THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S TOP BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Shortlisted for The Orwell Prize 2020

Shortlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year Award 2019

'Easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasn't at least familarised themselves with Zuboff's central ideas.' - Zadie Smith, The Guardian

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 us.

The heady optimism of the Internet's early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future?

Shoshana Zuboff shows that we are at a crossroads. We still have the power to decide what kind of world we want to live in, and what we decide now will shape the rest of the century. Our choices: allow technology to enrich the few and impoverish the many, or harness it and distribute its benefits.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism's impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilization. Most critically, it shows how we can protect ourselves and our communities and ensure we are the masters of the digital rather than its slaves.

Length: 705 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Reveals capitalism's most dangerous frontier with stunning clarity...A masterpiece of rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and deeply urgent.

-- "Robert B. Reich, New York Times bestselling author"

Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense...Zuboff demonstrates not only how our minds are being mined for data but also how they are being rapidly and radically changed in the process.

-- "Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author"

The rare volume that puts a name on a problem just as it becomes critical.

-- " Wall Street Journal"

Unmissable...The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shines a searing light on how this latest revolution is transforming our economy, politics, society-and lives.

-- " Financial Times (London)"

[A] comprehensive work of scholarship and synthesis...A business model that seeks growth by cataloging our 'every move, emotion, utterance and desire' is too radical to be taken for granted. As Zuboff repeatedly says near the end of the book, 'It is not O.K.'

-- "New York Times"

About the Author

Shoshana Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor emerita at Harvard Business School and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She joined HBS's faculty in 1981 and was one of the first tenured women at HBS and the youngest professor to receive an endowed chair. She received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard University and her BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago. Her previous book, In the Age of the Smart Machine, was characterized on the front page of the New York Times Book Review as a work of rare originality. She has been a columnist for Fast Company and BusinessWeek.com, and strategy+business magazine named Zuboff one of the eleven most original business thinkers in the world.

Nicol Zanzarella is an Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator and a theater and television actress. She has appeared in productions of Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Winter's Tale, Cousin Bette, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, and many others.

Product details

Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 2323 KB
Print Length: 705 pages
Publisher: Profile Books; Main edition (31 January 2019)
Sold by: Amazon Australia Services, Inc.
Language: English
ASIN: B01N7UERGX
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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Word Wise: Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported
Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Customer Reviews: 446 customer ratings
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #15,415 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #23 in Sociology of Culture
- #55 in Social History
- #1 in Human-Computer Interaction

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David J

A bit too much philosophy for me

Reviewed in Australia on 8 May 2019

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Maybe I'm a philistine or just not very smart - but the extensive references to philosophy were a little irritating. Her thesis is interesting and she makes a reasonably compelling, if not slightly overwrought case. Would argue that there's a much more clear and present danger to democracy posed by large multi-national investment banks, and the orthodoxy of unfettered neo-liberalism.

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David Court

A tour de force

Reviewed in Australia on 11 October 2019

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This book is a brick. Zuboff offers an exhaustive analysis of 'surveillance capitalism', relentlessly peeling back the logic of Google and Facebook — of any business built on the acquisition of ever more data. It's a tour de force. A brick to hurl through windows.

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Bob Doss

Important book

Reviewed in Australia on 8 April 2019

Professor Zuboff thoroughly dissects the impact and power of Google, Facebook and other large tech companies that take our lives and make commercial products from the data we generate and also influence our decisions and minds.

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de Crespigny

5 Star story with 1 Star delivery.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 February 2019

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Caveat emptor:

Some parts are good. The content is extremely thought-provoking, educational and ground-breaking; in parts it is quite brilliant and at the cutting edge of the challenges of the digital age. Sadly it is significantly undermined on a number of counts: It is verbose to the extreme and could easily be 50% shorter. The introduction is so poor it could be deleted in its entirety. The author clearly knows her core subject matter but is very poor at articulating her view in a succinct manner. It is extremely repetitive and full of unnecessary padding. There is a woeful lack of editing.

Oddly, it is rather like Dava Sobel's "Longitude" - a thoroughly compelling and fascinating story that is thankfully so strong it just about compensates the author's poor literary skills.

A paradox: It is essential reading but requires a considerable amount of patience to wade through the contextural 'noise'.

A 5 Star story with 1 Star delivery.

MG

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Dr. Julienne B. Ford

By no means the best discussion of this subject

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 10 April 2019

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I am embarrassed to have wasted time and money on this massive, poorly organised and very badly written book. Like so many other twits I fell for it due to the huge publicity it received.

The writer is clearly in love with the process of writing, so rather than working things out, planning a structure, and saying what she had to say in precise terms, she just ploughed in. The result is a mess, looping back and repeating herself in very unhelpful ways, dallying in purple passages and twisted metaphors, making up clever-sounding "concepts" (like "division of knowledge") and actually failing to pick out the key aspects of the issue. The pretence at being in some way ground-breaking is dishonest as even the term "surveillance capitalism" is far from original.

A particularly annoying feature of this pseudo-academic approach is that there is no bibliography, meaning that there is not even any point in keeping it on the bookshelf for reference to other authors. To find anything you have to use the index then go back to the pages and follow up the tortuous footnotes many of which are to internet items which may have disappeared next year.

She misses key issues such as the importance of the military origins of the technology (see Yasha Levine:. Surveillance Valley). She makes a pig's ear of presenting the EU's General Data Protection Regulation the key points of which are "the right to be forgotten", data portability between platforms and explicit "opting in". Worst of all she has no real proposals for defending us against surveillance and data mining and doesn't even mention the important DECODE project being undertaken on a municipal basis by Barcelona, Amsterdam and other cities.

For a much more useful discussion pointing to a data commons see Nick Srnicek's article in Economics for the Many edited by John McDonnell.

61 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

This book needs a strong and forceful Editor

Reviewed in the United States on 13 February 2019

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I was really looking forward to reading this book but I read about 100 pages and put it down in frustration. It perhaps needs a better and more forceful editor because the author can't seem to decided if she want to write a flowery novel or an informative and topical book. She uses phases that make no sense and distract from the points she is trying to make.
For example on Page 55 the end of the paragraph reads: "But the lessons of that day had not yet been fully tallied when fresh answers - or, more modestly, the tenuous glimmers of answers as fragile as a newborn's translucent skin-rose to the surface of the world's attention gliding on scented ribbons of Spanish lavender and vanilla." I expect to see this in a Romance novel not a book on Surveillance Capitalism.
By eliminating such indulgences the book could be half the length, more focused and certainly more powerful. I am sure it is an important topic but in the end I did not finish it. I will wait for a more edited version that gets to the point.

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charrette

Here's looking at you, kids...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 February 2019

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This large book should be read by anyone who still thinks that Google is a Search engine or that Facebook is a social medium.

Both corporations are primarily in the lucrative business of selling raw material: us. Our behaviour, interests, locations, habits, personalities, as tracked and measured 24/7. To be parcelled up as data points, metrics, profiles, and sold to other corporations. To enable them to induce us to buy, buy, buy. Now. Here. Advertisers are the core customers and beneficiaries of Google and Facebook, even if 'users' get some benefit from the 'free' services they offer. And, as the role of Cambridge Analytics in the EU referendum indicated, 'advertising' now incorporates sophisticated behaviour modification, not just targetted messages or fake news, but direct emotional manipulation. And so on.

All this is detailed by Zuboff. Inexorably. Incontrovertibly. 500 pages of instances, anecdotes, case studies, research reports, backed up by 150 pages of references. A massive demystification.

There are minor problems. Far too much repetition of core themes. Some cringe-inducing prose. A 200 page compressed version concentrating on the detailed information would perhaps be more useful.

A larger problem is the overall framework of analysis. Zuboff is a professor of psychology and she rightly sees 'surveillance capitalism' as the commercial implementation of B .F. Skinner's notorious behaviourist theory of human activity: that we are only what we can be measured to be seen to be doing. Like lab rats. Against this she counterposes Erikson's notion of human identity as a process of emerging adulthood, of finding one's inward self in autonomy and self-direction. This contrast generates perceptive insights into Facebook's 'Likes' and 'Friends' as appealing to the adolescent (of whatever age) anxiously looking for social confirmation from their imagined community. The Facebook generation is constantly 'on stage' and under scrutiny, but far far more than they realise. Any parent will benefit from chapters on 'Life in the Hive' and 'The Right to Sanctuary', the need for a safe private place like home…. provided you switch off the smartphone and all the other domestic sensors.

Zuboff draws out what she sees as the dangers to political democracy and civil society in these developments. But Millenials don't just have identity crises. They also don't have secure jobs. Or affordable rent. Or viable pension options. Zuboff's account of 'surveillance capitalism' is pretty thin on the continuing old-fashioned exploitative capitalism which, after all, underpins Google selling data analytics to advertising firms which sell adverts to companies which sell us shoddy goods profitable enough to prop up the entire ponzi pyramid, with Google's [2016] £532 billion market value and Zuckerberg's personal billions at its monetary apex. How that works is an even larger story, to which, of course, Zuboff has contributed in her previous books.

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Mobile

Not a light read. Good analysis.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 February 2019

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Andrew Marr describes this as possibly the most important economics book of the last twenty years. He’s an economist, and he should know.
However, the author’s style takes at least two chapters to get used to. The amount of (extraneous?) verbiage and the number of (unnecessarily?) long words tends to obscure the zietgiest underpinning her crucial fundamental meaning. (She could probably have written that last sentence herself.)
After the first hour the mental spam filters kick in and the underlying text starts to emerge from the fog. The message is clearly that the Information Age isn’t working for the masses. In fact it’s working to impoverish their (our) lives and enrich the 1%.
Numerous good examples are given. This is a work of reference, rather than an easy read. As such it probably needs to be read several times and dipped back into. Readers of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris will be familiar with doing this.
I hope I’m not being too harsh on the style point. This is a complex subject. However, I think there’s a need to avoid alienating the people who most need to be aware of the issues. The invaders of our privacy probably understand it already; and are wilfully ignoring it.
Dawkins gets round the complexity in his books by using numerous footnotes. These can be skimmed over and revisited later. Perhaps this would be an idea for later editions.

22 people found this helpful

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Mr. G. Lawrence

Heavy going but important subject

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 April 2019

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This book is by an academic, and it shows. That can be a good thing, but it can also prevent an important message from reaching a wider audience - and at over 600 slightly repetitive pages, this book should not be a best-seller. The writing is superb, the author is extremely well informed. Neverthless I had reservations. The subject is massively important - the ruthlessness, particularly of Google and Facebook, but also of all those companies that will be selling you "the internet of things" in the near future, maximising their (a) spying on you, basically, and (b) manipulating your behaviour - not just (c) their own profits. There is however a bit of a streak of paranoia amidst all these distressing facts. We do have governments, regulations, activists, philosophers, as well as capitalist profit-maximisers, to provide some balance in the future world (difficult as it is against people who spend millions every month on lobbying governments to try and block legislation that restricts them in any way) . And If we have a bit of intelligence and willpower we can also choose to reduce their influence on us and on what we do with our lives and our money. I also suspect that Google and Facebook are not entirely staffed by supervillains, but people with kids and privacy concerns and philosophies of their own. It still remains true that the modern world contains massive resources and convenience for us, that the internet is the greatest thing that has ever happened to business opportunities, and that we need to balance the digital and the real in an authentic life. But if you want to read something fascinating about the latest uses of artificial intelligence and increased data, this book is not it. I recommend "AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order" by Kai-Fu Lee, and "Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life" by Adam Greenfield. Those excellent books will give you a pretty good view of surveillance, government and otherwise, but be balanced with plenty of other interesting information. Something more future-orientated and philosophy-orientated about how to think about AI is Max Tegmark's "Life 3.0", another superb book.

6 people found this helpful

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Andrew Trigg

How companies are spying on us all for the benefit of others. Brilliant, eye-opening book.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 February 2019

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In terrifying detail Zuboff describes how companies are spying on us all in increasingly intrusive ways, relentlessly grabbing our most private data and using it to predict our future - and shape our behaviour -- for their profit. It's one of the most dystopian books I've ever read but it's not a novel. It's a description of real and increasingly widespread business practices that intrude into all of our lives by stealth and make the surveillance practices of Orwell's 1984 look charmingly unsophisticated and non-intrusive by comparison.

Zuboff is a master of the subject, a great storyteller and a staunch defender of our human future. I love her style of writing, which is always lively, thought-provoking and brilliantly argued. Please read this book if you want to understand how huge corporations are exploiting us all and how you can protect yourself from them. Thank you Ms. Zuboff for this superb book!

8 people found this helpful

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Book review

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 March 2019

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If a service is free - then you are the product. I read this twice and am left informed but bewildered. It describes how digital technology has spawned a new mutant form of capitalism which has found a way to use human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data, this data is then sold into the commercial or political sphere.
The social platform giants need a mid-term correction or the internet will descend into a dysfunctional future, methinks.

5 people found this helpful

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The Outsider

Best Book of 2019

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 December 2019

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Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism is a milestone - the first major book outlining the truth threat to humanity posed by the internet revolution and the effects of AI on capitalism. Citing Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity throughout, she shows how the Googles and Facebooks are undermining freedom and democracy by violating privacy with and without consent, acting above the law and threatening everything we have worked so hard to achieve over the last 300 years.

While it is repetitive, most of the points made build to this terrifying conclusion - we are sleepwalking into a new totalitarianism concealed with soft sentiments about connectivity. Readers feel like they are watching the Invasion of the Body Snatchers - while we are sleeping the Zuckerbergs and Pages are stealing our humanity for their own profit and are herding us to a hive mind future. Well its time to wake up and smell the poison.

Google is evil, Facebook is too, Amazon is joining in and so is Microsoft. Before it is too late - wake up. Do everything you can to wake others, break up these companies, tax them and remove the surveillance. If not, my friends we are screwed.

Oh yeah, read this book - it is long, alarming and probably 100% right.

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Amazon Customer

This is written as a sociological treatise

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 March 2019

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The author has done a lot of research in her field, but unless you are into the jargon of sociology and wish to look at the topic from that perspective, it is fairly impenetrable.

6 people found this helpful

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M. Mannion

"You are the product"

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 May 2019

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It's difficult to know where to start with a book that contains so much information and insight of profound value. It is both a warning and a call to action. I am changed by reading this book.
"If you have nothing to hide... then you are nothing" ... is the perfect counter to those that justify surveillance on the grounds that they "have nothing to hide". But what they fail to realise is that when one's inner life cannot operate free from prying eyes and/or without fear of being misinterpreted/exposed, then it will necessarily begin to self-censure - to dumb itself down. And this is just one of the many dangers in which we, as a society, are allowing ourselves to walk into.
This is a long and sometimes difficult read - but its value cannot be understated.

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umkirkp4

Poorly written stream-of-consciousness

Reviewed in Canada on 10 June 2019

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I have concerns about the amount of data being collected on consumers and was drawn to this book after reading some positive reviews. Unfortunately, I was profoundly disappointed. Simply put, it is not well written and badly in need of an editor. The book is filled with run-on sentences, invented jargon, and inappropriately long (and occasionally outright bizarre) flowery descriptions when it should be providing facts and research. I admit that I approached the book as someone familiar with the tech sphere, and found a number of unsophisticated or factually wrong descriptions regarding the technology behind the Silicon Valley companies being discussed, to the point where it made me question everything written. Any references to computer science or economics are purely on an amateur level that one might find in an undergrad social science paper. The author is clearly bringing an anti-capitalist bias to the subject, and while that does not necessarily invalidate the work, there needs to be a level of scholarship brought to the table if the thesis is to be found credible, and this was lacking.

Ultimately, this read like an overly long self-help book in that there was a 20-page core of a good and important idea surrounded by about 650 pages of overwrought padding. In this case, that padding actively worked against the author’s arguments and left me regretful of the time I spent reading it.

18 people found this helpful

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Neil Mason

Great subject but.....

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 August 2019

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Poorly written. it could have been one third the size it is and is painfully written with almost no editing. This book contains nothing that isnt already in the public domain. Dont waste your time or money.

3 people found this helpful

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Kobori Enshu

Turgid

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 September 2019

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Written in a highly structured and formulaic way this is a turgid read. There are interesting analyses but they suffer from being buried in a 600 page tome. The concluding chapter summarises the points in the book and would be more than enough for most people.

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Amazon Customer

Important Read if you value freedom

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 June 2019

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Who decides and who decides who decides want I want? I know my thinking is sometimes flawed, I don't always get it right, but it is mine. Sometimes I am pleased when Google gets it right and tells me something I want which I was not aware of, but no I don't want them always to decide it in their best interests, which is them making money. This book is a wake up call as to what is happening with AI and what it is and will do to our freedom. If we do not recognise this we may sleepwalk into a world we do not want. Will we be like the lion in captivity, or the bird in a guilded cage, with a comfortable life but one which is not our own? This is the dream of totalitarian rulers to have control over the people.

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