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Shoshana Zuboff

Disciplines:
business
sociology/social theory

Summary

American social theorist who developed the concept of surveillance capitalism — arguing that tech companies have invented a new economic logic that claims human experience as raw material for behavioral prediction products.

Core Contribution

Surveillance capitalism: a new economic logic — Google and Facebook extract behavioral surplus (data beyond what is needed for service improvement) to feed prediction machines that sell certainty about human behavior to advertisers. The behavioral futures market. In the Age of the Smart Machine: an earlier analysis of workplace computerization. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the systematic account.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) is 700 pages and was described as the most important book on technology since Marshall McLuhan — making an academic work of social theory a mainstream event.
  • Google never responded to the book publicly — its silence was itself interpreted as a form of confirmation.

Notable Works & Achievements

In the Age of the Smart Machine

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Historical Influences

Hannah Arendt Karl Polanyi

Intellectual Lineage

Critical Social Theory Political Economy

Contemporaries & Peers

Evgeny Morozov

Minds Influenced

Technology Policy Platform Regulation

Intellectual Posterity

Surveillance Capitalism Theory

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