by Shoshana Zuboff (Author) 

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.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification."

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

Review

"If a book's importance is gauged by how effectively it describes the world we're in, and how much potential it has to change said world, then in my view it's easily the most important book to be published this century... Zuboff is concerned with the largest act of capitalist colonisation ever attempted, but the colonisation is of our minds, our behaviour, our free will, our very selves. Yet it's not an anti-tech book. It's anti unregulated capitalism, red in tooth and claw. It's really this generation's Das Kapital." ―Zadie Smith

"One of the most important criticisms of the power of Big Tech."―Rana Foroohar,FINANCIAL TIMES

"Chilling and essential."―GLOBE AND MAIL

"A book that no tech industry official will want the American public to read... One of the true joys of this insanely brilliant, deeply unsettling book is how fluidly Ms. Zuboff's style incorporates jargon, analogy, research and memoir."―PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE

"The most ambitious attempt yet to paint the bigger picture and to explain how the effects of digitisation that we are now experiencing as individuals and citizens have come about... A continuation of a tradition that includes Adam Smith, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and-dare I say it-Karl Marx... A striking and illuminating book."―THE OBSERVER

"Eye-opening...she raises questions about businesses that mine personal data, manipulate our desires for instantaneous information, and encourage us to narcissistically display our egos and foibles on social media platforms."―SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

"Staggeringly brilliant."―WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

Categories : Privacy & Surveillance in Society

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01N2QEZE2

Publisher ‏ : ‎ PublicAffairs; 1st edition (January 15, 2019)

Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 15, 2019

Language ‏ : ‎ English

File‏ : ‎EPUB, 3.87 MB

Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported

Print length ‏ : ‎ 705 pages