the age of surveillance capitalism book review

For instance, when Facebook does behavioral research, they don’t follow “The Common Rule“, Zuboff explains, that academic experimenters apply to themselves to avoid power abuse. This attitude of setting their own scene is a recurring theme throughout the book. And will insist that their way is the only way, which the world just needs to accept: Zuboff coins this ‘inevitabilism’. Yup, they prefer to make their own rules. Zuboff explains how the founders of Google, and later Facebook and others too, set the scene: how they found use for data that previously looked useless, their secrecy about exposing the size of their data collection and their lobby against rules. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism explains this new iteration in the context of early capitalism (Ford’s, and even the age of gilds). The book is huge, but only just over 500 pages, the rest is footnotes We aren’t exactly the product… we, or the data that describes our behaviour, to be more precise, are the raw material of a whole new iteration of capitalism.

It’s a bit of a cliché now, that Zuboff completely reframes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. You’ve likely heard people say ‘if a product is free to use, you are not the customer, you are the product’. I thought I had heard all of this, but, of course, I couldn’t be more wrong. Basic Books.This week I read The age of surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, an enlightening book about how big tech companies are watching what we do, and what their end game might be. In the age of the smart machine: The future of work and power. Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology. Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Cambridge analytica’s ‘secret’ psychographic tool is a ghost from the past. Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 18(12), 872–899. The doing of datafication (and what this doing does): Practices of edification and the enactment of new forms of sociality in the Indian public health service. The presentation of self in everyday life.

Artificial unintelligence: How computers misunderstand the world. Against the gods: The remarkable story of risk.

Review of Zuboff’s The age of surveillance capitalism. Prediction machines: The simple economics of artificial intelligence. The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. Facebook sued for ‘misleading’ advertisers on potential reach.

The age of surveillance capitalism book review