Shoshana Zuboff

THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year Award 2019 'Easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasn't at least familarised themselves with Zuboff's central ideas.' - Zadie Smith, The Guardian The 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 us. The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future? Shoshana Zuboff shows that we are at a crossroads. We still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in, and what we decide now will shape the rest of the century. Our choices: allow technology to enrich the few and impoverish the many, or harness it and distribute its benefits. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. Most critically, it shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities and ensure we are the masters of the digital rather than its slaves.

The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Eneko Uruñuela

"You need to do more than just invent things,"

"Simply displaying the ability to make money will not be enough to remain a major player in the years ahead. What will be required will be an ability to show sustained and exponential profits."

Without a device like Apple's iPod or its digital songs, there were no margins, no surplus, nothing left over to sell and turn into revenue.

italism's unusual products manage to be derived from our behavior capwhile remaining indifferent to our behavior. Its products are about predicting us, without actually caring what we do or what is done to us.

A précis of Piketty's extensive research may be stated simply: capitalism should raw. Capitalism, like sausage, is meant to be cooked not be eaten by a democratic society and its institutions because raw capitalism is antisocial.

A sobering 2016 report from the International Monetary Fund warned of instability, concluding that the global trends toward signeoliberalism "have not delivered as expected." Instead, inequality had nificantly diminished "the level and the durability of growth" while increasing volatility and creating permanent vulnerability to economic crisis."

He described the double movement: "a network of measures and policies ... integrated into powerful institutions designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land, and money."

The absolute authority of market forces would be enshrined as the ultimate source of imperative control, displacing democratic contest and deliberation with an ideology of atomized individuals sentenced to perpetual competition for scarce resources. The disciplines of competitive markets promised to quiet unruly individuals and even transform them back into subjects too preoccupied with survival to complain.

Hayek explained the necessity of absolute individual and collective submission to the exacting disciplines of the market as an unknowable "extended order" that supersedes the legitimate political authority vested in the state: "Modern economics explains how such an extended order... constitutes an information-gathering process... that no central planning agency, let alone any individual, could know as a whole, possess, or control...."2 Hayek and his ideological brethren insisted on a capitalism stripped down to its raw core, unimpeded by any other force and impervious to any external authority. Inequality of wealth and rights was accepted and system and as even celebrated as a necessary feature of a successful market a force for progress.23 Hayek's ideology provided the intellectual superstructure and legitimation for a new theory of the firm that became another crucial antecedent to the surveillance capitalist corporation: its structure, moral content, and relationship to society.”

lol reading this as i'm trying to get a job in tech

Ivy Chen

Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral 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. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism quotes

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