Surveillance State

Meet 'Surveillance Capitalism,' Our Terrifying New Economic Order

Advanced technology isn’t just getting out of control, it’s being used as a means of control—big time. That’s the key message of Shoshana Zuboff’s new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, where the Harvard professor emerita and business analyst argues that Big Tech is determined to fully commodify, control, and co-opt human experiences to provide raw behavioral data that sustains its massive profits and power.

Put simply, Zuboff contends that surveillance capitalism is the constant tracking, analysis, and attempted modification of human behavior for the profit of tech giants who trade in what she terms “behavioral futures markets,” places where knowing what people are very likely to do tomorrow or next year is of enormous value to those trying to sell a product or service.

Surveillance capitalism renders human behavior by tracking, measuring, and analyzing from your smartphone to your smart home—from browsing the internet to private messages or emails with a colleague. This relatively new, dominant force intrudes through cookies and privacy permissions that in most cases must be accepted for a service to work properly or at all, including, for example, many smart home security systems.

Zuboff argues that the main problem with surveillance capitalism is that it makes us mere objects whose every life experience and intimate detail must be analyzed and predicted for the benefit—and potential influence—of others. As Zuboff writes, “the essence of the exploitation here is the rendering of our lives as behavioral data for the sake of others’ improved control of us.”

Although Zuboff claims in the book that technology and its discoveries do not have to be malign if data were not inappropriately shared and used, she says that surveillance capitalists basically see the technology as justifying its use in manipulating docile populations.

“Despite all the futuristic sophistication of digital innovation, the message of the surveillance capitalist companies barely differs from the themes once glorified in the motto of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: ‘Science Finds—Industry Applies—Man Conforms,’” Zuboff writes.

Provocatively, Zuboff contends that just as industrial capitalism devastated the environment in the nineteenth and twentieth century, surveillance capitalism now directly threatens human nature and relation, twisting our inner self into a weak, squashed bug that can be listlessly herded where companies (or governments) want us to be.

Surveillance capitalism’s aim, according to Zuboff, is to force a new collectivist order on humanity founded on the certainty of AI systems and to steadily take away people’s rights, freedoms, and even conscious thought, by limiting the choice architecture around us and conceptually shepherding people into increasingly tightly controlled avenues of mentation, decision, and action.