The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana Zuboff

How the future was sold

Considered a landmark text on big tech and the internet in general, I've finally got around to reading it. No wonder it took me so long. On the upside, it's quite an extraordinary work, deeply moral, almost an activist's manual on how to combat the big tech companies. On the downside, it's a tough read. The prose is really dense and, to my mind at least, it's overwritten. Too many long words and torturous sentences. Which is a shame, because this book deserves to reach even more readers than it already does. 

Surveillance Capitalism argues many things, but if I could try to summarise, the main point is that all of our data (all those thousands of google searches, posts, messages, emails etc.) is being captured, amassed, analysed and packaged into "prediction products". Big tech now knows so much about us they can predict our behavior, even our future. In fact, they know more about us than we know about ourselves. This is all done by way of a one way mirror. We volunteer all our data, really thinking it's being done anonymously, but behind the veil complete profiles are being built. There's no transparency on what's being done with our data and government has completely failed to regulate. 

What Zuboff describes is a Faustian pact. We've sold our souls to the devil. The digital treats we get for free are so seductive it's lulled us into this terrible complacency. My personal analogy is from H.G. Wells The Time Machine. We are like the innocent Eloi, lacking in curiosity about how we get all these free treats, being fattened up by the Morlocks for slaughter.  

The book also takes a long, philosophical view of capitalism, demonstrating that "surveillance capitalism" (Zuhoff's coined the term in 2014) is something completely unprecedented. It's come out of  nowhere, which in part answers why governments have been slow to regulate it. Nevertheless, it's urgent that it is regulated, and well regulated. Its power is frightening. The capitalism of the last 150 years sowed the seeds for our current climate disaster. Surveillance capitalism now threatens to commercialise our very psyches. Will we lose our souls in the bargain?

After reading Surveillance Capitalism, living in ignorance is no longer possible.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff. Published by Profile Books. 2019