Shoshana Zuboff
Author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power
About the Author
Shoshana Zuboff is chaired professor at the Harvard Business School. She lives in Maine with her husband and two children.
Image credit: Professor Shoshana Zuboff, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School. By Michael D. Wilson - CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75532952
Works by Shoshana Zuboff
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019) 1,611 copies, 36 reviews
The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism (2004) 122 copies, 1 review
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoe Dog, The Everything Store [3 book collection] (2019) — Contributor — 2 copies
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Zuboff, Shoshana
- Birthdate
- 1951
- Gender
- female
- Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Maine, USA
- Short biography
- Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita, Harvard Business School. She is the author of In The Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her BA from the University of Chicago.
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e s s e n t I a l r e a d i n g
(though please maybe avoid this much repetition as it gets exhausting to read towards the end? thank you)
(though please maybe avoid this much repetition as it gets exhausting to read towards the end? thank you)
This week my company officially got into the business of surveillance. People will pay us to surveil their home and business computers to protect them from rogue computer software, from losing data resulting from defective or aging components in their computers, and from misguided management of their computers themselves.
Going forward this will be a growing and lucrative business segment because people rely on their computers to do so many important things for them, because they feel inadequate keeping up with changes in the computing environment, and because they justifiably fear cyber crime.
It doesn’t mean they like it. I sure don’t.
Being in retail business as I have for almost 25 years I have learned how to surveil myself, to protect my assets, and my employees. It is an ongoing challenge and it changes. I surveil for shoplifters, for currency and credit card counterfeiters, for daylight and after hours thieves. I surveil for dishonest employees, for honest mistakes, for poor buying decisions, and for the obsolescence of the products on my shelves. I surveil how the bank handles my money. I surveil my suppliers to prevent them from shipping me incomplete or broken goods. And I pay attention to my customers, to save them from making poor purchasing decisions.
And when I am not surveilling, I am surveying. All the time. How were my customers’ experiences? What new products are on the horizon? How can I protect my liquidity, my profitability, and lastly, my sanity.
I especially surveil myself, because I make mistakes, and because I too am growing old.
These are some of the risks of operating a business.
Then there are the people who surveil me. They include thieves looking for a weakness in my security. Government agencies to make sure I am paying the eight or ten different taxes I pay on an ongoing basis. Credit card companies surveil my transactions to make sure somebody hasn’t stolen my credit card, or that I am spending no more money than I can afford to pay back. My suppliers make sure I am paying them on time. Some manufacturers visit me in person or electronically to make sure I am representing their product lines fairly. They send me electronic training, and tests, and they regularly measure the efficiency and quality of our repair facilities. The utilities tell me when my operations (and home) are inefficient. And there are my landlords.
Finally, we surveil at home. We surveil our daughter to make sure she is doing her homework and not falling in with the wrong crowd. My wife surveils me to make sure I’m not overeating, overspending, or being overly attentive to other women. I surveil my dog Seamus just in case he poops on the neighbour’s lawn so I can pick it up before someone notices. And Seamus surveils the front window and barks whenever a neighbouring dog saunters by.
Last and not least are the gargantuan corporations who are watching what I do online. People like facebook, Google, amazon, and many, many more.
So when somebody writes a book to tell me I live in an Age of Surveillance Capitalism...I GET IT! REALLY, I GET IT!
But is it uniquely capitalist, or more generally an age of surveillance?
And if it is more general to our society, where do we go from here?
One thing for sure: it isn’t going away anytime soon.
Shoshana Zuboff concentrates her guns on Google and facebook. She’s concerned that these companies are inherently different from the companies that came before it and they set a new standard for egregious capitalism. They are companies in the prediction business, predicting human behaviour and right now largely predicting purchasing behaviour by accumulating, as she called it, “surplus behaviour,” which kinda sounds like an oxymoron.
She believes they abuse the freedoms of the marketplace to frustrate privacy, that they are built to enrich few and sidestep the traditional workplace which pays many employees fairly and creates consumers, and she argues that they are indifferent to social ills.
She argues that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” doesn’t operate in this marketplace because the new knowledge capitalists know everything happening in the market.
A close reading of Andrew Carnegie’s life and legacy, perhaps John D. Rockefeller as well, could lead you to a similar conclusion, even though both men turned to philanthropy later in life. For sure, these men affected the course of capitalism.
Is this a turn away from “good” capitalism toward an inherently evil capitalism?
And if it is evil, can we create some rules for the big guys that us little guys can live with?
Let’s take a step back and look at things in context: Google’s revenue is about $25 billion, Facebook’s $17 billion. The entire US economy is about $25 trillion and the world economy upwards of $107 trillion.
Most of Google’s and Facebook’s revenue is advertising. The US advertising market is upwards of $80 billion so it is fair to say these two firms command quite strong positions in this industry. If you make the argument that America’s advertising industry is too concentrated then you’d have a pretty good argument to break up these firms which combined represent about 50% of all advertising dollars in the US. By comparison, Standard Oil at its peak commanded 88% of the market for processing crude. In its first year of operation, US Steel produced 67% of steel produced the the US.
And they exhibit the classic behaviour of monopolists by dominating the markets for search and for social media on a global scale.
In the US a case for breaking up the firms traditionally would have to be made that consumers are paying too much for their services or that competitors are being kept out of the market. Maybe breaking up these firms is a good idea, maybe it isn’t, but either way the technologies they employ for gathering, and analyzing, data isn’t going away.
When I worked as an auditor, we used to gather lots of data, too, but what we eventually learned was that we could make assumptions about its meaning by sampling the information; that is, we cut down our work by only looking at some of the data. We tried to cut down on the wasted time. I sometimes wonder how much of what Google does is a total waste of time because the answers it seeks can be found in much faster time using much less data. And how much of “Big Data” is in fact a “Big Waste of Time.”
Zuboff doesn’t consider that these firms may still be just in the early stages of figuring out what they are supposed to be doing. I think about it because so much time and resources are wasted paying attention to wholly irrelevant stuff.
But we would do well to consider the affect of these companies on our freedoms and our government partially because they aren’t just national problems. They are transnational problems. What happens in China, and the extreme kind of surveillance practiced there on ethnic minorities like the Uigers, affects or will affect us here.
They are transnational because the data collection is transnational and the very same data collected for the purpose of selling advertising is probably being used to develop artificial intelligence. The fastest developer of AI whether they be Chinese companies, transnational companies like Google or Facebook, or companies directly financed by government will have a big say in who has a job in the coming years and who doesn’t.
No country on its own can hope to curb data collection and aggregation or perhaps more importantly, the control of what search results reveal on this scale any more than a country can curb money laundering, tax avoidance, or climate change without coordination between many if not all nations. Contemporary politics seems to be going in the opposite direction if Trump’s “America First,” Brexit, and Russian adventurism are any indication.
If we are divided and our attention fractured we are susceptible to the influence or real or imagined “experts.” (To firms like Facebook I think we all have ADD, attention deficit disorder...they can never get enough of our attention!) That doesn’t mean we cannot continue to make decisions affecting our government, it more likely means that the decisions we make will more commonly resemble the imperatives of those desiring more of the same, read: the status quo.
And that turns us to the question of how good is the status quo. If you believe that the universe ultimately bends toward the dilution of energy, total entropy, then the status quo is not too good. If you believe the status quo to be a teleological evolution toward a great singularity, perhaps a union with God, and a progression toward greater complexity in the universe, the status quo looks pretty good.
Business executives, in my experience, tend to be of the more optimistic latter type of people. Like the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and other people who have become incredibly wealthy in a short period of time.
In the meantime, some of us have rather pedestrian concerns like the security of really private information. While convincingly arguing that there is insufficient transparency over who handles the big data and how they handle it, I think Zuboff fails to sufficiently weigh immense risk that the data will fall out of control of the aggregators and into the hands of rogue individuals.
The hacking of credit card databases is one thing, and I think it a bigger risk than the hacking of a database which tells people how I like my hotdogs dressed. People made a big deal of the Cambridge Analytica scare. In the end, those people sold bogus claims to naive political organizations. The data predicted nothing and was of no use to anybody. And it didn’t get Donald Trump elected.
Certainly big data aggregation has concrete effects on the economy. You get “free” Google searches. I get a cheaper smart TV because the data guys get first dibs on my TV watching preferences.
This book is not the best guide for the good works these technologies enable (ie crowd sourcing, scientific research, epidemiology, etc). Self-driving cars benefit by machine learning. The acceleration and reductions in the friction in electronic commerce are generally good things.
I don’t agree with Zuboff that the behavioural science behind the new data aggregation firms promotes a radical indifference to the lot of the common person. Nor do I agree that hyperscale doesn’t require competitive markets or for that matter democracy.
This has yet to be proven.
We all need participatory democracy, and more than ever on a global scale. Let’s make these damn machines work for us, not agin us.… (more)
Going forward this will be a growing and lucrative business segment because people rely on their computers to do so many important things for them, because they feel inadequate keeping up with changes in the computing environment, and because they justifiably fear cyber crime.
It doesn’t mean they like it. I sure don’t.
Being in retail business as I have for almost 25 years I have learned how to surveil myself, to protect my assets, and my employees. It is an ongoing challenge and it changes. I surveil for shoplifters, for currency and credit card counterfeiters, for daylight and after hours thieves. I surveil for dishonest employees, for honest mistakes, for poor buying decisions, and for the obsolescence of the products on my shelves. I surveil how the bank handles my money. I surveil my suppliers to prevent them from shipping me incomplete or broken goods. And I pay attention to my customers, to save them from making poor purchasing decisions.
And when I am not surveilling, I am surveying. All the time. How were my customers’ experiences? What new products are on the horizon? How can I protect my liquidity, my profitability, and lastly, my sanity.
I especially surveil myself, because I make mistakes, and because I too am growing old.
These are some of the risks of operating a business.
Then there are the people who surveil me. They include thieves looking for a weakness in my security. Government agencies to make sure I am paying the eight or ten different taxes I pay on an ongoing basis. Credit card companies surveil my transactions to make sure somebody hasn’t stolen my credit card, or that I am spending no more money than I can afford to pay back. My suppliers make sure I am paying them on time. Some manufacturers visit me in person or electronically to make sure I am representing their product lines fairly. They send me electronic training, and tests, and they regularly measure the efficiency and quality of our repair facilities. The utilities tell me when my operations (and home) are inefficient. And there are my landlords.
Finally, we surveil at home. We surveil our daughter to make sure she is doing her homework and not falling in with the wrong crowd. My wife surveils me to make sure I’m not overeating, overspending, or being overly attentive to other women. I surveil my dog Seamus just in case he poops on the neighbour’s lawn so I can pick it up before someone notices. And Seamus surveils the front window and barks whenever a neighbouring dog saunters by.
Last and not least are the gargantuan corporations who are watching what I do online. People like facebook, Google, amazon, and many, many more.
So when somebody writes a book to tell me I live in an Age of Surveillance Capitalism...I GET IT! REALLY, I GET IT!
But is it uniquely capitalist, or more generally an age of surveillance?
And if it is more general to our society, where do we go from here?
One thing for sure: it isn’t going away anytime soon.
Shoshana Zuboff concentrates her guns on Google and facebook. She’s concerned that these companies are inherently different from the companies that came before it and they set a new standard for egregious capitalism. They are companies in the prediction business, predicting human behaviour and right now largely predicting purchasing behaviour by accumulating, as she called it, “surplus behaviour,” which kinda sounds like an oxymoron.
She believes they abuse the freedoms of the marketplace to frustrate privacy, that they are built to enrich few and sidestep the traditional workplace which pays many employees fairly and creates consumers, and she argues that they are indifferent to social ills.
She argues that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” doesn’t operate in this marketplace because the new knowledge capitalists know everything happening in the market.
A close reading of Andrew Carnegie’s life and legacy, perhaps John D. Rockefeller as well, could lead you to a similar conclusion, even though both men turned to philanthropy later in life. For sure, these men affected the course of capitalism.
Is this a turn away from “good” capitalism toward an inherently evil capitalism?
And if it is evil, can we create some rules for the big guys that us little guys can live with?
Let’s take a step back and look at things in context: Google’s revenue is about $25 billion, Facebook’s $17 billion. The entire US economy is about $25 trillion and the world economy upwards of $107 trillion.
Most of Google’s and Facebook’s revenue is advertising. The US advertising market is upwards of $80 billion so it is fair to say these two firms command quite strong positions in this industry. If you make the argument that America’s advertising industry is too concentrated then you’d have a pretty good argument to break up these firms which combined represent about 50% of all advertising dollars in the US. By comparison, Standard Oil at its peak commanded 88% of the market for processing crude. In its first year of operation, US Steel produced 67% of steel produced the the US.
And they exhibit the classic behaviour of monopolists by dominating the markets for search and for social media on a global scale.
In the US a case for breaking up the firms traditionally would have to be made that consumers are paying too much for their services or that competitors are being kept out of the market. Maybe breaking up these firms is a good idea, maybe it isn’t, but either way the technologies they employ for gathering, and analyzing, data isn’t going away.
When I worked as an auditor, we used to gather lots of data, too, but what we eventually learned was that we could make assumptions about its meaning by sampling the information; that is, we cut down our work by only looking at some of the data. We tried to cut down on the wasted time. I sometimes wonder how much of what Google does is a total waste of time because the answers it seeks can be found in much faster time using much less data. And how much of “Big Data” is in fact a “Big Waste of Time.”
Zuboff doesn’t consider that these firms may still be just in the early stages of figuring out what they are supposed to be doing. I think about it because so much time and resources are wasted paying attention to wholly irrelevant stuff.
But we would do well to consider the affect of these companies on our freedoms and our government partially because they aren’t just national problems. They are transnational problems. What happens in China, and the extreme kind of surveillance practiced there on ethnic minorities like the Uigers, affects or will affect us here.
They are transnational because the data collection is transnational and the very same data collected for the purpose of selling advertising is probably being used to develop artificial intelligence. The fastest developer of AI whether they be Chinese companies, transnational companies like Google or Facebook, or companies directly financed by government will have a big say in who has a job in the coming years and who doesn’t.
No country on its own can hope to curb data collection and aggregation or perhaps more importantly, the control of what search results reveal on this scale any more than a country can curb money laundering, tax avoidance, or climate change without coordination between many if not all nations. Contemporary politics seems to be going in the opposite direction if Trump’s “America First,” Brexit, and Russian adventurism are any indication.
If we are divided and our attention fractured we are susceptible to the influence or real or imagined “experts.” (To firms like Facebook I think we all have ADD, attention deficit disorder...they can never get enough of our attention!) That doesn’t mean we cannot continue to make decisions affecting our government, it more likely means that the decisions we make will more commonly resemble the imperatives of those desiring more of the same, read: the status quo.
And that turns us to the question of how good is the status quo. If you believe that the universe ultimately bends toward the dilution of energy, total entropy, then the status quo is not too good. If you believe the status quo to be a teleological evolution toward a great singularity, perhaps a union with God, and a progression toward greater complexity in the universe, the status quo looks pretty good.
Business executives, in my experience, tend to be of the more optimistic latter type of people. Like the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and other people who have become incredibly wealthy in a short period of time.
In the meantime, some of us have rather pedestrian concerns like the security of really private information. While convincingly arguing that there is insufficient transparency over who handles the big data and how they handle it, I think Zuboff fails to sufficiently weigh immense risk that the data will fall out of control of the aggregators and into the hands of rogue individuals.
The hacking of credit card databases is one thing, and I think it a bigger risk than the hacking of a database which tells people how I like my hotdogs dressed. People made a big deal of the Cambridge Analytica scare. In the end, those people sold bogus claims to naive political organizations. The data predicted nothing and was of no use to anybody. And it didn’t get Donald Trump elected.
Certainly big data aggregation has concrete effects on the economy. You get “free” Google searches. I get a cheaper smart TV because the data guys get first dibs on my TV watching preferences.
This book is not the best guide for the good works these technologies enable (ie crowd sourcing, scientific research, epidemiology, etc). Self-driving cars benefit by machine learning. The acceleration and reductions in the friction in electronic commerce are generally good things.
I don’t agree with Zuboff that the behavioural science behind the new data aggregation firms promotes a radical indifference to the lot of the common person. Nor do I agree that hyperscale doesn’t require competitive markets or for that matter democracy.
This has yet to be proven.
We all need participatory democracy, and more than ever on a global scale. Let’s make these damn machines work for us, not agin us.… (more)
I was most interested in how personal data is located, captured, and sold. This didn’t appear until the beginning of Chapter 5. You need to know what this chapter says! It’s impossible to keep your personal information from being gathered, but there are some things that you can do to safeguard it.
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Zuboff centres her overall enquiry into surveillance capitalism on three fundamental questions: who knows? Who decides? And who decides who decides? The answers are disquieting, to say the least. It amazes me that so many people I know seem unconcerned about the amount of data the big five tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon) have about them and how it is used. Not only do these firms have far more data about us than we can readily understand, its individual value is irrelevant in comparison to the value of it all in aggregate. Zuboff uses the term ‘economies of scale and scope’ for this. Big data is valuable because machine learning models require vast amounts to produce useful results. For work reasons, I recently taught myself data mining and basic machine learning in R. It was alarming to realise how easy to use yet fundamentally opaque big data analytics are. Neural networks aren’t really analogous to human brains in structure or function. The real similarity is that in neither case is it known why you get the result you do. Moreover, like human brains, neural networks makes mistakes. However their mistakes are very different to those of humans, and generally depend on how much data they’ve been trained on and what forms it took.
Zuboff does not discuss such technicalities. If you want an introduction to machine learning, I suggest this youtube video. She is, rightly, more interested in the data that google and others gather to feed machine learning models, which then predict our behaviour in order to sell us stuff. Once limited to your computer, the imperative to gather more and more behavioural data increasingly invades daily life via the internet of things:
Zuboff is especially good at explaining how it came to this: how big tech seized a specific historic moment when neoliberal economics, the war on terror, and advances in information technology converged. The big five’s tactics for avoiding regulatory control or even admitting what they actually do are set out chillingly well. While all this has certainly been discussed before, it is expressed especially well here. A slew of short articles over years are hard to distil sense from, whereas this book sets out the situation with admirable clarity. Chapter eleven lists characteristics that have allowed surveillance capitalism to take root, despite the fact that the Western population consistently claim to value privacy. The range and impact of these characteristics certainly makes sense of how we got here: lack of precedent, declaration as invasion, historical context, fortifications, the dispossession cycle, dependency, self-interest, inclusion, identification, authority, social persuasion, foreclosed alternatives, inevitabilism, the ideology of human frailty, ignorance, and velocity.
The most novel part for me was an exploration of the philosophy underlying surveillance capitalism. Since big tech aggressively avoids articulating such a thing, based on the spurious claim that data is totally neutral, this was especially interesting. Zuboff labels it instrumentalism and contrasts it powerfully with totalitarianism:
I particularly appreciated the link Zuboff made with behavioural economics and its rejection of the rationality assumption, while keeping all the other reductive and dubious assumptions of free market economics. The ‘nudge’ ethos of behavioural modification to optimise outcomes is entirely consistent with surveillance capitalism. Whenever I’ve read behavioural economics books over the years, the same questions come to mind: first off, why are you so amazed to have discovered very basic psychology? Secondly, whose behaviour are you nudging, why, and for whose benefit? This idea of nudging or tuning behaviour is deeply unsettling and contains potentially massive hidden contradictions, quite apart from its ethical implications. What if two companies in the big tech oligopoly try to push behaviour in different directions? Surely the vague aspiration of making the world run more smoothly and efficiently (whatever that means and for whom) is in conflict with the anger and violence social media stokes in politics?
I was slightly surprised that only towards the end of the book does Zuboff broach the corrosive political effects of social media, such as the spread of fake news and an adversarial, reductive, and angry political culture. In a way, she hardly needs to. The prior chapters set this up well, by explaining the ‘radical indifference’ that big tech has for the actual content it feeds to its users. The only aim is to increase revenues via a business model of maximising attention and engagement on the platform(s). If divisive, dangerous, and totally inaccurate material gets clicks and comments, then that’s good enough for facebook and google. They take zero responsibility for the consequences this has on politics, culture, and society, despite profiting massively from them. I’m actually glad this wasn’t mentioned earlier in the book, as it’s so depressing that it would have pulled focus from the economic and philosophical foundations beneath the surface.
As has probably become clear, I consider this a deeply thought-provoking and helpful book that has made my view of the world we live in a little clearer. That is the pinnacle of what you can hope for in non-fiction, in my view. Nonetheless, I didn’t agree with every word of it. Zuboff treats surveillance capitalism as a successor to industrial capitalism, stating several times that the latter wrecked the environment and now the former is wrecking the human soul. While I don’t disagree with this, I think surveillance capitalism is also making it much harder to deal with the consequences of industrial capitalism (which still exists as well! Smart phones don’t just manifest from the aether). Action to deal with climate change has been derailed by reactionary populist politics and a false equivalency between scientific research and conspiracy theories. The complex and long-term nature of environmental problems is totally unsuited to the acceleration and superficiality of social media. Moreover, surveillance capitalism is still capitalism, thus all about economic growth, increasing consumption, and wasteful energy use. I think these links should have been acknowledged a little more. Much like financial capitalism, surveillance capitalism is a parasite upon industrial capitalism; will it drain its host until they both die, I wonder?
I think the weakest material is in the final chapter, which considers how young people are growing up with pervasive internet surveillance that stunts their sense of self. This is more speculative and lacks the rigor and conviction of the other chapters. Which is not to say that I find the concept uninteresting or unimportant. Here, though, it is treated as something of an afterthought. The psychological effects of constant connectivity and a norm of performative content sharing, especially on children, deserve their own books. Mixing macro and micro-level analysis can be risky; this is a macro book and that is its great strength.
It is salutary to compare ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ with Paul Mason’s [b:Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future|24878857|Postcapitalism A Guide to Our Future|Paul Mason|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1437580637l/24878857._SY75_.jpg|44526761], which I read in 2015. Mason covered some similar ground, but drew very different conclusions that now appear remarkably naive. The contradictions that he suggested would bring down neoliberalism are resolved by surveillance capitalism. Mason wrote, and I agreed when I read it, that big tech’s control over data was fragile and unsustainable. I no longer believe that; the past four years have seen consolidation and expansion of google and facebook’s control over data. Over the same period, it has become evident that such data can be put to dangerous purposes with a total absence of democratic accountability. According to free market economic theory, the infinite supply of data should make it worthless. Quite the opposite occurs, as data becomes more and more valuable as its scale and complexity increases, because it can be used to make quicker and more accurate behaviour predictions, and to influence behaviour. Certainly not in a free market, though. Google, amazon, and facebook are in unassailable economic positions. Any company that tries to compete is bought by them.
The only threats to their dominance come from outside the market: regulation, essentially. Breaking up their monopolistic positions is part of public discourse, for example the proposals of Elizabeth Warren, a potential Democratic presidential candidate in the US. As with oil companies, though, there is great reluctance to face the fundamental problem: their business model. Oil companies have no place in any world that takes climate change seriously, because we must stop burning oil. Likewise, pervasive surveillance and data gathering have no place in any world that values privacy. Reliance on secretive behavioural monitoring and modification should also stop, but a ban on them seems even further away than a ban on burning oil. At present they appear inextricably linked with the internet, just as energy systems seems inextricably linked with fossil fuels. In both cases, the two developed interdependently, but their linkage isn't inevitable. The possibility exists of other energy systems and other forms of internet. To my mind, the first step to imagining better is understanding the flaws in what we have.
I am more pessimistic and negative about social media than most people I know, quite possibly most people in general. While it can have positive consequences, the fact that it is optimised by a handful of companies to take our data and sell us shit makes it fundamentally flawed. The internet has a lot of potential to bring people together; social media as currently constituted is more likely to push them further apart. I wonder whether Trump could have become president without twitter and facebook? Frankly I doubt it. The irony of my posting this on a social media site owned by amazon is not lost on me; this is how we live now. ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ takes the reader beyond the endless noise of twitter et al in an attempt to explain the underlying theory and structure of 21st century capitalism. I found it an invaluable guide that solidified ideas I already had, as well as introducing new concepts and raising new questions. Be warned: I’m probably not going to shut up about this one for a long while. Probably best to read it now, so you can make up your own mind.… (more)