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

Abstract

This book by Shoshana Zuboff, professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, can be counted among the studies that denounce the existence of social oppression of the individual. It is not difficult to suppose that the author seeks to free us from the institutional control exercised, in this case, by the Internet industry and social networks. The old books of political philosophy that proposed to free the individual from social institutions, as JeanJacques Rousseau and his disciples did in their day, also had a warning tone. Zuboff takes up this urgency a few centuries later to remind us that the use of digital tools is neither neutral nor innocuous, but responds to the economic design of those who own these tools. ‘The fact that what is called the technological development of modern times has been so largely oriented economically to profit-making is one of the fundamental facts of the history of technology’ (22). The social institutions of the digital world use and control us to obtain economic results, hence the title ‘surveillance capitalism’. ‘I consider surveillance capitalism’s operations as a challenge to the elementary right to the future tense, which accounts for the individual’s ability to imagine, intend, promise, and construct a future’ (25).