The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

by Shoshana Zuboff

Industrial capitalism was marked by the specialized division of labor, with its historically specific characteristics: the conversion of craft work to mass production based on standardization, rationalization, and the interchangeability of parts; the moving assembly line; volume production; large populations of wage earners concentrated in factory settings; professionalized administrative hierarchies; managerial authority; functional specialization; and the distinction between white-collar work and blue-collar work. The list is illustrative, not exhaustive, but enough to remind us that industrial civilization was drawn from these expressions of the economic imperatives that ruled industrial expansion. The division of labor shaped culture, psychology, and social experience. The shift from craft to hourly wages created new populations of employees and consumers, men and women wholly dependent on the means of production owned and operated by private firms.