"The Harvard scholar who named the business model behind the modern internet"
Shoshana Zuboff is Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School, where she spent decades studying the intersection of technology, capitalism, and power. Long before surveillance capitalism became a mainstream concern, she wrote about how digital technology reshapes work and society. That early optimism curdled into alarm as she watched Google and Facebook build business models around extracting and monetizing human behavior at scale. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published in 2019, took nearly a decade to research, drawing on economics, psychology, law, and the history of capitalism. It became a New York Times bestseller and a touchstone reference for journalists, regulators, and technologists.
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
Shoshana Zuboff's landmark book explains how Google and Facebook built a new economic logic around extracting and predicting human behavior, and what…
Read Summary →The excess behavioral data companies extract beyond what's needed to run their service — the raw material of a new economic logic.
A shift from watching human behavior to actively shaping it through subtle design and incentives.
A case for collective, democratic action — not just personal privacy habits — to reclaim autonomy from extractive business models.
"Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data."— The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
"We are the objects from which raw materials are extracted and expropriated for a new kind of manufacturing process."— The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
"The real psychological truth is this: if you've got nothing to hide, you are nothing."— The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff's landmark book explains how Google and Facebook built a new economic logic around extracting and predicting human behavior, and what you can do about it.
