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

By @SimonCocking review of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff Available from Amazon here.

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.

Shoshana Zuboff’s interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and democratization?

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the twenty-first century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves. 

This is an important book, and follows a series of books we have reviewed recently which look to address the darker sides of the new world we are rushing headlong into. At times it is almost overwhelming how negative a situation we have got ourselves into, unthinkingly, with a massive land grab of our digital lives by the FANG mega corporations who currently dominate our daily lives. At one point Zuboff compares the digital rights they have grabbed to the behaviour of the Spanish conquistadors, who muttered fake legalistic declarations to the ‘heathens’ before they took away their lives and land. While this may seem sensationalistic, the impact may well be similar, especially if we are not active immediately to question and challenge T&Cs that have intentionally been written to be so long as to defy anyone actually reading or understanding them.

The book is long, possibly too long for many readers, which could be a challenge as Zuboff is dealing with an important, timely and extremely important issue which affects all of our lives. Therefore it is worth reading, and hopefully as many people as will do so because the issues raised in this book do need to be acted upon. The current, new status quo, does not need to remain as it is, but it is up to us to make the challenges now, before it is too late. She ends with a reference to George Orwell, and his call to arms not to simply accept where we now are, simply because the forces of might have told us that we must, and it is too late to have any other alternative options.

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