The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Zuboff, Shoshana

ISBN 10: 1549149970 ISBN 13: 9781549149979

Publisher: Public Affairs, 2019

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Review

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"

Edition details

• Publisher: Public Affairs
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1549149970
• ISBN 13: 9781549149979
• Binding: Audio CD
• Language: English