The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
Summary
Argues that Google, then Facebook and others, invented a new economic logic: claiming human experience as free raw material, turning it into behavioral data, and using it to predict and eventually shape behavior for sale to advertisers and others. Zuboff calls this surveillance capitalism and argues that it threatens individual autonomy and democracy.
Why it’s useful here
- The standard reference and the source of terms the public already knows.
- A useful contrast with Griziotti and McQuillan. Zuboff treats surveillance capitalism as a rogue mutation of an otherwise acceptable capitalism. The blog’s other sources see it as capitalism continuing as usual. Posts that cite both should name that disagreement.
- Detailed history of how ad-tech business models were built.
Key ideas
- Behavioral surplus: data beyond what’s needed to provide a service
- Prediction products and behavioral futures markets
- Instrumentarian power: shaping behavior at scale
- Critique: surveillance capitalism as a departure from “normal” capitalism (contested by others in this bibliography)
Related
- griziotti-2018-neurocapitalism.md
- doctorow-2025-enshittification.md
- sadowski-2020-too-smart.md