The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

In this way, the machine hive becomes the role model for a new human hive in which we march in peaceful unison toward the same direction based on the same “correct” understanding in order to construct a world free of mistakes, accidents, and random messes. In this world the “correct” outcomes are known in advance and guaranteed in action. The same ubiquitous instrumentation and transparency that define the machine system must also define the social system, which in the end is simply another way of describing the ground truth of instrumentarian society. In this human hive, individual freedom is forfeit to collective knowledge and action. Nonharmonious elements are preemptively targeted with high doses of tuning, herding, and conditioning, including the full seductive force of social persuasion and influence. We march in certainty, like the smart machines. We learn to sacrifice our freedom to collective knowledge imposed by others and for the sake of their guaranteed outcomes. This is the signature of the third modernity offered up by surveillance capital as its answer to our quest for effective life together.