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

“Surveillance capitalism’s products and services are not the objects of a value exchange. They do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities. Instead, they are the ‘hooks’ that lure users into their extractive operations in which our personal experiences are scraped and packaged as the means to others’ ends. We are not surveillance capitalism’s ‘customers’. [...] We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation.”

Whereas reciprocity is a hallmark of former versions of capitalism, surveillance capitalism abandons this relationship with the public. Instead, it seeks to exploit people for their data, luring people in with enticing technologies that purport to solve the complex issues of contemporary life. Surveillance capitalism is dangerous to society because it views people as resources housing the raw material necessary to fuel its operations.

“Just as individual 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. [...] This mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the possibility of a human future at the new frontier of power will be contested.” 

Industrial capitalism revolutionized the modern world, but it came at the cost of disastrous environmental effects. Similarly, surveillance capitalism offers society enticing new technologies that pose an equally destructive threat—one that instead targets mankind. As this instrumentarian power begins to mobilize on a global scale, Zuboff insists that only a popular resistance movement will be able to save our democratic future from surveillance capitalism’s exploitative grip.

“More precisely, the Apple miracle and surveillance capitalism each owes its success to the destructive collision of two opposing historical forces. One vector belongs to the longer history of modernization and the centuries-long societal shift from the mass to the individual. The opposing vector belongs to the decades-long elaboration and implementation of the neoliberal economic paradigm: It's political economics, its transformation of society, and especially its aim to reverse subdue impede and even destroy the individual urge towards psychological self-determination and moral agency.” 

Surveillance capitalism’s rise and successful integration into society was due to the collision of two forces: the evolution of society’s understanding of the “individual” through time, and evolving economic philosophies, such as neoliberalism. The collision of individualism, which championed one’s rights to self-determination, and neoliberalism, whose dire social and political ramifications threatened one’s ability to achieve self-determination, ruptured society.