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

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification."
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit--at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future--if we let it.

• The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
• Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
• The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
• The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld
• The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
• Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America
• American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What to Do About It
• The Psychology of Democracy
• Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe: Southern Europe, South America and Post-communist Europe
• Conflict in Cyber Space: Theoretical, Strategic and Legal Pespectives (Routledge Studies in Conflict, Security and Technology)