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oznorCOThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism : The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power – Shoshana Zuboff
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THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM : The Fight For A Human Future At The New Frontier Of Power

Shoshana Zuboff
LIGHTLY USED, HARDCOVER

RM35.00

Define & Analyze The New And Dangerous Economic Form Of Surveillance Capitalism That Has Taken Root In the 21st Century By Digital Companies

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
ISBN 9781610395694
Book Condition LIGHTLY USED
Format HARDCOVER
Publisher PublicAffairs,U.S.
Publication Date 15 Jan 2019
Pages 704
Weight 1.1 kg
Dimension 24.3 × 16 × 5.6 cm
Availability: 1 in stock

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★★ An International Bestseller ★★
★★ A New York Times Notable Book of the Year ★★
★★ A Financial Times Best Book of the Year ★★
★★ A Sunday Times (UK) Best Business Book of the Year ★★
★★ Selected by Barack Obama, Zadie Smith (in the Wall Street Journal), Jia Tolentino (in the New Yorker), Elif Shafak (in the Guardian), and Ana Botin (in Bloomberg) as one of the best books of 2019 ★★
★★ Finalist for the Financial Times/McKinsey Best Book of the Year Award ★★
 
Tech companies want to control every aspect of what we do, for profit. A bold, important book identifies our new era of capitalism. This challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.
 
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
 
She offers a comprehensive account of the new form of economic oppression that has crept into our lives, challenging the boundless hype that has often surrounded the activities of modern technology companies.


In her introduction, Zuboff defines surveillance capitalism as a process whereby technology firms collect data on lived human experience to create prediction products. These products are sold on behavioral futures markets to buyers who wish to know and influence people’s future behaviors. The author argues that surveillance capitalism’s secret exploitation of the mass public is a dire threat to the future of democratic society, threatening the very idea of free will.
 
She also vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
 
Zuboff states that surveillance capitalism “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data [which] are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.” She states that these new capitalist products “are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets.”
 
In a capitalist society, information, such as a user’s likes and dislikes gathered when accessing a platform like Facebook, or from any other kind of sensor that serves as an internet touch point to data-stream, is information that can be used by that company to better the experience of a user by feeding them information that data obtained from their previous activity would have shown them to be interested in.
 
It can also infer many things about the individual that extend far beyond the terms and conditions of use. This in many ways can be done through the use of an algorithm that analyses information. The danger of surveillance capitalism is that platforms and tech companies claim ownership of private information because it is free for them to access, claiming private experience as ‘raw material’ for data factories.
 
There is very little supervision or actual laws by governments and users themselves. Because of this, there has been backlash on how these companies have used the information gathered. For example, Google, which is said to be “the pioneer of surveillance capitalism”[4] introduced a feature that used “commercial models … discovered by people in a time and place”.
 
This means that not only are commercials being specifically targeted to you through your phone, but now work hand in hand with your environment and habits such as being shown an advertisement of a local bar when walking around downtown in the evening. Advertising attempts this technical and specific can easily have an impact on the one’s decision-making process in the activities they choose and in political decisions.
 
Thus the idea that these companies seemingly go unchecked whilst having the power to observe and control thinking is one of the many reasons tech companies such as Google themselves are under so much scrutiny and criticism.
 
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit — at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
 
Furthermore, Zuboff writes, the freedom allotted to tech companies comes from the idea that “surveillance capitalism does not abandon established capitalist ‘laws’ such as competitive production, profit maximization, productivity and growth”, as they are principles any business in a capitalistic society should aim to excel in, in order to be competitive.
 
Zuboff claims in an article that “new logic accumulation … introduces its own laws of motion”. In other words, this is a new phenomenon in capitalistic operations that should be treated as such and be instilled with its own specific restrictions and limitations.
 
Lastly, as invasive as platforms have been in terms of accumulating information, they have also led to what is now called a “sharing economy”, Van Dijck in which digital information can be obtained by individuals carrying out their own surveillance capitalism through the aid of platforms themselves. Thus “individuals can greatly benefit from this transformation because it empowers them to set up business”, Van Dijck (2018).
 
Small businesses will also benefit in potentially growing faster than they would have without knowing consumer demands and wants but would need to pay corporations for access to knowledge. This leaves surveillance capitalism as an exceptionally useful tool for businesses, but also an invasion of privacy to users who do not want their private experience to be owned by a company.
 
Part 1 of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism looks at specific historical, political, and economic circumstances that led to the rise of surveillance capitalism. Zuboff identifies the collision of second modernity’s individualism and neoliberalism as a key moment in history that ruptured society, triggering a phase of socio-political turmoil that allowed for surveillance capitalists to enter the stage and exploit modern citizens’ vulnerabilities for their own gain.
 
Surveillance capitalism fortified its growth by establishing close ties to the government, lobbying Congress and creating relationships with US presidents to shield itself from federal regulation.
 
In Part 2, Zuboff analyzes surveillance capitalism’s present operations. Surveillance capitalism enforces a division of knowledge to preserve its power dynamic. The division of knowledge is expressed through two texts: a public facing text, which is composed of all the material that anybody can access online, and the “shadow” text, which is all of the behavioral data surplus that only the surveillance capitalists can access.
 
They then leverage this knowledge against the mass public, using it to predict and encourage future behaviors that might work in their profitable favor. This process relies on mundane, everyday technologies that secretly glean user behavioral data on a regular basis.
 
The final part of Zuboff’s book casts its eyes on the future, theorizing what a society under surveillance capitalism’s rule would look like. The author argues that surveillance capitalism seeks to create a world of ubiquitous computing, making the entire world population a source of raw behavioral material. This network of ubiquity—the “apparatus”—enforces instrumentarianism, surveillance capitalism’s form of power that seeks to control behavior at a massive, global scale.
 
In her conclusion Zuboff emphasizes the fact that surveillance capitalism’s wishes for a utopia of certainty comes at the expense of profound ideals that modern humanity holds dear, such as democracy and free will. While it will be a utopia for the surveillance capitalists, it will be an oppressive dystopia for the mass public.
 
According to Zuboff, only a collective, popular resistance movement that urges world governments to recognize and legislate the dangers of surveillance capitalism can prevent the looming instrumentarian future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future — if we let it.
 
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About the Author :
 
Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita, Harvard Business School. She is the author of In The Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her BA from the University of Chicago.
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