the age of surveillance capitalism goodreads

Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behaviour.”More broadly, the quintessence of her work concerns the idea that 'just as industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism and its new instrumentarian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our humanity.” Another important point brought to light is the often existing problem of confusion between surveillance capitalism and the technologies it employs.“ Surveillance capitalists would have us believe that their practices are inevitable expressions of the technologies they employ. “We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus. The hidden actions behind the scene are the main interest of her research, which deals extensively with the origin of a newly appearing capitalist system, its social and intellectual meaning. This inevitably becomes 'a proprietary behavioural surplus that is fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as 'machine intelligence' and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.” Surveillance capitalists wrap themselves in the fashions of support and emancipation, appealing to and exploiting the fears of the day, while the real action remains hidden behind the scene. Zuboff begins by noting that 'surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.' As such, our digital behaviour encompasses a wide range of preferences and choices that we voluntarily or involuntarily share online. If you are patient enough, buckle up and Shoshana Zuboff will take you to a long journey.

This work comes as an academic umbrella to many particular questions regarding our digital lives, among which social networks become just one part. Instead, Shoshana Zuboff opened a much broader chapter of analysis in which she managed to follow the etymology of growth through a few hypotheses and instead traced the evolution of capitalism. I began reading The Age of Surveillance on the premise of learning a little more about the influence of social networks and the deleterious impact they have on the modern human psyche.

The age of surveillance capitalism goodreads