The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

“We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles,” Wylie admitted, “and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.” His summary of Cambridge Analytica’s accomplishments is a précis of the surveillance capitalist project and a rationale for its determination to render from the depths. These are the very capabilities that have gathered force over the nearly two decades of surveillance capitalism’s incubation in lawless space. These practices produced outrage around the world, when in fact they are routine elements in the daily elaboration of surveillance capitalism’s methods and goals, both at Facebook and within other surveillance capitalist companies. Cambridge Analytica merely reoriented the surveillance capitalist machinery from commercial markets in behavioral futures toward guaranteed outcomes in the political sphere. It was Eric Schmidt, not Wylie, who first pried open this Pandora’s box, paving the way for the transfer of surveillance capitalism’s core mechanisms to the electoral process as he cemented the mutual affinities that produced surveillance exceptionalism. In fact, Wylie enjoyed his early training under Obama’s “director of targeting.”83 Schmidt’s now-weaponized innovations have become the envy of every political campaign and, more dangerously, of every enemy of democracy.84