The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

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