Synopses & Reviews
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 our behavior.
Shoshana Zuboff's interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and democratization?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the twenty-first century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
Review
"Shoshana Zuboff has produced the most provocative compelling moral framework thus far for understanding the new realities of our digital environment and its anti-democratic threats. From now on, all serious writings on the internet and society will have to take into account with The Age of Surveillance Capitalism." Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Chair Professor, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania
Review
"The defining challenge for the future of the market economy is the concentration of data, knowledge, and surveillance power. Not just our privacy but our individuality is at stake, and this very readable and thought-provoking book alerts us to these existential dangers. Highly recommended." Daron Acemoglu, coauthor of Why Nations Fail
Review
"Zuboff is a strikingly original voice, simultaneously bold and wise, eloquent and passionate, learned and accessible. Read this book to understand the inner workings of today's digital capitalism, its threats to twenty-first century society, and the reforms we must make for a better tomorrow." Frank Pasquale, University of Maryland Carey School of Law, Author of The Black Box Society
Review
"A panoramic exploration of one of the most urgent issues of our times, Zuboff reinterprets contemporary capitalism through the prism of the digital revolution, producing a book of immense ambition and erudition. Zuboff is one of our most prescient and profound thinkers on the rise of the digital. In an age of inane Twitter soundbites and narcissistic Facebook posts, Zuboff's serious scholarship is great cause for celebration." Andrew Keen, author of How to Fix the Future
Review
"In the future, if people still read books, they will view this as the classic study of how everything changed. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a masterpiece that stunningly reveals the essence of twenty-first-century society, and offers a dire warning about technology gone awry that we ignore at our peril. Shoshana Zuboff has somehow escaped from the fishbowl in which we all now live, and introduced to us the concept of water. A work of penetrating intellect, this is also a deeply human book about what is becoming, as it relentlessly demonstrates, a dangerously inhuman time." Kevin Werbach, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust
Review
"From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book as act of digital self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, Zuboff demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the process. The hour is late and much has been lost already-but as we learn in these indispensable pages, there is still hope for emancipation." Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and No Logo, and Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University
Review
"Zuboff's expansive, erudite, deeply-researched exploration of digital futures elucidates the norms and hidden terminal goals of information-intensive industries. Zuboff's book is the information industry's Silent Spring." Chris Hoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley
Review
"My mind is blown on every page by the depth of Shoshana's research, the breadth of her knowledge, the rigor of her intellect, and finally by the power of her arguments. I'm not sure we can end the age of surveillance capitalism without her help, and that's why I believe this is the most important book of our time." Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economy, editor-in-chief, Linux Journal
Review
"The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is brilliant and essential. Shoshana Zuboff reveals capitalism's most dangerous frontier with stunning clarity: The new economic order of surveillance capitalism founded on extreme inequalities of knowledge and power. Her sweeping analysis demonstrates the unprecedented challenges to human autonomy, social solidarity, and democracy perpetrated by this rogue capitalism. Zuboff's book finally empowers us to understand and fight these threats effectively — a masterpiece of rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and deeply urgent." Robert B. Reich, author of The Common Good and Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few
About the Author
Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita at Harvard Business School and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She joined HBS’s faculty in 1981 and was one of the first tenured women at HBS and the youngest professor to receive an endowed chair. She received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University and her BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago. Her previous book, In the Age of the Smart Machine, was characterized on the front page of the New York Times Book Review as “a work of rare originality.” She has been a columnist for Fast Company and BusinessWeek.com, and strategy+business magazine named Zuboff one of the eleven most original business thinkers in the world.