The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

In its latest incarnation, behavioral modification comes to life as a global digital market architecture unfettered by geography, independent of constitutional constraints, and formally indifferent to the risks it poses to freedom, dignity, or the sustenance of the liberal order that Ervin’s subcommittee was determined to defend. This contrast is even more distressing in light of the fact that in the mid-twentieth century, the means of behavior modification were aimed at individuals and groups who were construed as “them”: military enemies, prisoners, and other captives of walled disciplinary regimes. Today’s means of behavioral modification are aimed unabashedly at “us.” Everyone is swept up in this new market dragnet, including the psychodramas of ordinary, unsuspecting fourteen-year-olds approaching the weekend with anxiety. Every avenue of connectivity serves to bolster private power’s need to seize behavior for profit. Where is the hammer of democracy now, when the threat comes from your phone, your digital assistant, your Facebook login? Who will stand for freedom now, when Facebook threatens to retreat into the shadows if we dare to be the friction that disrupts economies of action that have been carefully, elaborately, and expensively constructed to exploit our natural empathy, elude our awareness, and circumvent our prospects for self-determination? If we fail to take notice now, how long before we are numb to this incursion and to all the incursions? How long unt...