The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
Shoshana Zuboff
Book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
This book is honestly so big conceptually that I don’t know what to write. I think I will start with what I think is good/amazing/
Some great reasons to read this book
- Does a great job explaining Why we gave away our privacy in the first place and how we got here. There are key case studies and some great summaries of historical and cultural literature. Notably describing how the internet meets the many varied needs of those living in highly individualized cultures.
- Points out that surveillance capitalism was not an inevitability, and instead was invented by specific people at a specific time and place. Those people took advantages of post 9/11
- Covers some great case studies - Roomba leaking photos of people on the toilet was pretty horrifying.
Part 2 is about where is this is all going. How will all this power be used?
Much of surveillance capitalism is about selling guaranteed outcomes. Making people do what the companies want them to do. Mostly this is about influencing people to purchase specific things to support the advertisers. If a platform like google could guarantee that they will sell your product that would make them a lot of money.
Zuboff is arguing that the amount of power being accrued will indeed leaded to guaranteed outcomes. She says it is hard to imagine what this will look like because this is novel. She dedicates quite a few pages to showing how authoritarianism in the 20th century was so hard to understand because it was new and how that can be a model for how this new power, which she dubs instrumentarianism, should be thought about. Something completely new, impossible to conceptualize, maybe not as bloody as Stalin but possibly more powerful.