The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

(3) the late twentieth century’s psychologically autonomous individual whose inner resources and capacity for moral judgment rise to the challenges of self-authorship that history demands and act as a bulwark against the predations of power. The self-authorship toward which young people strive carries forward these histories, strengthening, protecting, and rejuvenating each era’s claims to the sanctity and sovereignty of the individual person. What we have seen in Facebook is a living example of the third modernity that instrumentarianism proffers, defined by a new collectivism owned and operated by surveillance capital. The God view drives the computations. The computations enable tuning. Tuning replaces private governance and public politics, without which individuality is merely vestigial. And just as the uncontract bypasses social mistrust rather than healing it, the post-political societal processes that bind the hive rely on social comparison and social pressure for their durability and predictive certainty, eliminating the need for trust. Rights to the future tense, their expression in the will to will, and their sanctification in promises are drawn into the fortress of surveillance capital. On the strength of that expropriation, the tuners tighten their grasp, and the system flourishes. Industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, with catastrophic consequences that we only now recognize. Surveillance capitalism, I have suggested, dep...