The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

The democratic impulse of US society, repelled by the excesses of its intelligence agencies, their support of criminal activities undertaken by the Nixon administration, and the migration of behavior modification as a means of disciplinary control in state institutions, led to the rejection of behavioral modification as an extension of governmental power. Unknown to the senators, scholars, rights activists, litigators, and many other citizens who stood against the antidemocratic incursions of the behavioral engineering vision, these methods had not died. The project would resurface in a wholly unexpected incarnation as a creature of the market, its unprecedented digital capabilities, scale, and scope now flourishing under the flag of surveillance capitalism. During the same years that US democratic forces combined to resist behavior modification as a form of state power, the energies of capitalist counterinsurgency were already at work within society. The corporation was to enjoy the rights of personhood but be free of democratic obligations, legal constraints, moral calculations, and social considerations. Certainly in the US case, a weakened state in which elected officials depend upon corporate wealth in every election cycle has shown little appetite to contest behavior modification as a market project, let alone to stand for the moral imperatives of the autonomous individual.