And therein lies the system’s foundation, the prime deception that fuels Zuboff’s slow, focused burn. She meticulously demonstrates how Google, initially a financially struggling search engine, pioneered surveillance capitalism once it discovered it was sitting on a data gold mine – its users – and could monetise the personal information disclosed by every search. “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data”, which then is utilised to produce “surveillance revenue”, Zuboff writes. These surveillers are intrinsically and historically linked. In two important and deeply personal books, Harvard Business School emeritus professor Shoshana Zuboff and Russian-born American journalist Yasha Levine reveal that such surveillance, by the corporate world and the state, is not a dirty exception but the rule not a malfunction or mistake, but the norm.

Two related events in the past five years have made us depressingly aware that when we use the internet, almost everything we do – our digital trail of crumbs showing where we have been, what we have read, what we clicked on, who we’ve contacted, even what we’ve written or said – is being recorded, stored, aggregated, analysed and made available for access to hidden parties.įirst came the 2013 disclosure by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden of wide-ranging mass internet and communications systems surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency (NSA), including Prism, a project that tapped directly into servers at major internet and technology companies (which may or may not have been complicit).Īnd then there was the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal last year, in which millions of Facebook users discovered their personal information had been shared with a company aiming to fine-tune rogue social media techniques for influencing voters, perhaps swaying the Brexit vote and the 2016 US presidential election.

Book the age of surveillance capitalism