The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff Profile 704pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99
Shoshana Zuboff’s new book is nothing less than an attempt to “produce the Das Kapital of the digital age”, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. A Harvard Business School professor, Zuboff argues that capitalism has recently entered a new and unprecedented phase of existence, which she labels “surveillance capitalism”. This differs from its predecessors chiefly in the method of wealth creation: instead of extracting “labour surplus” from their workers, today’s big tech companies extract a “behavioural surplus” from their customers. Put simply, this is the “behavioural data we give to tech companies over and above that which they need to make their services work better for us”. Because this data can be used to model and predict our behaviour, it is extraordinarily attractive to advertisers – and is proving, for tech firms, an inexhaustible gold mine. The Age of... can be a “perplexing” read: it’s “sprawling” and very poorly written. And that’s a shame, because when Zuboff’s thoughts do “cut through her swampishly execrable prose, they can blow you away”.
The desire to spy on us ever more closely has become the underlying motive for nearly everything Silicon Valley does, said John Thornhill in the FT. Every new “smart” device – from virtual assistants to self-driving cars – is, in essence, a “data-gathering mechanism”. And the push into fields such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence merely continues this “land grab”. The basic modus operandi of Google, Facebook et al, has been clear for some time, said John Naughton in The Observer. But Zuboff is the first commentator to put it in context within capitalism’s “long evolution”. That’s why her book is “such a big event”. Surveillance capitalists aren’t just gathering data about our behaviour, said Jacob Silverman in The New York Times. Increasingly, they want to shape it at every juncture – which is “why you might see make-up ads before a Friday evening out or why inducements from a personal injury lawyer might pop up on your phone as you sit in a hospital waiting room”. Zuboff sees all this not only as a “disastrous overturning of the traditional capitalist order”, but, ultimately, as a threat to free will. Beyond proposing a “right to sanctuary” from data-gathering, her book is “light” on solutions. But that may be because she has a “bigger” aim: providing a “scaffolding of critical thinking from which to examine the great crises of the digital age”. This is a book that will “lead us down the long, hard road of understanding”.