shoshana zuboff the age of surveillance capitalism summary

Surveillance capitalism is an economic creation, and it is therefore subject to democratic contest, debate, revision, constraint, oversight, and may even be outlawed. If technology is bone and muscle, surveillance capitalism is the soft tissue that binds the elements and directs them into action. Thus, surveillance capitalism is not the same as algorithms or sensors, machine intelligence or platforms, though it depends on all of these to express its will. The economic orientation is the puppet master technology is the puppet. Just as surveillance capitalism can no longer be conflated with an individual corporation, neither should it be conflated with “technology.” Digital technologies can take many forms and have many effects, depending on the social and economic logics that bring them to life. Surveillance capitalism cannot be imagined as something “out there” in factories and offices. The competition for surveillance revenues bears down on our bodies, our automobiles, our homes, and our cities, challenging human autonomy and democratic sovereignty in a battle for power and profit as violent as any the world has seen. While the titanic power struggles of the twentieth century were between industrial capital and labor, the twenty-first century finds surveillance capital pitted against the entirety of our societies, right down to each individual member. This mutation quickly spread from Silicon Valley to every economic sector, as its success birthed a burgeoning surveillance-based economic order that now extends across a vast and varied range of products and services. Surveillance capitalism can no longer be identified with individual companies or even with the behemoth information sector.

Like an invasive species with no natural predators, its financial prowess quickly overwhelmed the networked sphere, grossly disfiguring the earlier dream of digital technology as an empowering and emancipatory force. Invented at Google and elaborated at Facebook in the online milieu of targeted advertising, surveillance capitalism embodies a new logic of accumulation. Instead of claiming work (or land, or wealth) for the market dynamic as industrial capitalism once did, surveillance capitalism audaciously lays claim to private experience for translation into fungible commodities that are rapidly swept up into the exhilarating life of the market. It revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. In our time, surveillance capitalism repeats capitalism’s “original sin” of primitive accumulation. Requests for article permissions and reprints should be directed to the author at szuboff Is Surveillance Capitalism? Publisher’s note: This article has been published by permission of the author.

Shoshana zuboff the age of surveillance capitalism summary