insights hidden in there, such as the Chinese model of collecting personal data on millions of people and using it to affect life chances and advancement, but this is dismissed as unworkable, and "the Chinese are used to being observed anyway". There seems no curiosity about how much our western governments are doing the same thing to profile their citizens. The repeatedly examined catchy examples are of Pokemon-Go directing players to businesses and an automated vacuum cleaner secretly mapping your rooms. Little mention of surveillance capitalism's more sinister uses in having always on microphones in millions of households. Also Edward Snowden and Cambridge Analytica's exposés of big data's political uses, eg in trying to swing elections and referendums gets barely a mention.

The conclusion feels like a good introduction, summing up what we already know, but that is the point we get to by the end of the book. There feels like a naivety in the author, who has just suddenly realised that our actions, decisions, routes we take and private conversations are being catalogued. She talks about the teenagers being in the vanguard of those observed by Facebook (I would suggest teenagers are elsewhere whilst Facebook's biggest audience are aged 20-40), and other slightly wrong mentions about how technology is used and accepted into the day to day lives of many people, who know they are being watched, but don't care. This book fails to let us know why we should care.

I honestly think most newspaper reviewers read the intro, looked at the chapter titles and then read the conclusion, not noticing that there is little new in between. ...more

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Jun 26, 2020 Hadrian rated it liked it

Shelves: technology, economics, society-culture-anthropology-etc, nonfiction

[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 [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 ignorant of the atrocities of war he was about to unleash upon them.

"Surveillance capitalism", a term the author coined, is not all imagined. It is still a term that can refer to the bargain that users make when they use free websites such as this. The users of a website are not the consumer, they are the product, as their use data and product history is sold to big marketers or advertising firms. Zuboff calls this 'behavioral surplus'. On Goodreads, this is benign - I can talk about books with friends for free, and I get recommended new ones. No harm done.

The problem lies in what is referred to as the "internet of things" - household objects or new device which track more of the user's location and behavior. Exercise equipment, thermostats, refrigerators, phones, mattresses, and doorknobs are connected to the internet. All of this is sent to "behavioral futures markets", and the general public simply does not know their personal information is treated this way. Legal regimes on monopolies or privacy law do not encompass the current situation - and who reads the terms of service anyway?

Zuboff is best when she does the work of journalism and digs through patent files and internal documents. The antagonists of her story are Facebook and Google, and their grand ambitions in business jargon for human society. But where Zuboff loses me is her exaggeration of their hold on society, of how much change they can carry out, and of how powerless most people are. I personally share her skepticism, but not her "inevitabilism", to use her term.

Where adblocking tools are powerful and widely shared and where targetted lists of consumer data can still be sabotaged (see what happened to the Tulsa rally), advertising is not as powerful as is thought. What makes me the most doubtful at present is Facebook's own scandal where it inflated by a significant margin the count of how many of its users visited its ads, and big companies can and do pull their money and go elsewhere. If digital advertising really is so easily ignored, then why would big businesses bother with such a wide net at all?

While there are social costs to intrusive advertising and Zuboff is right to doubt, I admit things are as bad as she says. Those ships have not sailed. ...more

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Mar 06, 2019 Nilesh rated it did not like it

Shelves: good-non-fiction

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 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 about Microsoft) in such a long book ensures that the author never even gets started on discussing the real problem, let alone any solutions beyond calling for all of us to say “No”.

The author - who yearns for the pre-digital era utopia of almost anytime in history including as late as the 1980s - is a twenty-first century, Rousseau-like romantic. She happens to be a critic of our era modernity but if she was from some other era, she might have hated television or automobiles or combustible engines with equal gusto. In this book, she comes out as someone who hates collection of almost any data, and analysis based on them, even though if approached with these charges, she will flat deny them. The author never understands that there is no turning back from the current point, that the digital era has some enormous positives along with many negatives, that most negatives cannot be wished away, that many of the negatives are structural intricately joined to the massive positives, that authorities cannot fight or even understand many evils that are transforming continuously, etc etc

Let’s build slowly to see how complicated the issues of data ownership are before we even look at the commercial aspects:

- There is that age-old question: if a tree falls in a jungle with no “one” to observe, does it make a sound or does it “count”? If you twist this question in the digital contexts, how do you define the “one” doing the measurement? Is my privacy invaded if my “personal” data - however defined - are “seen” by programs?
- The author will say a resounding yes to the question posed above based on what one reads in the book. Here, if I have a program living on my machine analyzing the private data to give me some results on what I am looking for - like a friend’s contact details - is my privacy invaded?
- what if some incoming data - say a barrage of ten billion ads or news articles - are sorted by some program on my machine to filter out the likely unimportant ones for me based on my past habits as stored on my device - is this an invasion?
- if not, how is the same an invasion if the same things are stored or processed on hardware located millions of miles away?
- how does anyone explain complex analytical tools to me? Need my apps to analyze only to the extent I/humans understand? If yes, how will we ever progress in fields of quantum physics, genetics or other behavioural sciences?
One can go on and on. The point is that issues of what is private data or understandable analysis are complex: the author seems to hate any analysis of “my” data for almost any commercial use. However, the same author would despise

- if search and many other similar functions were charged and were so expensive due to the lack of scale that only the elite of the world benefited from them
- Or if my lack of data-sharing did not solve her health or traffic or many similar solutions
- Or somebody prevented smart analysis of “my” data that might have helped me find the right education, right connections, right entertainment, right news amongst a plethora of choices out there.
- Or if the companies forced not to “nudge” offered no choice architecture (like no search) which is far worse than some choice, or offered the same “choice” without customisation to all
- Or if lack of free storage of my data - like health over decades - did not offer me the same health or financial advantages as somebody who could afford such storage

The author does not see how free/cheap access to information, analysis, storage, health, entertainment, etc has benefitted the underprivileged of the world since the onset of the digital revolution. Is the surplus enjoyed by the digital elite at the cost of the rest? Or is there a win-win, where we may charge them of keeping a disproportionate amount, but not accuse them of plunder?

The new era technologies have many negatives that need to be discussed and solved. Most of them are not what this author talks about in this book. The book is written by someone who yearns to be a digital hermit and feels she cannot. She is rightly frustrated by this viewpoint; it is nigh impossible to completely go dark as it is no longer just about devices under my control with the surveillance of millions of other varieties. That said, there are likely to be extremely few who could truly go back to such isolation for long now. ...more

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Dec 27, 2020 Marija rated it it was amazing

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

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Jun 04, 2019 Alex Orr rated it did not like it

Shelves: non-fiction-general, economics

This is so poorly written, so horrendously edited (was it edited?), and so stupefyingly redundant that it's really hard to adequately capture in words. You really have to slog through it yourself to understand the depths of its faults. So, let me save you the frustration. The author basically is saying that the aim of much of our current cutting edge technology is to gather as much data about us as possible through everything from smart homes, smart cars, and (obviously) social media in order to This is so poorly written, so horrendously edited (was it edited?), and so stupefyingly redundant that it's really hard to adequately capture in words. You really have to slog through it yourself to understand the depths of its faults. So, let me save you the frustration. The author basically is saying that the aim of much of our current cutting edge technology is to gather as much data about us as possible through everything from smart homes, smart cars, and (obviously) social media in order to construct a perfect simulacrum of ourselves in order to not just sell us more stuff, but to mold our behaviors...nay...our whole lives...as the companies deploying this tech see fit. That's about it. This book is a Ted Talk gone off the rails in the hands of an author who never met an ancillary idea she didn't want to include, and who really, really, REALLY loves to restate her hypotheses over, and over, and over... In the third part of the book, she literally devotes a whole chapter to summarizing the previous chapter. Every second or third paragraph exists solely to restate the preceeding paragraphs. Whole paragraphs exist only to lay out what she will tell us in the proceeding paragraphs and then later (you guessed it) she devotes whole paragraphs to summarizing the previous paragraphs. As for her central ideas? Ehhh.... Look, if you're aware of this book then you're already well aware of her central ideas because they're some of the most commonly discussed and hotly debated in the realms of big data, online privacy, and the growing sway Silicon Valley holds over our lives. The people who are unaware of these issues really could use a shorter, tighter, and just plain easier to read book to perhaps wake them up. The biggest problem I found (other than this being an atrociously written and edited book) is the author's extreme confidence in her beliefs of how this is all going to play out. By the end of the book she is talking of a near-future defined by a sort of techno-fascism in which the individual self has been exterminated from the world. Subtlety is not in her intellectual toolkit. If you decide to tackle this massive misfire at least take some comfort in knowing that it gets easier to read because you become far more comfortable skimming dozens of pages in a matter of seconds since most of it is usually just stuff she said earlier in the book that is repeated, often identically, for no other reason than...well...I don't know. This book reads like a wild and wooly first draft, not like a thoughtful, streamlined, well laid out, final version. ...more

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Nov 28, 2019 Graeme Newell rated it it was ok

Shelves: overdrive

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

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May 22, 2019 Bryan Alexander rated it really liked it

Shelves: technology, economics, cyberculture, american-history

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

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Jan 26, 2019 George Anders rated it liked it

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 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 provides effortless socialization? Do we want the right to be forgotten, or easier opportunities to become known? If we want a bit of both, how do we balance these trade-offs?

I would have loved to read a book that combined her relentless probing of tech's potential excesses with a realistic sense of what we've gained and lost at each step of the way. But that's not what we get. Instead TA0SC is weirdly colored -- in fact sometimes outright poisoned -- by endless nostalgia for a supposedly better time, long ago.

I've lived through the multi-decade transformation that Zuboff describes. Things weren't better back then! We're talking about the days of taking outdated paper maps on road trips, instead of having in-dash nav. Or looking up hotels in a Frommer's guide, instead of tapping into the detailed listings and reviews on TripAdvisor or Airbnb. Looking back on it, information was maddeningly costly, slow and hard to obtain back then.

Even if some aspects of today's digital connectivity seem silly or unnerving, when you add it all up, we're enjoying much better lives with Internet-era tools. To cite one more example, we've evolved from narrow knowledge cartels (where encyclopedia salespeople in the 1970s preyed on poor families) to a much more equitable world where easily accessible Google searches can get you up to speed on almost anything, no matter what your income.

I'd hoped this book would be a landmark contribution to the dialogue about how to handle tech's allures and pitfalls better. Instead, it's as frustrating as a partial encyclopedia set that stops at the letter D. For me, at least, TAoSC loses much of its effectiveness (and readability) by treating modernity as the apocalypse. All we're left with is a preservationist's anguished denunciation of everything that's changed.

There's a wonderful quote from English author Douglas Adams that covers this terrain better than anything I can add:

“1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ...more

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Feb 25, 2019 Kusaimamekirai rated it it was amazing

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

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Jan 25, 2020 Chris Chapman rated it it was amazing

Shelves: zz-yr-2020

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 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, Paine, Piketty and many others are marshalled to her cause.

So - in short, googlefacebookmicrosoftamazonverizon are making oodles of money from targeted ads, based on predictions of our behaviour which in turn are based on our activity online. Yeah yeah yeah, you say, we know this. Fine. But she goes further - their ultimate goal is not to stop at predicting our behaviour but shaping it. Cambridge Analytica, the targeted fake news aimed at influencing voting, was only the tip of the iceberg.

The promise of the promise and the will to will run deeper than these deformities. They remind us of that place again where we humans heal the breach between the known and the unknowable, navigating the seas of uncertainty in our vessels of shared promises. In the real world of human endeavour there is no perfect information and no perfect rationality. Life inclines us to take action and to make commitments even when the future is unknown. Anyone who has brought a child into the world or has otherwise given her or his heart in love knows this to be true. God knows the future, but we move forward, take risks, and bind ourselves to others despite the fact that we can’t know everything about the present let alone the future. This is the essence of our freedom, expressed as the element right to the future tense. With the construction and ownership of the new means of behavioural modification, the fate of this right conforms to a pattern that we have already identified. Is it not extinguished but rather it is usurped, commandeered and accumulated by surveillance capital’s exclusive claims on our futures. (Ch. 11.2: We Will to Will)

As you can see she invents a new language to talk about this stuff. Don't be put off. You learn it pretty quickly (she makes very clever use of repetition - not too much, just the right amount so you retain key themes, and they are rhetorically anchored in her narrative). ...more

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May 22, 2020 Lucy rated it it was ok

The unnecessarily ornate writing style makes the content harder to comprehend and retain.

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Apr 24, 2019 Keith Swenson rated it it was amazing

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 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 technique of guaranteed outcomes.

You already know that as users of Google search, we are not the customer. But we are not the product either. We are merely the source of something else: behavioral surplus. Google, and Facebook, and Amazon vacuum up that surplus which consists of old search queries, logs of mouse clicks, records of sites visited, and most importantly: "like" button clicks. None of this is of any value to us, but when aggregated it can tell a powerful story about each and every one of us. That behavioral surplus can be used to predict what we will do. If it was only prediction it would not be a particular problem. But this is where it turns dark: if you have a model that can predict what a person will do, then you can use that model to make people do things.

Our democracy and capitalism is built on the idea of a free market. Adam Smith described the "invisible hand" of the market, that while millions of people made independent decisions for our own personal welfare, the market was structured to find a nearly optimal distribution of goods ans services. The hand is invisible because it was impossible to know everything the everyone was doing. The aggregate behavior of all people was unknowable.

Until now.

Google and Facebook have detailed profiles on most of the people in the country: some thorough and some not, but it is all getting much more complete as new devices emit ever more digital exhaust to be collected. It is surveillance-as-a-service. We can be quite sure the 2016 Brexit vote and the Trump victory were due in no small part to manipulation with the tools of surveillance capitalism. What happens to democracy when a company can sell guaranteed outcomes for a price? What happens to the free market when the invisible hand disappears and is replaced by plutocrats who simply manipulate the public will to their favor?

We don't know the answers to these questions, and Zuboff doesn't either. It is too new. It is all just forming. Most of our legislators have only the faintest grasp of what is going on, much less what to do about it. But this is clearly the most important development of our time. If you want to understand it, this book is a monumental resource: well organized, well researched, well written.

This is a timely book, not too soon, and not too late. On a five-star scale, I am giving it a six. It is that important.

Wait ... we have had mass propaganda before that persuaded people and in some sense controlled them. Why is it any different this time? The difference is that through the collection of behavioral surplus, a very detailed model of every citizen can be constructed. From this model, algorithms can fashion a detailed plan for exactly what to display unique to each person. But it does not stop there: your behavior is further monitored to see which things you reacted to and which you didn't. This is used to further tune the model. Advertisements, memes, opinions, political statements, images are all thrust into the sidebars of the web pages. No two people get the exact same mix. Your response on every one can be captured and categorized independently. There has never in history been the ability to customize propaganda campaigns for individuals and be able to measure exactly how each individual responds. We have no precedence for this, and we have no idea where it is going or even how to change course if we see something amiss.

Zuboff gives us detailed example after example of how this came about, how it is being used, and what the legal implications are. Even Roger McNamee who has just published a similarly themed book called "Zucked" admits that the big difference is that Zuboff has all the data. She compare this emergence to that of Totalitarianism just 100 years ago. Totalitarianism enveloped the individual in a state-wide system of total control. We are not to fear that this is all going toward totalitarianism -- that was last time, and this time is different. She coins the term "Instrumentarianism" to describe the way that unknown algorithms are at the root of collecting the data, building the models, and crafting the plan of persuasion.

I guarantee in the next 5 to 10 years, you will be hearing a lot about Surveillance Capitalism and Instrumentarianism. We will need these new terms, and many other presented concepts just to understand what is happening. Only then, can we hope to navigate these stormy seas to the (hopefully) safe harbor once we know how to tame this new beast. ...more

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Jun 09, 2019 Sasha Mircov rated it really liked it

Shelves: philosophy

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 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 theorists of the last century, such as Adorno, Arent, Weber, Marx and Foucault, Zuboff provides a coherent picture of the inner workings of big tech behind the information economy, notably Google and Facebook. She eloquently explains the effect of the quantified and all-connected world in which big tech is harvesting our "digital behavioral surplus" for profit, often without our informed and explicit consent.

Zuboff’s prowess as a business professor shines through as she breaks down big tech’s business practices. From the business model of Google AdWords and Sheryl Sandberg’s influence to Google's lobbying strategies and Facebook's constant experimentation, the author gets it all right. She even ties it all together with the Internet of Things and The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

As masterful as it is, the book is not without its shortfalls and deficiencies. The economic impact of the surveillance economy is barely discussed. In 2017, Google alone generated around $238B in economic activity. Google and Facebook are often the best-performing advertising platforms for millions of small and medium-size businesses. Another noticeable no-show in Zuboff's book is Amazon, perhaps because of its association with the concept of "advocacy capitalism" - a more favorable form of capitalism as described in Zuboff’s previous book, The Support Economy.

The least convincing part of Zuboff’s most recent book is around what is at stake - our humanity, our freedom and even our free will. Free will, a finicky and controversial philosophical concept, is mutated into its meta-version, a will to will, which is the prerequisite for freedom and ultimately what defines us as humans. And it is precisely the ability to envision a future for ourselves that the “instrumentarian power” through “surveillance capitalism” is stealing away from us.

Zuboff is not wrong. People are complex, dynamic systems and the very attempt to predict one’s future behavior can trigger adaptation. The information economy, mediated by prediction algorithms, does precisely that - it changes us. However, to fear the change because it will strip us of our free will leaves her worries hanging on a shaky nail. Zuboff is careful not to get entangled in the metaphysics of free will, leaving those inclined to question the concept with unanswered questions.

Finally, for the 700 plus pages long polemic, the book is noticeably short of solutions. Zuboff acknowledges that regulation, such as the EU privacy regulation GDPR, are steps in the right direction and praises artists making clothing that can trick the image recognition software deployed by the surveillance capitalists.

On a philosophical level, she calls for the development of synthetic declaration on surveillance capitalism "to define and support other variants of information capitalism that participate in the social order, value people, and reflect democratic principles". Blockchain, the one technology that sprung out of the need for privacy, is part of the problem according to Zuboff, especially smart contracts, or "the anti-contracts", as she calls them.

In spite of the flaws, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism should be required reading for those who work in or with information technology. After all, what Professor Zuboff is doing in the book is predicting the future. And, in the same way Facebook's prediction and recommendation algorithms are slowly changing us, so will this book, but hopefully in the opposite direction. ...more

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Aug 18, 2020 Hannah Cook rated it it was ok

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

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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..." ...more

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Apr 07, 2021 Nataliya Yaneva rated it it was ok

Shelves: non-fiction, in-english

Abandoned it after having read 2/3 of it. Shoshana Zuboff is exploring a crucial subject for our modern tech-ridden lives and she’s certainly put a lot of effort and research into her work. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” somehow fell short of my expectations though due to the enormous sea of data, names, legal aspects and studies crammed into the book. There are also the heavy forays into some sort of philosophical plot twists defending the existence of the so called “free will” which I do ...more

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Feb 13, 2020 Tatiana rated it it was amazing

An absolute MUST READ. I listened to this on audio and loved the narrator. But I need this as an ebook so I can take notes. Because, holy shit. I feel like, if you care about the future of democracy then this is for you.

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Dec 01, 2020 Alex rated it liked it

Not going to finish. Moments of brilliance, but also weighed down by academic jargon and overstating phenomenon for sake of thesis.

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Jun 03, 2021 Matthew Sun rated it really liked it

It took me so long to get through this book but here we finally are! I'm honestly still considering how much of Zuboff's central thesis I agree with, but I appreciate how expansive her arguments were & the wide variety of evidence used to substantiate her claims. Some thoughts (not a comprehensive review, just the first few things that are top of mind now upon finishing it):
- As others have probably stated, the book is far too long. To be fair, I think Zuboff was not aiming for brevity, but rath It took me so long to get through this book but here we finally are! I'm honestly still considering how much of Zuboff's central thesis I agree with, but I appreciate how expansive her arguments were & the wide variety of evidence used to substantiate her claims. Some thoughts (not a comprehensive review, just the first few things that are top of mind now upon finishing it):
- As others have probably stated, the book is far too long. To be fair, I think Zuboff was not aiming for brevity, but rather to rouse the reader. But I felt that some of the more idiosyncratic phrases / topics started to blend into each other by the end (Big Other, instrumentation power, uncontract, etc.) that they almost began to lose their meaning.
- I wish Zuboff had taken more seriously the possibility that the instrumentarian project is itself a massive farce! For example, so many scholars are arguing that despite hundreds of millions of dollars being thrown into targeted ads, they actually influence our actions very, very little, and that online advertising is a massive bubble (see the Subprime Attention Economy by Tim Hwang for more details). For all the language about the "subjugation of free will," there's surprisingly little evidence that this is actually happening. Zuboff's discussion of sponsored PokeStops in Pokemon Go made me lose a little faith in her analysis; she depicts Pokemon Go as this massive surveillance project designed to psychologically manipulate users into purchasing...Starbucks drinks...is not persuasive. I tend to think most of these products make their money on a very tiny percentage of users whose actions at the margin are influenced by technological nudges.
- There's a bit of a weird "China is the dystopian society that the US must avoid becoming at all costs" dynamic in this book and surprisingly little engagement with people who actually live in China, or China scholars. This isn't to say that Zuboff's analysis is necessarily wrong - I just found this part of the analysis to be particularly thin. In general, I find that Zuboff is quite selective with the evidence she brings in to support her points - for example, she insists that social media is bad for mental health, which doesn't seem to accurately capture the nuances of current academic debates around social media and mental health.
- Zuboff's yearning for a sense of home / sanctuary from technology definitely resonates. She writes beautifully in the last few chapters about the very real sense of encroachment that technology introduces into our lives. But though I feel this, I am a bit skeptical of universalizing this idea that people are fundamentally incapable of finding their own ways to negotiate their relationships with technology.
- My reading is that Zuboff is actually not anti-capitalist at all? Which was a bit surprising when I started reading the book, especially since some people have said that this is "my generation's Das Kapital." In general, she expresses a lot of faith/hope in democracy and highly regulated capitalism. ...more

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About Shoshana Zuboff

Shoshana Zuboff

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Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita, Harvard Business School. She is the author of In The Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her BA from the University of Chicago.