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

The importance of this book cannot be overstated. The book shows that we are living in a bad, new, and dangerous world. The changes wrought by Google and Facebook have profoundly changed life in every imaginable way. The book is long, because the author is forced to describe the historical changes that democracy, capitalism, and society have gone through in order to put the significance of the current era into perspective. In comparison to the most significant changes that humanity has ever gone through -- for instance Fascism, Stalinism, democracy, capitalism -- what is going on now is more earth-shattering. The most helpful review of this book (with 328 votes so far) was from a person who read 100 pages of the book and found some of the language too flowery. That is a shame. I feel the opposite is true. The author had so much truly basic material to get through, that this is why the book is so long. Here is an example from page 377: "Forget the cliche that if it's free, "You are the product." You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass. The "product" derives from the surplus that is ripped from your life. I found the book to be wall-to-wall truths about how the world has changed into something that is without precedent, dangerous and unrecognizable. Far from needing an editor, I found it to be a very tight description. I doubt anything could be edited out without omitting something important. This is probably the most significant and important book written this century. I bought it in audiobook, listened to it, and then bought the Kindle version so I could highlight it. John Locke described why a government is a good idea. I'm sure that was earth-shattering at the time. This is a book whose importance is on the same level. It describes why everything we have done in the past is irrelevant. It is as if you wake up on Planet Claire, and the trees are red.

The subject matter covered in this book was an interest of mine, so I bought this with great anticipation. When it arrived I realized this was an undertaking, the book is long, dense and deals with complicated issues. Within 100 pages I was pleased with my decision. By 200 I was mesmerized and totally taken in by this masterful work. The subject matter is simultaneously granular (like something as close to me as my hand) and beyond the scope of my comprehension (like a galaxy so far away no telescope can view it). But Dr. Zuboffs ability to take the reader down a pathway of insight and learning is masterful and a gift which I wish I possessed. Don't get me wrong this book is longgggg. But unlike what some reviewers have said about it being too long - I would take a different point of view. This topic is so important , so far reaching and of such great importance that it requires literary expansiveness to fully do justice to these points. The manner in which she weaves together seemingly unconnected events into a shockingly clear picture of just how manipulated we are by the companies controlling our online experience is masterful. Her understanding of the topic and the ability to provide the reader with a clear understanding of the manipulative nature of social media and big tech in general is evident. The conclusions one draws at the end are (IMHO) a chilling and sad indictment of where humanity has come and for what the future holds. She takes the reader on a journey of discovery and understanding. I truly enjoyed this book

This is a very important book which alerts us to the dangers of losing our privacy, independent decision-making and democracy in the impending age of Surveillance. The digital age promised to give us a world of personalized information, communication, shopping and entertainment at our finger-tips and we were enticed by the prospect of instant gratification. At the same time we were completely unaware that more and more private information about our habits, likes and dislikes was being mined from our internet searches and sold off to the highest bidder. Shoshana Zuboff traces this intriguing story of the step by step transformation of what was to be an age of personalized information into an age of surveillance. Apple's iTunes Store was opened in 2003 and quickly became the world's largest online music service, with over 25 billion downloads by 2013. Personalized digital music was here to stay. Google set out to make profits from its personalized Adwords and Adsense after its Search application proved immensely successful with its users but generated no revenue. While learning to improve predictions of user clicks and "likes", Google and later Facebook discovered a gold-mine in trading user's behavioral surplus, which turned both companies into "fortune-telling giants" "This was all based on accumulating more and more user data because" Google’s machine intelligence capabilities feed on behavioral surplus, and the more surplus they consume, the more accurate the prediction products that result" Serving its users was no longer Google's main priority but became a means to a far more lucrative end .Our lives became the raw materials for this new process of production. Shoshan Zuboff writes "Google would no longer mine behavioral data strictly to improve service for users but rather to read users’ minds for the purposes of matching ads to their interests, as those interests are deduced from the collateral traces of online behavior. With Google’s unique access to behavioral data, it would now be possible to know what a particular individual in a particular time and place was thinking, feeling, and doing." This "digital dispossession" took place in secret and paved the way to more ambitious goals which pried much deeper into the details of our offline lives. Larry Page, one of the co-founders of Google expressed it this way :" "People will generate enormous amounts of data. . . . Everything you’ve ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.” With Google Maps and Street View privacy has been further reduced. After "cookies" to track our online browsing, the next step is pervasive emotion scanning and emotional analytics based on our "likes" , recordings of our voice and our facial expressions. This is not science fiction. At least one company, Emoshape.. produces a microchip which delivers “high performance machine emotion awareness” which.. can classify twelve emotions with up to 98 percent accuracy." In addition "Samsung acknowledges that the voice commands aimed at triggering the TV’s voice-recognition capabilities are sent to a third party". There are now toy dolls that can spy on us, robot floor cleaners that sell our floor plans to third parties and its getting more and more difficult to opt out because even if you can read and understand the complicated click-through agreements which manufacturers provide and opt out of the right to sell your information to third parties, you end up with degraded products with much reduced functionality. The technology of surveillance advances much faster than legislation and since 911 governments have been more desperate to catch terrorists than protect privacy. Cyberspace has become the new "wild west" a lawless frontier. The next two stages are even more frightening: "ubiquitous computing" and behavioral control. Ex Ceo of Google, Schmidt sees the internet disappearing in future because sensors and devices will be everywhere including wearables and the walls of every room so we will be permanently online. Behavioral control starts with little nudges to manipulate us and "fake news" that has already swayed our election results. The Pokemon game showed a way to nudge users to particular locations where businesses would pay for each visit .In future we will have individual insurance policies based on monitoring our driving with sensors, and then giving reduced premiums to careful drivers while switching off the engine of dangerous drivers .Maybe we will have fridges that automatically shut to prevent gluttony because we are overweight. There is also the Microsoft automatic factory which integrates machine and human behavior automatizing both. There is no doubt that Shoshana Zuboff is right about the need for action and legislation to preserve our freedom before it is too late. Unfortunately, having presented all the facts, she dwarfs the real problem with ideology by claiming that surveillance capitalism is the major problem, a vampire devised to exploit us and impoverish us by giving an unfair advantage to rogue capitalists who distort the classic market (where the future is unknown) by manipulating consumers and employing so few workers. She writes "Most startling is that GM employed more people during the height of the Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights of market capitalization." It makes no sense to blame Google and Facebook who pay higher wages than other companies for contributing towards the increasing inequality of income in capitalist societies in the last 50 years. Automation is probably the main cause of depressing wage incomes and increasing income from capital. The surveillance economy is still a very small part of our economy and cannot be blamed for all the unrest of the last 50 years. She writes: "The surveillance capitalists reverse the normal sequence of theory and practice. Their practices move ahead at high velocity in the absence of an explicit and contestable theory. The only way to grasp the theory advanced in their applied utopistics is to reverse engineer their operations and scrutinize their meaning, as we have done throughout these chapters." In other words, she uses the very absence of an ideology or guiding theory in surveillance capitalism to justify inventing one, using the predictions of a few leading data scientists. Since Plato's concept of philosopher kings, there have always been some philosophers, writers and now scientists who preferred enlightened despotism to democracy. This doesn't entitle Shoshana Zuboff to marry Skinner's ideas of totalitarian rule by scientists (for the "greater good") to surveillance capitalism in general. Even worse, the few pages that this book devotes to the surveillance state and its foremost exemplary China are enough to show that real totalitarianism is very easy to spot. This brings me to my most important criticism of this book. We are in danger of living in a surveillance society and every crisis in this overcrowded world, like the corona crisis brings solutions which further encroach on our privacy (e.g a health passport) with more personal monitoring. There are too many reasons to use surveillance technology which are not connected to the profit motive. The Chinese are already living in a state where your every move is surveyed by camera and you are granted a social grade for your behavior. Adopting unsuitable friends can lower your social grade which will block you from buying a train ticket. At the end of the day, the problem is not an economic one of "surveillance capitalism" but how to avoid the encroachment of surveillance on all aspects of our life and preserve our rights to privacy and democracy.

Shoshana Zuboff's "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is a succinct alarm bell for the 21st-century. It is a fervent plea for the citizens of developed nations to rescue their democratic values and institutions from utter extinction. Anyone who values personal freedom and privacy should read this wonderful exposé. ___Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and their wannabes are the main practitioners of Surveillance Capitalism. They steal your info when you use a smartphone, tablet, laptop or computer. They gather info from your smart utensils, smart wear, smart apps, and when you ask online for help or directions. InfoTech moguls know us so well they can predict the colors of our socks. They have us by our junk (this includes both male and female varieties of genitalia). ___I do NOT exaggerate. Fifty pages into the narrative, you'll be shocked at how pervasive this corporate tyranny has usurped our social matrix. The author's delivery is both lively and impassioned. Fair warning: The narrative includes multisyllable words and complex ideas. But you should have no trouble if you cherish an open mind and have a capacity to think outside the box. ___Zuboff gives countless working definitions of Surveillance Capitalism. Here is but one: "A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales." ___Please read this book. It is one of the few tomes of our era that truly matters. Five-plus stars.

Product was a present but they were very happy with the book.

A groundbreaking work which must surely rank as a key reference for anyone wishing to consider the implications of living in the digital age. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines – economics, history, sociology, political philosophy – Zuboff communicates her reflections with skill and passion, interweaving these with reminiscences from her own life. You get the sense that this is her life’s work and she’s communicating both her fears and hopes to future generations. We’re given an invaluable history of Big Tech emerging from Silicon Valley as well as an overview of the distinctive variant of surveillance capitalism in China. I would encourage readers not to be put off by the length of the book – Zuboff will often recapitulate her arguments and in any event the thoroughness of her investigations comes as a welcome contrast to the welter of superficial opinion pieces we’re currently inundated with online. Having read this once, I’ll certainly be returning to it in future to gauge how much has changed since the publication in 2019. The impressive bibliography is an education in its own right.

ネット社会の裏面に大胆かつ哲学的にアプローチするこの種の作品は日本で話題になることはまれだ。数年前に読んだEvgeny Morozofの作品もその重厚な内容にもかかわらず、日本ではとうとう翻訳されることはなかった。この作品はどうなのだろう。Financial Times のBusiness Book of the year 2019にショートリストされているので、もしかしたら翻訳されるかもしれない。でも日本では,その独特の風土の下で, 「軽い」そして奇妙な技術と進歩信仰がメディアのど真ん中で大手を振っているので、どうもこの種の作品は受けが悪いのだろう。 さて、この作品だが、全編で500ページ強、注は１5０ページ以上だ。レヴューでは「冗長だ、半分以下に圧縮できる」などの技術的な批判をいくつか目にしたが、怒りと憂慮がペンを動かした作品というのは大なり小なり、繰り返しが多くなり、長くなってしまうものだ。これは読み手の好悪にも左右される。今年の初めにhardboundで出版されたようで、読もうか、どうか、だいぶ迷っていたのだが、John GrayがNew Statesmanにレヴューを書いたのを見て、paperbackになるのを待って読むことと相成った。というわけで、英語が読める方は、このJohn grayのレヴューを読んでくれた方が手っ取り早いのだが......... 著者が対象とするのは、Surveillance Capitalism（ＳＩ）の担い手でもあるGoogle, Facebook, MicrosoftなどのIT企業だ。このSurveillance Capitalismという言葉、どう訳したらいいのだろう、「監視資本主義」とでもいうのだろうか、ちょっとニュアンスが中国共産党を想像させる。むしろ「観察資本主義」とでも言ったほうがいいのかもしれない。その定義は本書の冒頭に掲げられている。「中身検索」の最初で見れるので見ていただきたい。 つまるところは、「人間の行動や経験を抽出、予測、販売という隠された商業活動のためにタダで資源として利用することを核心とする新しい経済秩序」と定義されている。こうまとめてしまうと、何となく「ビッグデータを操る新種のビジネスモデル」という日経新聞流の脳天気な印象を与えてしまうのだが、この秩序形成の背後には「人間性の改変」をも狙いとする根本的な思想的な挑戦が潜んでいるというのが、著者の主張なのだ。 本書では既存の民主主義に与えるこのSIの挑戦が多面的な側面から解析されている。もはやSIの活動は、新しいビジネスモデルという通俗的な理解にとどまるものではなく、むしろそれが突きつける哲学的並びに思想的な脅威を含めた全体として理解すべき「魔物」ということになってくる。そうこの作品は、一種の「共産党宣言」の冒頭を彷彿とさせる作品なのだ。そしてその解明には社会学、法哲学、社会心理学、政治学や人類学を含む様々な議論が援用されていく。この議論の幅は西欧の思想に内在する基本的な考え方の「型」についての相当な予備知識が読み手に要求するのだ。 本書の構成は三つに分けられている。第一部はいわゆるオンラインというvirtualな世界を対象としている。そこでは、behavioral surplusという概念が提示されている。マルクスの剰余価値説にヒントを受けた用語だろう。ユーザーのネットへのアクセスを通じて蓄積されたデータはshadow textとして蓄積され、膨大な蓄積とalgorithmの下で、宣伝・広告のデータ、つまり「予測商品」として使われるというわけだ。userのアクセスは其の同意を得ることなく、userのprivacyを無視し、当初は想定もしていなかった使われ方をされ、広告収入として膨大な利益をSIにもたらしているというわけだ。 第二部は、当初はネットのみを舞台とするvirtualな空間でのSIの活動が、その量だけでなく質的に進化していくプロセスが取り扱われる。そうIOT (Internet of things）だ。もはやVirtualな空間のみにその活動は限定されることなく、人間の現実の生活空間つまりreality businessの世界にまでその触手が伸びてくるというわけだ。車、テレビ、健康アプリ、レストランの選択や消費活動、家庭セキュリティサービズなど様々な人間の生活に手をのばし、そこでは人間の行動だけでなく表情、感情の揺らめきまでもが、ある種のモデルの下でデータとして処理されるというわけだ。となると人間という存在はその全体がSIによって把握されることにより、その網の目が拡大・深化することにより、そのデータのcertaintyが高まるというわけだ。ここまで来ると、人間の行動は予測されるというよりは、むしろ行動を改変させることによりモデルがもたらす予測に合致させるというグロテスクな腐臭を漂わせる。そしてそこでは、個人の行動はネットの広告や宣伝の精緻化により、絶え間なく商品が売り込まれるというわけだ。ここまで来ると人間という存在の核ともいうべき自由意志や未来の持つ不確定性そして聖地ともいうべきprivacyというものは否定されていくというわけだ。 第三部は、このようなSIのビジネスモデルに内在している世界観が解剖されていくことになる。著者の立ち位置は西欧の啓蒙主義の古典版（リベラル版）ともいうべき個人と人間性の尊重という立場だ。この古典的な考え方のよって立つ基盤がSIによって徹底的に破壊され、そこに新しく出現する社会は、「radical indifference」と「Instrumentarian Power」という考え方に規定される、dystopiaというわけだ。そこでは、人間のすべての行動はその価値をはぎ取られデータ化されることにより、人間存在の法則なるものがcomputationとalogorithmの下で発見され、新しいpriestともいうべきdata scientistによって、そしてその一握りのdata scientistのために、集産主義的な計画社会ともいうべきものが管理されていくのだ。この考え方の先駆者としてskinnerとその現代版ともいうべきPentlandの考え方が詳しく紹介される。 そう、ネットという無法地帯での自由を追求した果てに待ち受けていたのは、共産主義社会も真っ青の「計画社会」だっとというparadoxなのだ。そう共産主義とアメリカのSIとの間の距離は思ったほど離れてはいないのだ。John Grayが指摘する通り、両者ともに啓蒙主義の変種（非リベラル版）である実証主義（positivism)のたどり着く先だったというわけだ。技術は前の時代までの蓄積をもとに永遠に進歩していく、しかし人間や社会は決して単線的に進歩していくことはない。中国共産党がそのいい例だ。さてここからどうなるのか。核兵器と同じく、一度、発明（invent)されたものはもはや捨てる（disinvent)ことは不可能だ。飼い馴らしていくしかないのだが、その観点から展開される著者の提言は、これまでの分析とは打って変わって、抑えられたものだ。 ここまで、だいぶ大急ぎで紹介してきた本作品だが、本書の射程や論点は非常に幅広いものであり、深い思索を促す作品である。本書で新しく提示された用語は、あまりわかりやすく定義されていないものも多く、西欧のリベラル派の独特の思考回路を如実に反映したものであり、どうもその種の伝統にはいい意味でも悪い意味でもなじみのない日本人には、くどいと思われる部分も散見される。上記に紹介した以外にも、様々な読み込みや批判が可能であり、ぜひ一読していただきたい。

For sure we know that big others are no saints and the examples in the book often give a deja vu feeling. Yet we keep on trudging on without thinking. This book shifts your already information overloaded brain into gear to the point of realization and the realization hits hard and is very uncomfortable to the reader. Privacy is about control of your data. We are on the verge to lose that control forever. Time to read this book and act.