The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

It is eloquent testimony to the health care system’s failure to serve the needs of second-modernity individuals that we now access health data and advice from our phones while these pocket computers aggressively access us. M-health has triggered an explosion of rendition and behavioral surplus capture as individuals turn in record numbers to their fitness bands and diet apps for support and guidance.47 By 2016, there were more than 100,000 mobile health apps available on the Google Android and Apple iOS platforms, double the number in 2014.48 These rich data can no longer be imagined as cloistered within the intimate closed loops between a patient and her doctor or between an application and its dieters or runners. That bucolic vision has its holdouts, to be sure, but for surveillance capitalists this vision is but a faded daguerreotype.