The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.

Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of “smart” networked devices, things, and spaces.

Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists and their market players are now locked into the continuous intensification of the means of behavioral modification and the gathering might of instrumentarian power.

Digital connection is now a means to others’ commercial ends. 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.

We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.

This logic turns ordinary life into the daily renewal of a twenty-first-century Faustian compact. “Faustian” because it is nearly impossible to tear ourselves away, despite the fact that what we must give in return will destroy life as we have known it. Consider that the internet has become essential for social participation, that the internet is now saturated with commerce, and that commerce is now subordinated to surveillance capitalism. 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, create 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.12 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.13

Just as industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity. The industrial legacy of climate chaos fills us with dismay, remorse, and fear. As surveillance capitalism becomes the dominant form of information capitalism in our time, what fresh legacy of damage and regret will be mourned by future generations? By the time you read these words, the reach of this new form will have grown as more sectors, firms, startups, app developers, and investors mobilize around this one plausible version of information capitalism. This mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the possibility of a human future at the new frontier of power will be contested.

Surveillance capitalism is not technology; it is a logic that imbues technology and commands it into action. Surveillance capitalism is a market form that is unimaginable outside the digital milieu, but it is not the same as the “digital.”

the motto of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: “Science Finds—Industry Applies—Man Conforms.”

I describe the “collision” between the centuries-old historical processes of individualization that shape our experience as self-determining individuals and the harsh social habitat produced by a decades-old regime of neoliberal market economics in which our sense of self-worth and needs for self-determination are routinely thwarted. The pain and frustration of this contradiction are the condition that sent us careening toward the internet for sustenance and ultimately bent us to surveillance capitalism’s draconian quid pro quo.

When a firm collects behavioral data with permission and solely as a means to product or service improvement, it is committing capitalism but not surveillance capitalism.

One vector belongs to the longer history of modernization and the centuries-long societal shift from the mass to the individual. The opposing vector belongs to the decades-long elaboration and implementation of the neoliberal economic paradigm: its political economics, its transformation of society, and especially its aim to reverse, subdue, impede, and even destroy the individual urge toward psychological self-determination and moral agency.

“If work becomes more divided,” it is because the “struggle for existence is more acute.”8 The rationality of capitalism reflects this alignment, however imperfect, with the needs that people experience as they try to live their lives effectively, struggling with the conditions of existence that they encounter in their time and place.

The first modernity suppressed the growth and expression of self in favor of collective solutions, but by the second modernity, the self is all we have. The new sense of psychological sovereignty broke upon the world long before the internet appeared to amplify its claims. We learn through trial and error how to stitch together our lives. Nothing is given. Everything must be reviewed, renegotiated, and reconstructed on the terms that make sense to us: family, religion, sex, gender, morality, marriage, community, love, nature, social connections, political participation, career, food…

Indeed, it was this new mentality and its demands that summoned the internet and the burgeoning information apparatus into our everyday lives. The burdens of life without a fixed destiny turned us toward the empowering information-rich resources of the new digital milieu as it offered new ways to amplify our voices and forge our own chosen patterns of connection. So profound is this phenomenon that one can say without exaggeration that the individual as the author of his or her own life is the protagonist of our age, whether we experience this fact as emancipation or affliction.16

In the “crisis of democracy” zeitgeist, the neoliberal vision and its reversion to market metrics was deeply attractive to politicians and policy makers, both as the means to evade political ownership of tough economic choices and because it promised to impose a new kind of order where disorder was feared.25 The absolute authority of market forces would be enshrined as the ultimate source of imperative control, displacing democratic contest and deliberation with an ideology of atomized individuals sentenced to perpetual competition for scarce resources. The disciplines of competitive markets promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects too preoccupied with survival to complain.

As the old collectivist enemies had receded, new ones took their place: state regulation and oversight, social legislation and welfare policies, labor unions and the institutions of collective bargaining, and the principles of democratic politics. Indeed, all these were to be replaced by the market’s version of truth, and competition would be the solution to growth. The new aims would be achieved through supply-side reforms, including deregulation, privatization, and lower taxes.

A sobering 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund warned of instability, concluding that the global trends toward neoliberalism “have not delivered as expected.” Instead, inequality had significantly diminished “the level and the durability of growth” while increasing volatility and creating permanent vulnerability to economic crisis.45

capitalism should not be eaten raw.

what is unbearable is that economic and social inequalities have reverted to the preindustrial “feudal” pattern but that we, the people, have not. We are not illiterate peasants, serfs, or slaves. Whether “middle class” or “marginalized,” we share the collective historical condition of individualized persons with complex social experiences and opinions. We are hundreds of millions or even billions of second-modernity people whom history has freed both from the once-immutable facts of a destiny told at birth and from the conditions of mass society. We know ourselves to be worthy of dignity and the opportunity to live an effective life. This is existential toothpaste that, once liberated, cannot be squeezed back into the tube. Like a detonation’s rippling sound waves of destruction, the reverberations of pain and anger that have come to define our era arise from this poisonous collision between inequality’s facts and inequality’s feelings.57

The deepest contradiction of our time, the social philosopher Zygmunt Bauman wrote, is “the yawning gap between the right of self-assertion and the capacity to control the social settings which render such self-assertion feasible. It is from that abysmal gap that the most poisonous effluvia contaminating the lives of contemporary individuals emanate.”

Under this new regime, the precise moment at which our needs are met is also the precise moment at which our lives are plundered for behavioral data, and all for the sake of others’ gain. The result is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment. In the absence of a decisive societal response that constrains or outlaws this logic of accumulation, surveillance capitalism appears poised to become the dominant form of capitalism in our time.

The new harms we face entail challenges to the sanctity of the individual, and chief among these challenges I count the elemental rights that bear on individual sovereignty, including the right to the future tense and the right to sanctuary. Each of these rights invokes claims to individual agency and personal autonomy as essential prerequisites to freedom of will and to the very concept of democratic order.

As a Bloomberg journalist explained in 2006, “Google maximizes the revenue it gets from that precious real estate by giving its best position to the advertiser who is likely to pay Google the most in total, based on the price per click multiplied by Google’s estimate of the likelihood that someone will actually click on the ad.”42 That pivotal multiplier was the result of Google’s advanced computational capabilities trained on its most significant and secret discovery: behavioral surplus. From this point forward, the combination of ever-increasing machine intelligence and ever-more-vast supplies of behavioral surplus would become the foundation of an unprecedented logic of accumulation. Google’s reinvestment priorities would shift from merely improving its user offerings to inventing and institutionalizing the most far-reaching and technologically advanced raw-material supply operations that the world had ever seen. Henceforth, revenues and growth would depend upon more behavioral surplus.

In other words, Google would no longer mine behavioral data strictly to improve service for users but rather to read users’ minds for the purposes of matching ads to their interests, as those interests are deduced from the collateral traces of online behavior. With Google’s unique access to behavioral data, it would now be possible to know what a particular individual in a particular time and place was thinking, feeling, and doing. That this no longer seems astonishing to us, or perhaps even worthy of note, is evidence of the profound psychic numbing that has inured us to a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods.

To state all this in plain language, Google’s invention revealed new capabilities to infer and deduce the thoughts, feelings, intentions, and interests of individuals and groups with an automated architecture that operates as a one-way mirror irrespective of a person’s awareness, knowledge, and consent, thus enabling privileged secret access to behavioral data.

A one-way mirror embodies the specific social relations of surveillance based on asymmetries of knowledge and power. The new mode of accumulation invented at Google would derive, above all, from the firm’s willingness and ability to impose these social relations on its users. Its willingness was mobilized by what the founders came to regard as a state of exception; its ability came from its actual success in leveraging privileged access to behavioral surplus in order to predict the behavior of individuals now, soon, and later. The predictive insights thus acquired would constitute a world-historic competitive advantage in a new marketplace where low-risk bets about the behavior of individuals are valued, bought, and sold. Google would no longer be a passive recipient of accidental data that it could recycle for the benefit of its users. The targeted advertising patent sheds light on the path of discovery that Google traveled from its advocacy-oriented founding toward the elaboration of behavioral surveillance as a full-blown logic of accumulation. The invention itself exposes the reasoning through which the behavioral value reinvestment cycle was subjugated to the service of a new commercial calculation. Behavioral data, whose value had previously been “used up” on improving the quality of Search for users, now became the pivotal—and exclusive to Google—raw material for the construction of a dynamic online advertising marketplace. Google would now secure more behavioral da...

These capabilities were and remain inscrutable to all but an exclusive data priesthood among whom Google is the übermensch. They operate in obscurity, indifferent to social norms or individual claims to self-determining decision rights. These moves established the foundational mechanisms of surveillance capitalism. The state of exception declared by Google’s founders transformed the youthful Dr. Jekyll into a ruthless, muscular Mr. Hyde determined to hunt his prey anywhere, anytime, irrespective of others’ self-determining aims. The new Google ignored claims to self-determination and acknowledged no a priori limits on what it could find and take. It dismissed the moral and legal content of individual decision rights and recast the situation as one of technological opportunism and unilateral power. This new Google assures its actual customers that it will do whatever it takes t...

In the new operation, users were no longer ends in themselves but rather became the means to others’ ends.

In this picture, commercial surveillance is not merely an unfortunate accident or occasional lapse. It is neither a necessary development of information capitalism nor a necessary product of digital technology or the internet. It is a specifically constructed human choice, an unprecedented market form, an original solution to emergency, and the underlying mechanism through which a new asset class is created on the cheap and converted to revenue. Surveillance is the path to profit that overrides “we the people,” taking our decision rights without permission and even when we say “no.” The discovery of behavioral surplus marks a critical turning point not only in Google’s biography but also in the history of capitalism.

The big pattern here is one of subordination and hierarchy, in which earlier reciprocities between the firm and its users are subordinated to the derivative project of our behavioral surplus captured for others’ aims. We are no longer the subjects of value realization. Nor are we, as some have insisted, the “product” of Google’s sales. Instead, we are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for Google’s prediction factories. Predictions about our behavior are Google’s products, and they are sold to its actual customers but not to us. We are the means to others’ ends.

It is obscene to suppose that this harm can be reduced to the obvious fact that users receive no fee for the raw material they supply. That critique is a feat of misdirection that would use a pricing mechanism to institutionalize and therefore legitimate the extraction of human behavior for manufacturing and sale. It ignores the key point that the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us. The remarkable questions here concern the facts that our lives are rendered as behavioral data in the first place; that ignorance is a condition of this ubiquitous rendition; that decision rights vanish before one even knows that there is a decision to make; that there are consequences to this diminishment of rights that we can neither see nor foretell; that there is no exit, no voice, and no loyalty, only helplessness, resignation, and psychic numbing; and that encryption is the only positive action left to discuss when we sit around the dinner table and casually ponder how to hide from the forces that hide from us.

In historian Karl Polanyi’s 1944 grand narrative of the “great transformation” to a self-regulating market economy, he described the origins of this translation process in three astonishing and crucial mental inventions that he called “commodity fictions.” The first was that human life could be subordinated to market dynamics and reborn as “labor” to be bought and sold. The second was that nature could be translated into the market and reborn as “land” or “real estate.” The third was that exchange could be reborn as “money.”3 Nearly eighty years earlier, Karl Marx had described the taking of lands and natural resources as the original “big bang” that ignited modern capital formation, calling it “primitive accumulation.”4 The philosopher Hannah Arendt complicated both Polanyi’s and Marx’s notion. She observed that primitive accumulation wasn’t just a one-time primal explosion that gave birth to capitalism. Rather, it is a recurring phase in a repeating cycle as more aspects of the social and natural world are subordinated to the market dynamic. Marx’s “original sin of simple robbery,” she wrote, “had eventually to be repeated lest the motor of capital accumulation suddenly die down.”5

The key point for our story in the age of surveillance capitalism is that the expansion of opportunities for free expression associated with the internet has been an emancipatory force in many vital respects, but this fact must not blind us to another condition: free speech fundamentalism has deflected careful scrutiny of the unprecedented operations that constitute the new market form and account for its spectacular success. The Constitution is exploited to shelter a range of novel practices that are antidemocratic in their aims and consequences and fundamentally destructive of the enduring First Amendment values intended to protect the individual from abusive power.

During these years, scholars noted the growing interdependencies between the intelligence agencies, resentful of constitutional constraints on their prerogatives, and the Silicon Valley firms.86 The agencies craved the lawlessness that a firm such as Google enjoyed. In his 2008 essay “The Constitution in the National Surveillance State,” law professor Jack Balkin observed that the Constitution inhibits government actors from high-velocity pursuit of their surveillance agenda, and this creates incentives for the government “to rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it.”87 Balkin noted that the Supreme Court has imposed few privacy restrictions on business records and information that people give to third parties. E-mail is typically held in private servers, making its protection “limited if not nonexistent.” This absence of law made private companies attractive partners for government actors bound to democratic constraints.

Surveillance capitalism’s ability to keep democracy at bay produced these stark facts. Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world’s information. One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks.

For now, suffice to say that Street View and the larger project of Google Maps illustrate the new and even more ambitious goals toward which this cycle of dispossession would soon point: the migration from an online data source to a real-world monitor to an advisor to an active shepherd—from knowledge to influence to control.

In 2016, for example, the corporation introduced a new Maps app feature called “Driving Mode” that suggests destinations and travel times without users even selecting where they want to go. If you searched for a hammer online, then “Driving Mode” can send you to a hardware store when you buckle up your seat belt. “Google is integrating this ‘push’ technology into its main mobile search app,” reported the Wall Street Journal.69 With this app, Google the “copilot” prompts an individual to turn left and right on a path defined by its continuously accruing knowledge of the person and the context. Predictions about where and why a person might spend money are derived from Google’s exclusive access to behavior surplus and its equally exclusive analytic capabilities: “Eat here.” “Buy this.” Google’s surplus analysis can predict that you are likely to buy an expensive woolen suit, and its real-time location data can trigger the proprietor or advertiser’s real-time prompt, matched to your profile and delivered at the very moment that you are within sight of the flannels, tweeds, and cashmeres. Push and pull, suggest, nudge, cajole, shame, seduce: Google wants to be your copilot for life itself. Each human response to each commercial prompt yields more data to refine into better prediction products. The prompts themselves are bought and paid for in a novel iteration of Google’s online ad markets: real-time, real-world trading in behavioral futures. Your future.

The stakes are high in this market frontier, where unpredictable behavior is the equivalent of lost revenue. Google cannot leave anything to chance.

“Maps created empire.” They are essential for the effective “pacification, civilization, and exploitation” of territories imagined or claimed but not yet seized in practice. Places and people must be known in order to be controlled. “The very lines on the map,” wrote Harley, were a language of conquest in which “the invaders parcel the continent among themselves in designs reflective of their own complex rivalries and relative power.” The first US rectangular land survey captured this language perfectly in its slogan: “Order upon the Land.”72 The cartographer is the instrument of power as the author of that order, reducing reality to only two conditions: the map and oblivion. The cartographer’s truth crystallizes the message that Google and all surveillance capitalists must impress upon all humans: if you are not on our map, you do not exist.

John Hanke described its familiar shape in the form of eyewear as suitable for “the early adoption phases” of wearable technology in much the same way that the first automobiles resembled horse-drawn buggies. In other words, the “glasses” were intended to disguise what was in fact unprecedented: “Ultimately we will want these technologies, wherever they are on your body, to be totally optimized based on the job they’re doing, not on what is more socially acceptable at that first moment of creation, just because it reminds people of something they’ve seen in the past.”73

To my Democratic colleagues and me, the digital tracks that a consumer leaves when using a network are the property of that consumer. They contain private information about personal preferences, health problems and financial matters. Our Republican colleagues on the commission argued the data should be available for the network to sell.147

The rapid migration to surveillance revenues that is now underway recalls the late-twentieth-century shift from revenues derived from goods and services to revenues derived from mastering the speculative and shareholder-value-maximizing strategies of financial capitalism. Back then, every company was forced to obey the same commandments: shrink head count, offshore manufacturing and service facilities, reduce expenditures on product and service quality, diminish commitments to employees and consumers, and automate the customer interface, all radical cost-reduction strategies designed to support the firm’s share price, which was held hostage to an increasingly narrow and exclusionary view of the firm and its role in society.

The six declarations laid the foundation for the wider project of surveillance capitalism and its original sin of dispossession. They must be defended at any cost because each declaration builds on the one before it. If one falls, they all fall: • We claim human experience as raw material free for the taking. On the basis of this claim, we can ignore considerations of individuals’ rights, interests, awareness, or comprehension. • On the basis of our claim, we assert the right to take an individual’s experience for translation into behavioral data. • Our right to take, based on our claim of free raw material, confers the right to own the behavioral data derived from human experience. • Our rights to take and to own confer the right to know what the data disclose. • Our rights to take, to own, and to know confer the right to decide how we use our knowledge. • Our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide confer our rights to the conditions that preserve our rights to take, to own, to know, and to decide.

The division of learning is to us, members of the second modernity, what the division of labor was to our grandparents and great-grandparents, pioneers of the first modernity. In our time the division of learning emerges from the economic sphere as a new principle of social order and reflects the primacy of learning, information, and knowledge in today’s quest for effective life. And just as Durkheim warned his society a century ago, today our societies are threatened as the division of learning drifts into pathology and injustice at the hands of the unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that surveillance capitalism has achieved.

The result is that the division of learning is both the ascendant principle of social ordering in our information civilization and already a hostage to surveillance capitalism’s privileged position as the dominant composer, owner, and guardian of the texts. Surveillance capitalism’s ability to corrupt and control these texts produces unprecedented asymmetries of knowledge and power that operate precisely as Durkheim had feared: the relatively free rein accorded to this market form and the innately illegible character of its action have enabled it to impose substantial control over the division of learning outside of our awareness and without means of combat. When it comes to the essential questions, surveillance capital has gathered the power and asserted the authority to supply all the answers. However, even authority is not enough. Only surveillance capital commands the material infrastructure and expert brainpower to rule the division of learning in society.

In Britain, university administrators are already talking about a “missing generation” of data scientists. The huge salaries of the tech firms have lured so many professionals that there is no one left to teach the next generation of students. As one scholar described it, “The real problem is these people are not dispersed through society. The intellect and expertise is concentrated in a small number of companies.”32

In this hidden movement the competitive struggle over surveillance revenues reverts to the pre-Gutenberg order as the division of learning in society shades toward the pathological, captured by a narrow priesthood of privately employed computational specialists, their privately owned machines, and the economic interests for whose sake they learn.

So here is what is at stake: surveillance capitalism is profoundly antidemocratic, but its remarkable power does not originate in the state, as has historically been the case. Its effects cannot be reduced to or explained by technology or the bad intentions of bad people; they are the consistent and predictable consequences of an internally consistent and successful logic of accumulation. Surveillance capitalism rose to dominance in the US under conditions of relative lawlessness. From there it spread to Europe, and it continues to make inroads in every region of the world. Surveillance capitalist firms, beginning with Google, dominate the accumulation and processing of information, especially information about human behavior. They know a great deal about us, but our access to their knowledge is sparse: hidden in the shadow text and read only by the new priests, their bosses, and their machines. This unprecedented concentration of knowledge produces an equally unprecedented concentration of power: asymmetries that must be understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society. This means that powerful private interests are in control of the definitive principle of social ordering in our time, just as Durkheim warned of the subversion of the division of labor by the powerful forces of industrial capital a century ago. As things currently stand, it is the surveillance capitalist corporations that know. It is the market form that decides. It is th...

Surveillance capitalists therefore must ask this: what forms of surplus enable the fabrication of prediction products that most reliably foretell the future? This question marks a critical turning point in the trial-and-error elaboration of surveillance capitalism. It crystallizes a second economic imperative—the prediction imperative—and reveals the intense pressure that it exerts on surveillance capitalist revenues.