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

From the very first page I was consumed with an overwhelming imperative: everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense. With tremendous lucidity and moral courage, 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. The hour is late and much has been lost already - but as we learn in these indispensable pages, there is still hope for emancipation -- Naomi Klein A chilling expose of the business model that underpins the digital world ... a striking and illuminating book. A fellow reader remarked to me that it reminded him of Thomas Piketty's magnum opus, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in that it opens one's eyes to things we ought to have noticed, but hadn't -- John Naughton * Observer * A bold, important book ... Combining in-depth technical understanding and a broad, humanistic scope, Zuboff has written what may prove to be the first definitive account of the economic - and thus social and political - condition of our age. -- James Bridle * Guardian * Groundbreaking, magisterial ... unmissable -- John Thornhill * FT * Das Kapital of the digital age * The Times * Comprehensive and impassioned ... an important book -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times * [It] will surely become a pivotal work in defining, understanding and exposing this surreptitious exploitation of our data and, increasingly, our free will ... essential * Irish Times * Groundbreaking ... Aiming to apply Marx's account of surplus value in a time when capital is accumulated through knowledge-based technology, she has given us an illuminating critical perspective on the regime of surveillance under which we all now live * New Statesman * An intensively researched, engagingly written chronicle of surveillance capitalism's origins and its deleterious prospects for our society ... This is the rare book that we should trust to lead us down the long hard road of understanding -- Jacob Silverman * New York Times * Extraordinarily intelligent ... Absorbing Zuboff's methodical determination, the way she pieces together sundry examples into this comprehensive work of scholarship and synthesis, requires patience, but the rewards are considerable - a heightened sense of awareness, and a deeper appreciation of what's at stake -- Jennifer Szalai * New York Times * This book's major contribution is to give a name to what's happening, to put it in cultural and historical perspective, and to ask us to pause long enough to think about the future and how it might be different from today -- Frank Rose * WSJ * Original ... it arrives at a crucial moment, when the public and its elected representatives are at last grappling with the extraordinary power of digital media and the companies that control it. Like another recent masterwork of economic analysis, Thomas Piketty's 2013 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the book challenges assumptions, raises uncomfortable questions about the present and future, and stakes out ground for a necessary and overdue debate -- Nicholas Carr * LARB * I will make a guarantee: Assuming we survive to tell the tale, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has a high probability of joining the likes Adam Smith's The Wealth of Natiions and Max Weber's Economy and Society as defining social-economics texts of modern times. It is not a 'quick read;' it is to be savored and re-read and discussed with colleagues and friends. No zippy one-liners from me, except to almost literally beg you to read/ingest this book -- Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is brilliant and essential ... a masterpiece of rare conceptual daring, beautifully written and deeply urgent -- Robert B. Reich, author of The Common Good and Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few The defining challenge for the future of the market economy is the concentration of data, knowledge, and surveillance power. Not just our privacy but our individuality is at stake, and this very readable and thought-provoking book alerts us to these existential dangers. Highly recommended -- Daron Acemoglu, author of Why Nations Fail Zuboff's expansive, erudite, deeply-researched exploration of digital futures elucidates the norms and hidden terminal goals of information-intensive industries. Zuboff's book is the information industry's Silent Spring -- Chris Hoofnagle, University of California, Berkeley In the future, if people still read books, they will view this as the classic study of how everything changed. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a masterpiece that stunningly reveals the essence of twenty-first-century society, and offers a dire warning about technology gone awry that we ignore at our peril. Shoshana Zuboff has somehow escaped from the fishbowl in which we all now live, and introduced to us the concept of water. A work of penetrating intellect, this is also a deeply human book about what is becoming, as it relentlessly demonstrates, a dangerously inhuman time -- Kevin Werbach, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Blockchain and The New Architecture of Trust A panoramic exploration of one of the most urgent issues of our times, Zuboff reinterprets contemporary capitalism through the prism of the digital revolution, producing a book of immense ambition and erudition. Zuboff is one of our most prescient and profound thinkers on the rise of the digital. In an age of inane Twitter soundbites and narcissistic Facebook posts, Zuboff's serious scholarship is great cause for celebration -- Andrew Keen, author of How to Fix the Future Shoshana Zuboff has produced the most provocative compelling moral framework thus far for understanding the new realities of our digital environment and its anti-democratic threats. From now on, all serious writings on the internet and society will have to take into account The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. -- Joseph Turow, Robert Lewis Shayon Chair Professor, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania Praise for In the Age of the Smart Machine: 'A work of rare originality and engrossing complexity * New York Times Book Review * Ground-breaking, magisterial and synthetically brilliant * Technology and Culture * Examined with force and almost cunning insight what is yet to come * Encyclopedia of Software Engineering *

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'Everyone needs to read this book as an act of digital self-defense.' -- Naomi Klein, Author of No Logo, the Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough

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.